“It was an attempt to see if language can really be a bridge, as it is often aspired to be, and ultimately that it could fail.” In this video, Ocean Vuong speaks about the letter he wrote to his illiterate mother that inspired his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). A profile of Vuong by Rigoberto González appears in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
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Emilie Pine
Emilie Pine talks about fear of failure, connecting to readers, being open about grief and loss, and the power of storytelling with Ireland Unfiltered’s Dion Fanning. Pine’s debut essay collection, Notes to Self (Dial Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Four Lunches and a Breakfast: What I Learned About the Book Business While Breaking Bread With Five Hungry Agents
If you want to learn about the business of books, it helps to be hungry. Not only hungry to learn, as the expression goes, but also just plain hungry, literally—it helps to have an appetite. Or an expense account. Ideally both. Because no matter how much the world of publishing has changed over the past hundred years—and, boy, has it changed since the days of Blanche Knopf, Horace Liveright, and Bennett Cerf—some things remain the same. It is still a business of relationships; it still relies on the professional connections among authors and agents and editors and the mighty web of alliances that help bring a work of literature out of the mind of the writer and onto readers’ screens and shelves. And those relationships are often sparked, deepened, and sustained during that still-sacred rite: the publishing lunch.
In the two decades I’ve worked at this magazine, I’ve had the pleasure of eating lunch with a small crowd of publishing professionals—mostly book editors and publicists, the majority of whom want to tell me more about a new book they have coming out, or an exciting debut author I may not have heard about and who would be perfect for a little extra coverage. I’ve always considered it one of the perks of my job to receive such invitations, because without exception they have come from kind, passionate, smart people—in short, ideal lunch companions. But until recently relatively few have been agents. There was a lovely meal in Chicago with agents Jeff Kleinman and Renée Zuckerbrot. And last fall, quite out of the blue, the legendary agent Al Zuckerman, founder of Writers House and agent to Ken Follett, Michael Lewis, Olivia Goldsmith, Nora Roberts, and Stephen Hawking, invited me to lunch at the Belgian Beer Café, which is now closed but had clearly offered Zuckerman, whose office is a short stroll away, in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, years of sustenance. Those lunches notwithstanding, I have not had as many opportunities as I’d like to sit down with agents and talk about the important work they do.
“According to the hallowed tradition of book publishing, it was necessary to have lunch with all these people, and many more, as often as possible,” wrote Michael Korda, the former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, in his book Another Life: A Memoir of Other People (Random House, 1999), a treasury of anecdotes about the publishing industry in the mid-twentieth century. He goes on to paint a picture of publishing that has changed little, except perhaps the size of editors’ expense accounts:
For editors, in fact, having lunch is regarded as a positive, income-generating, aggressive act, and a certain suspicion is extended toward those few who can be found eating a sandwich at their desk more than once or twice a week. Publishers have been known to roam through the editorial department at lunchtime to catch editors who are ‘not doing their job’ in the act of unwrapping a tuna sandwich from the nearest deli. A large expense account is very often perceived as proof of ambition and hard work…. Nobody has ever done a poll to see whether the agents—the putative beneficiaries of this largesse—really want to be taken out to lunch every day of the workweek. It is simply one of the basic assumptions of book publishing that he or she who lunches with the most agents gets the most books.
To be honest, most afternoons I can be found in my office, staring over a sad desk lunch and trying to clear a heavy plate of work, not food. Meanwhile I suspect New York publishing’s best and brightest are rushing off to lunch reservations at fancy restaurants all over Manhattan, laying the groundwork for book deals and discussing plans for book launches and, yes, gossiping about titles the average reader won’t discover for many months or, more likely, years. To writers this world can seem opaque, removed from the solitary task of writing. So I figured it was time to get out of the office. It was time to learn more about how agents find writers and turn them into authors, to collect some honest advice for those who are looking for, or working with, an agent. And what better place to do that than in the agent’s native habitat: loud Manhattan restaurants.
The plan was simple: In five days invite five agents to lunch. (What did Robert Burns write about the best-laid plans of mice and men?) I asked each of them to pick a restaurant, ideally one they frequented with book editors and/or clients, and in exchange for a few hours of their valuable time, I’d pick up the check. Not surprising, all five chose restaurants in Manhattan—still the undisputed center of commercial book publishing—but thankfully not all were located in Midtown, that area between 34th and 59th Streets, where the concrete canyons can start to feel stifling to even the most urbane of urbanites.
I had previously met only two of the five agents I chose for this project. I was introduced to Anjali Singh of Pande Literary at a writers conference a couple years ago, and Emily Forland of Brandt & Hochman appeared in a cover feature, “The Game Changers,” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine. But for the most part, I didn’t know these agents, at least not well. I’d never met Julia Kardon of HSG Agency, Kent Wolf of the Friedrich Agency, or Marya Spence of Janklow & Nesbit Associates. I’d simply heard their names in casual conversation with editors and other agents, in the way one hears names when one talks about who is publishing what, when, and with whom.
All five of the agents represent authors whose recent publishing stories I suspected would illuminate certain aspects of the business—some positive, others maybe less so. I had no specific agenda for the conversations beyond eating some decent food and learning as much as I could about agents as people, their incentives for doing what they do, and how they see their role in the grand, flawed, beautiful experiment that is twenty-first-century book publishing.
MONDAY 8:45 AM
Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen
551 Amsterdam Avenue, near West 87th Street
Two eggs, scrambled; potatoes; toast; side of lox
French toast with marscapone cream and mixed berry jam
Three caffe lattes
Best-laid plans indeed. The first interview I am able to set up takes place not over lunch, as I had planned, but rather over breakfast because Anjali Singh’s schedule proves more crowded than a Times Square subway platform, which I thankfully avoid on my way to Kirsh Bakery & Kitchen on the Upper West Side. A few days earlier Anjali returned from the Belize Writers’ Conference, where she spent a week meeting with about a dozen writers from all over the United States who had traveled to the tropical locale to talk with agents about their writing projects. She came home to a full house: She has two children, ages ten and seven; her husband is a professor of Chinese history at Lehman College in the Bronx. Tomorrow she’ll travel to Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, where she is scheduled to give a Q&A and talk with students in the undergraduate writing program at Susquehanna University. Such is the busy schedule of a literary agent. So, yes, breakfast it is.
Anjali spends the first ten minutes of our time together recounting in remarkable detail the writers she met in Belize, all of them women—a retired fire chief from California; a police detective from Omaha; a speech pathologist from Reno, Nevada—and the way she speaks about these writers, with excitement and genuine interest in not only their writing, but also their personal and professional lives, provides a caffeine-fueled preview of what’s to come in our conversation. While most people would rhapsodize about the Caribbean shoreline or the daily yoga sessions that I will later learn were part of the conference schedule, Anjali’s takeaways are the lives of writers whose paths she feels fortunate to have crossed. “It was a beautiful beach and everything, but the best part was the writers I met,” she says. “It was amazing. It was so good for my soul.”
Anjali’s career in publishing started in 1996 when she took a job as a literary scout with Mary Anne Thompson Associates, having graduated from Brown University with a degree in English and American literature. I’ve always been curious about literary scouts, or book scouts as they are sometimes called, and wanted to know more about what these “spies of the literary world,” as Anjali jokingly calls them, actually do. “So you’re basically a consultant,” she offers helpfully. “You get paid a monthly retainer by your clients, and your clients are foreign publishers. But you only work for one per country because otherwise it would be a conflict of interest. When I first started, of course, there was no Publishers Marketplace or Deal of the Day or any of that. It was all on the ground. Mary Anne would talk to her editor friends…and then, officially, I would talk to agents. I covered certain agencies, and I would call them and find out what was going on and what books had sold to whom for how much. We would do a report every Friday, like a deal memo, and it would say, ‘XXXXX publisher, you should pay attention to this.’ So the idea is to help them get ahead of their competitors, or to be on par with their competitors, to get books early. It’s to be their eyes and ears in the New York publishing world.”
Anjali tells me that Mary Anne Thompson had exclusive contracts with foreign publishers such as Macmillan in the U.K., Droemer Knaur in Germany, and Kadokawa Shoten in Japan. Nowadays, with so much information available online, the scout’s job is to filter that information and tell the clients what to pay attention to and what to disregard, “because you can’t possibly pay attention to everything,” she says.
In some ways it was the ideal first job in publishing, working for five years in a small office, learning about the business alongside colleagues who would also go on to successful agenting careers, including PJ Mark, now an agent at Janklow & Nesbit; Cecile Barendsma, who has her own agency in Brooklyn; and Susan Hobson, director of international rights at McCormick Literary. “What it allowed me was an incredible database of information about publishing,” Anjali says.
But this information couldn’t have prepared her for the vagaries of the next dozen or so years, during which she moved from one house to the next—not uncommon for editors coming up in the business. First she was an editor at Vintage, the paperback imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and she very quickly made a name for herself by discovering Persepolis, the best-selling graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, on a shelf at a friend’s apartment in France, where the book was originally published. Anjali brought it to the United States, and it was published to great acclaim by Pantheon, another Knopf Doubleday imprint known for publishing graphic classics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth.
Anjali worked at Vintage for four years, buying paperback rights to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, and working on her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, before leaving to go to Houghton Mifflin (later Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), hired as senior editor by vice president and publisher Janet Silver. Silver was later let go, about a year before Anjali herself was laid off, during the financial crisis of 2008, just after Anjali’s first child was born. Two years later, Jonathan Karp hired Anjali as senior editor at Simon & Schuster, but she remained there for only two years before she was laid off during a restructuring in which Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, was folded into the company’s flagship imprint.
Her next stop was Other Press, an independent publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction founded by Judith Gurewich and Michael Moskowitz, where Anjali was editorial director. Although her stay at Other Press was relatively short—only sixteen months—it was a refreshing change after her years in the corporate environments of Vintage, Houghton Mifflin, and Simon & Schuster. At Other Press, she says, “I just got to feel a sense of stability again, and a sense of self-worth, I guess. I got to be much more connected to what made me care about books and publishing.”
Shortly thereafter her husband got tenure—and the time and financial stability, not to mention health insurance, that comes with it—so she made the switch to agenting. She’s been at Pande Literary for three and a half years.
Which is where Arif Anwar and his debut novel, The Storm, enter the conversation. Before Anjali became an agent, Arif had queried Ayesha Pande, head of the eponymous agency, with the manuscript of a novel that told a half century of Bangladeshi history through the braided stories of characters who live through a storm similar to the 1970 Bhola cyclone, in which a half million people in East Pakistan and India’s West Bengal died overnight. Ayesha had offered representation, but Arif went with another agent who had offered her services first.
Two years later, Anjali was now an agent and Arif was looking for a little more hands-on attention, so he asked again whether Ayesha was interested in representing him. Ayesha and Anjali both read his manuscript, compared notes, and decided that they would take him on, with Anjali assigned to do the editorial work necessary to prepare the novel for submission.
“One of the things that I found really moving was that he depicts a fishing community in Bangladesh,” Anjali says about Arif, who was born in Chittagong, a port city on the southeastern coast of Bangladesh, and now lives in Toronto. “There have been other books, but not that much South Asian literature focuses on the underclass—those people who aren’t visible. He just immediately brought me into this world in a very visceral way. It’s really ambitious, and I admire that ambition. He’s also writing outside of his experiences, writing from the perspective of a British nurse in the 1940s, and a Japanese fighter pilot. I admire the scope of that vision.”
Anjali worked with Arif for roughly six months, cutting two whole narrative threads from the manuscript and weaving together the remaining five. Finally it was ready to be submitted to editors. Because Arif lives in Toronto, Anjali says, it made sense to have a separate Canadian publisher. After an auction involving three excited editors—notable, given the relatively small Canadian market—the book went to Iris Tupholme at HarperCollins Canada.
Reactions to submissions in the United States were less encouraging. “We got a lot of passes, which was devastating,” Anjali says. “A lot of passes, including from someone who really liked the book but after talking about it with her publisher was like, ‘We can’t do this because we have another book with a Bangladeshi character.’ The author wasn’t Bangladeshi, but it was about a Bangladeshi woman.”
Anecdotes like this one, that throw into relief the cold reality of publishing as a subjective business that is not always all about the writing, have clearly made Anjali more determined than ever to use her role as an agent to fight for greater access on behalf of her authors. “A hunger to see more stories, to tell different stories in different places in the world,” she says about her own agenda. “A hunger for representation across class, which I think literary fiction doesn’t always do that well. All of that I’m bringing to the table.”
Eventually Rakesh Satyal of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, offered a deal in the United States, and Arif was off to the races. About four months ahead of publication—HarperCollins Canada scheduled it for March 2018, Atria set a May 2018 publication date—Anjali joined Arif on a conference call with the publicity team at Atria to brainstorm ideas for articles and essays Arif might write and try to place in newspapers, magazines, or websites to boost awareness of the book. Arif was also asked to supply Atria with names for a “big-mouth list” that might include organizations working with or interested in Bangladesh, as well as writers he admires.
“Big mouths” is an industry term for anyone—writers, editors, bloggers, and people with a large following on social media—in a position to spread the word about a book. These people are often on a list that the publicity department uses for a targeted mailing of finished copies of a book, sometimes accompanied by a personal note from the author or editor.
When I ask Anjali whether Arif was doing enough in the lead-up to publication, I don’t even have to finish my question. “Oh my God—the whole time Arif was like, ‘This is what I want to be doing. Tell me what I can do. I’ll do anything you want me to do.’” The book received starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist as well as a rave from Publishers Weekly calling it an excellent debut: “This first novel will touch and astound readers.”
Still, momentum can be difficult to sustain, and while the novel received some terrific blurbs from authors such as best-selling author Shilpi Somaya Gowda and novelist Rumaan Alam, and a positive review in the New York Times Book Review, albeit two months after the publication date, it just didn’t quite reach the heights that Anjali and, certainly, Arif were hoping for. Everyone, of course, is hoping for a best-seller. “Some really nice things happened, like the reviews, which made us hope it was poised for more, but for whatever reason…we just never got a sense of momentum,” Anjali writes to me after our breakfast. “I think it was both a success in the fact that we found editors who championed this book and published it beautifully; Arif is now an ‘author’ with some lovely reviews under his belt, one who has begun to make meaningful connections with readers at book clubs and the various festivals he was invited to; and he now has a paperback to sell the hell out of. I think as the agent, along with Ayesha, and as someone who loved this book and who thinks if more people knew it existed it would have a stronger readership, it’s hard not to feel some small sense of disappointment that the book wasn’t a best-seller, even though I do know how hard that is to achieve. Our hope is that Arif’s career will continue to grow, and as it does, more readers will discover and fall in love with this book.”
I ask Anjali if she has any advice for writers looking for an agent, and she doesn’t hesitate. “The best thing you can do is be really intentional about who you approach,” she says. “It’s doing all that work to write a really good query letter. It’s also doing all that work to think about what books your book sits alongside. And who you aspire to be as a writer.” This will be a recurring theme as I talk to the agents—this idea of intentionality, of doing the work of figuring out who you are as a person, as a writer, and how you want to direct that out into the world before you approach agents. “There’s a reason why you spent all of these years writing this book. If you can explain to me why you cared so much, it’s going to help me understand why I should care. And I think that is a kind of self-knowledge. I feel like by the time you write that query letter, you have to excavate that and articulate it.”
(Singh: Chuck Wooldridge)TUESDAY 12:30 PM
Russ & Daughters Cafe
127 Orchard Street
Whitefish Croquettes: smoked whitefish, potato, tartar sauce
Pickled Herring Trio: canapés of pickled herring on pumpernickel
Lower Sunny Side: eggs, sunny-side up; Gaspé nova smoked salmon, potato latkes
Challah bread pudding: dried apricots, caramel sauce; Halvah ice cream: halvah, sesame, salted caramel
Cream soda: vanilla bean–infused demerara sugar; Concord grape soda: jasmine, timut pepper, lemon
Making my way up Delancey Street, a few blocks from the sublet apartment where I laid my head during my first month in New York City—fresh out of an MFA program, little money, no prospects—I’m having difficulty matching the glass-encased condominium complex and the fancy Regal multiplex with my memory of the boarded-up storefronts and dirty brick facades of the Lower East Side in the late 1990s. But I don’t have a lot of time for nostalgia because I’m on my way to Russ & Daughters Cafe to meet Emily Forland, and she gave me explicit instructions to not be late. My punctuality has long been a point of pride, but I understand her urgency; the restaurant, which opened in 2014, on the hundredth anniversary of the original Russ & Daughters appetizing store, located two blocks away, on Houston Street, doesn’t take reservations. And it’s always busy. But Emily has called in a favor. She is the agent not of Joel Russ of Russ & Daughters (he died in 1961), nor his daughters (the last of them, Anne Russ Federman, died last year at the age of ninety-seven), but rather his grandson Mark Russ Federman, who wrote a memoir, Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes From the House That Herring Built (Schocken, 2013), and whose daughter and nephew opened the restaurant to which I am headed posthaste.
I find Emily waiting a bit nervously in the small crowd outside (I’m not late), and we duck inside and are quickly ushered to our booth.
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, Emily moved to New York City to attend the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Through a family friend (one of her father’s friends was married to Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar), she lucked out on an invitation to have dinner with Rossner’s literary agent, the much-beloved Wendy Weil. Nothing momentous happened at the dinner, but a couple of weeks later, she ran into Wendy on the subway. “She was coming from her weekly tennis game, and she looked like Annie Hall, and instead of being timid and hiding behind my New Yorker, which might have been what I normally did, I just went over and said hi. And we rode together.” In other words, it was one of those incredibly fortuitous moments when your life is forever altered by happenstance and a simple decision—like screwing up your courage and saying hi to a famous literary agent who you happened to see in the crowd.
Emily was offered a summer internship at the Wendy Weil Agency—the same summer, coincidently, that Wendy was interviewed for a profile that appeared in the September/October 1997 issue of this magazine—and continued on at the agency as an assistant and, eventually, as a full agent, up until when Wendy died suddenly, in September 2012. Emily then moved to Brandt & Hochman and represents authors such as Jane Alison, Flynn Berry, Katharine Dion, Carrie Fountain, Kirk Lynn, Elizabeth McKenzie, and Dominic Smith.
As the waiter brings us our whitefish croquettes, however, the author we are talking about is Nathan Hill, whose debut novel, The Nix, was the talk of the town—and, more important, bookstores—in 2016, when it was published by Knopf and landed on all the big year-end lists (the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, Slate). At last count the number of languages the novel has been published in was twenty-eight, but Emily tells me that this morning the agency’s foreign-rights director got a call from Beirut about an Arabic edition, so it might be twenty-nine by now.
The publication of The Nix is a lesson in perseverance and patience that pays off in a big way, the biggest way imaginable for most writers. It’s not just that the author took his time writing the book (ten years, from 2004 to 2014), and that he was patient through the publishing process (which took another two years), but also that he was patient in his professional relationship with Emily—after all, The Nix wasn’t even the first book of his that she had tried to sell.
Nathan first queried Emily (it was a “very straightforward” letter, she recalls) when she was still at the Wendy Weil Agency, in December 2010. Nathan had read Susanna Daniel’s novel Stiltsville, which was set in Florida, where he lived at the time, and decided to send her agent, Emily, a collection of stories he had written partly while an MFA student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst six years earlier. “I wrote to him after reading the first few pages of the first piece,” Emily says. “The writing was so strong, and I told him I had to keep reading, but I already knew.”
Ask any agent and you’ll likely hear the same thing: Stories are hard to sell. So it’s a testament to Nathan’s talent that Emily fell so deeply for his writing that she was willing to send the collection of stories (“very interconnected, about a couple inching toward each other,” she says) out on submission in 2011. “It came close, but it didn’t land,” Emily says about response to the collection. “There were people who really admired it but couldn’t get it through, or thought, ‘Ugh, stories.’ Also, stories come in waves of editors being receptive to them.”
Rather than let this derail him, Nathan told Emily about a novel he’d been working on for the past six years, about a mother and her son, partially set in 1968, and secrets about the mother’s past. Intrigued, Emily took him out to lunch the next time he was in New York. The two dined at the Morgan Library, across from the Wendy Weil Agency. (Fun fact: At the end of The Nix, there is a scene set in the dining room of the Morgan that was drawn from this visit.) For two years afterward, the two kept in touch.
It’s worth slowing down for this part and considering: two years. After getting encouragement from Emily, he didn’t rush through a draft of his novel; he wasn’t despondent after the rejection of his stories or panicking that his window of opportunity was closing. He took the time to write the best book he could write. In the meantime Emily had moved to Brandt & Hochman, but eventually Nathan wrote to her again: “Okay, remember my novel?” Emily recalls him writing. “It’s now also about cell-phone distraction and Occupy Wall Street and multiplayer online games and the housing crisis. Are you still in?” After Emily assured him she was, another update would arrive every six to eight months.
“Nathan was canny because he waited,” Emily says. “When he finally delivered The Nix, he waited quite a while for me to read it.” Why is this important? Because the manuscript he delivered, in the summer of 2014, was 275,000 words. (Some math: the typical double-spaced manuscript page contains 250 words, which means this draft was roughly 1,100 pages, or more than two packages of standard printer paper.)
About six months of revising and editing between agent and author followed. “Every draft he gave me, he had worked very hard to get to and had specific questions but was also very open to feedback…just open and creative in the way he addressed comments and revision,” Emily says. “I think he really enjoyed being in this book, so I don’t think he was hurrying.”
Finally, after cutting 35,000 words and moving some sections around and pushing the manuscript as far as they could, Emily sent it out to editors, in advance of a blizzard, at the end of January 2015. She submitted it to twelve editors, and additional editors requested it after there was a “very noisy response from foreign publishers.” I ask Emily what this means. How could foreign publishers know about it? “I guess the scouts got it,” she says, meaning one of the editors she sent it to must have forwarded it to one of those “spies of the literary world,” as Anjali Singh had joked. This can be a good thing—it was a very good thing in this case; fire spreads—but it doesn’t always work out that way. “If you have a quiet literary novel that is going to find its way but might take a lot of submitting, it’s likely that it’s going to be old news by the time it’s gone out. You don’t want anything to be shopworn.” In other words the scouts can note a lack of enthusiasm, too.
But in this case the fire spread, and Emily was fielding requests to see the manuscript, including one from Tim O’Connell at Knopf, who was not one of the original editors to whom Emily submitted it but who nevertheless made a preemptive bid (or preempt, the purpose of which is to end a bidding war immediately by offering a significant advance). It worked. “Knopf was great,” Emily tells me. “They were really behind it, their offer was strong, and we got to keep foreign rights.” (Marianne Merola, the foreign-rights director at Brandt & Hochman quickly sold rights in fourteen countries, so that detail about the foreign rights turned out to be a very good business decision.)
Nathan and Tim did another round of edits, cutting an additional thirty thousand words or so. This work did not come as a surprise to Nathan; before accepting the offer from Knopf, he had spoken with Tim, who wanted to make sure he conveyed exactly what was expected of the process. Nathan was all in. “It was very much about making sure the novel was as compulsive as it could be,” Emily says about the final round of editing. Meanwhile the gears were starting to turn on the marketing and publicity side of the business as well. Early on, Nathan returned to New York and met with Emily and representatives from the publicity department at Knopf. Emily says she expected maybe four people at that meeting. The conference room was full.
The purpose of such a meeting is to brainstorm ideas and explore possible ways of getting the word out about the book in advance of publication, but it’s also an opportunity for the folks in publicity to meet the author and see for themselves what he’s like—his style, his personality, his communication skills—as arguably the most important spokesperson for the book. Despite not knowing the crowd of professionals in the room, he made an impression, especially with Knopf’s vice president and editorial director. “I just remember Robin Desser whispering in my ear as we were leaving, ‘He’s a rock star,’” Emily says.
Before it was published on August 30, 2016, The Nix landed a coveted spot on the Editors’ Buzz panel at BookExpo, held that year in Chicago. (BookExpo America, or BEA, is the country’s largest book trade fair, and it’s where editors, publishers, agents, and authors from around the world promote their forthcoming books to a captive audience of booksellers.) It was also reviewed in all the usual places, and Nathan was profiled in the New York Times four days before the book was published. A month later, Warner Bros. optioned the novel for a television series adaptation, with JJ Abrams set to direct. Meryl Streep was initially attached to the project but no longer; as of this writing it’s still being cast.
Hope for the best; expect the worst. If Emily had a pregame speech—something she told her authors before she sends their work out on submission—that would be it. “In general I think that stance is helpful for going through the world and especially going through the world as a writer,” she says. And sometimes, as Nathan Hill’s story illustrates, you work hard then hope for the best, and that’s pretty close to what you get.
THURSDAY 12:30 PM
Gaonnuri
1250 Broadway, 39th floor, corner of West 32nd Street
Black Cod Gui: white kimchi, chive, doenjang, gochujang, served with white rice, banchan, and seaweed soup
Marinated Galbi: marinated prime beef short rib, served with white rice, banchan, and seaweed soup
Walking into Gaonnuri, the posh Korean restaurant on the thirty-ninth floor of a skyscraper just south of the Empire State Building, I’m reminded of the first time I had the very New York experience of riding an elevator to what I assumed would be a hallway leading to the apartment where a cocktail party was in full swing, but when the elevator doors opened, I was staring at the inside of the apartment, and all the guests turned their heads and stared. For an introvert this is the stuff of nightmares. But the panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline that greets me this afternoon when I step off the elevator is something else entirely, and as I’m shown to a table by the windows, I do not resist the urge to snap a photo with my phone. Fortunately, Julia Kardon, an agent at Hannigan Salky Getzler (HSG) Agency, hasn’t yet arrived to witness my touristy act.
When Julia does arrive she tells me why lunches with editors are so important for agents. “You just learn things about them that you can’t learn from their Publishers Marketplace write-up. You find out that Emily Graff at Simon & Schuster has a twin sister. So then you might think about how you would pitch a book about siblings to her. Molly Turpin [at Random House] is a beautiful artist, so in addition to the kind of history, nonfiction, that she focuses on, if you have a project that has to do with art history, you would definitely want to send that to her.”
Born and raised in New York City, Julia studied comparative literature as well as Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago, then moved to Prague to teach English for a year. Back in New York, after a brief internship at the Wylie Agency, she started her career at Sterling Lord Literistic, where she was an assistant to Philippa (Flip) Brophy, who showed Julia the ropes, including the art of the phone pitch. “She was on the phone constantly. Her handset smelled like her perfume,” Julia recalls. “I learned from her, and that made me want to pitch that way.” In addition to e-mailing a pitch letter to editors, she adds, “I, unlike some of my millennial peers, always call editors to pitch a project.”
Julia worked at Sterling Lord for just under three years before moving to Mary Evans, a boutique agency (a fancy term for a small, specialized agency), where she worked on foreign rights while building a list of clients for herself before moving to HSG. Among the first clients she signed was John Freeman Gill, whom Julia reached out to after reading an op-ed he had written in the New York Times titled “The Folly of Saving What You Kill,” about preserving the city’s old buildings. His bio stated that he was working on a novel about architectural salvage. Intrigued, she invited him to lunch. “He knew that I was young, but the way you position yourself when you’re young is that you’re very hungry but you’ve also worked on great things, like ‘I’m working with Michael Chabon to some degree. I worked on James McBride’s National Book Award–winning novel,’ things like that. Obviously I didn’t agent it, but I know what the publishing process looks like. I know how it’s done and how it should be done.” In other words, there was some salesmanship involved, but the two connected, and she ended up selling his novel, The Gargoyle Hunters, at auction to Knopf.
I ask Julia how an auction works, specifically a round-robin-style auction like Gill’s, in which there were four bidders. “You send the auction rules to everyone, and basically you tell them what rights they’re bidding on. If you have a lot of attention, you’d want to make that North American rights only,” she says, and I remember Emily Forland’s smart decision to retain foreign rights for her big sale. Julia continues: “In the first round everyone makes their first bids, and then you call the lowest bidder and tell them what the highest bidder’s number was, and they have to become the new high bidder or they have to drop out. And then you call the next-lowest bidder and tell them what the new high bid is. And they have to beat that or they drop out. And it goes around like that. It can be pretty exasperating because sometimes the lowest bidder will improve the highest bid by $2,500 or $5,000. So you can go from $100,000 to $200,000 over the course of two days, and it’s like, ‘I’m going to lose my mind if I have to keep doing this.’”
To avoid a prolonged auction, agents sometimes dictate a minimum increment by which a bid can be raised. “You can also at any point in the auction call for best bids,” she adds. “Theoretically that is just getting everyone’s best, final bid, and you don’t go back to negotiate.” But agents can and often do go back to negotiate certain aspects of the agreement, such as the payout of the advance—traditionally a third at signing, a third when the publisher accepts the final manuscript, and a third on publication, but that can be adjusted to quarters, with the final 25 percent due on paperback publication. The agent’s standard cut is 15 percent of the author’s gross domestic earnings, including the advance (and 20 percent for foreign rights deals).
Writers often think of agents sitting in well-appointed offices and waiting for a query or proposal to strike their fancy. But the path to a literary agent is not a one-way street. Agents are actively looking for potential clients too. This is how Julia found John Freeman Gill, and it’s also how she found Brit Bennett when she was in her final year of the MFA program at the University of Michigan. On December 17, 2014, Jezebel published an essay by Brit titled “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People” that went viral. “As soon as that essay published, I knew that it was going to be big,” Julia says. “I think it was already at several hundred thousand page views by the time I read it. And I looked in the white pages to see if I could find her phone number and—I don’t remember doing this, but—I apparently left a voice mail on her mother’s answering machine in California. Brit says she was in a class, and her mom called her cell phone…so she ran out of the class to make sure everything was okay. ‘An agent just left a voice mail for you; I think it’s really important!’ I don’t remember doing that, but it’s not unlike me…. I knew that I wouldn’t be the only agent to reach out to her. I think nine ultimately did. And I wanted to make an impression by getting in early and showing her that I was really passionate, because at that point I hadn’t even had one of my client’s books published yet. Brit’s book was my first book to publish. It was not the first book I sold, but it was my first one to publish. So I didn’t have a lot that I felt like I could trade off of other than the power of my conviction and the passion that I had for her.”
When the two of them eventually talked, Julia asked Brit if she was working on an essay collection. When she learned Brit was actually writing a novel, The Mothers, about a seventeen-year-old whose pregnancy leads to a decision that shapes her life and the lives of those around her forever, Julia asked for the first chapter. “I read that chapter and I was like, ‘Holy shit. This is amazing.’ I felt like that immediate electricity coming off the page, sizzling in my hands, and I’m like, ‘Okay, where’s the rest?’” Four weeks later, when Brit sent the full manuscript, as she had requested, Julia cleared her schedule and read it the same day it arrived. She was so blown away by it that she called Brit that evening to tell her she loved it and thought she could sell it. “She was so funny because Brit is very reserved and very cool and collected as a person,” Julia says. “She just was like, ‘Oh, thank you so much for reading so quickly. Can we schedule a call to talk about this tomorrow? Right now is not good for me.’”
Julia figured Brit was fielding offers from other agents. “I just had to assume that almost everybody who had two eyes and a beating heart and a brain would be able to recognize very fast that this was an incredible talent.” She scheduled a call with Brit for the following morning and, at the appointed hour, made the case for why she should be Brit’s agent. It didn’t go very well. “I just felt really unsatisfied with the conversation. I hadn’t asked her enough questions,” Julia admits. “And I remember talking to Mary Evans’s assistant about whether or not I should call her back, because [Brit] isn’t here in New York, so I can’t take her to lunch and show her how cool I am and find out more about her.” After much deliberation Julia did call her back that same morning, and the two ended up talking for two more hours. Even after that Julia wasn’t confident. “I do remember that it was this agonizing stretch of time. I felt completely convinced that she wouldn’t sign with me but that I had done everything I could. So I could at least take some small comfort in that I was going after the right people.”
But Brit did choose Julia, and when Julia sent The Mothers out to editors, right before the 2015 London Book Fair, Sarah McGrath, vice president and editor in chief of Riverhead Books, put in a significant preempt that was too good to pass up. The novel was published in October 2016, quickly became a New York Times best-seller, and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.
Julia and Brit’s relationship is a great success story, but it’s also a good reminder of the effort that agents often put into finding their authors. It also shows that the balance of power is not always weighted so heavily in the agent’s favor. While it may seem like agents hold all the cards, it’s important to remember that agents hope writers will choose them, too.
(Kardon: Tony Gale)FRIDAY 1:30 PM
Maysville
17 West 26th Street
Avocado egg salad sandwich: mixed greens, crispy shallots
Cobb salad: romaine, grape tomatoes, avocado, hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese
Cajun spiced nuts: garlic, rosemary
Diet Coke, ginger ale
My first full-time job in New York, after months of freelance proofreading and temp jobs, was at W. H. Freeman, an imprint of Macmillan. On my first day, when I walked through Madison Square Park to the black skyscraper that held my modest cubicle thirty-seven stories above Madison Avenue, across from the iconic Flatiron Building, my heart did a little somersault. I had made it. It didn’t last long—I left that job after eight months or so—but it was still a great moment. I’m in a hurry as I walk through Madison Square Park this afternoon, but every time I’m in the neighborhood I can’t help but look up at that black building to find the window—not mine, I never had one—through which my former boss, Erika Goldman (now the publisher of Bellevue Literary Press), saw the city’s skyline. After a quick look I pick up the pace, fast-walking a couple of blocks west to the restaurant at which I’m meeting Kent Wolf, an agent at the Friedrich Agency. When he suggested Maysville for lunch, I had to look it up to see whether we needed a reservation. It took me thirty seconds to discover that we would be eating lunch two days before the Southern-inspired eatery and bar that boasts 150 different American whiskeys is scheduled to close, for good. Two questions: Does this mean the place will be empty or crowded, and does the drink menu suggest I’ll get a taste of those inebriating publishing lunches I’d read about?
The first question is answered the moment I step inside: It’s neither packed nor deserted, which is not a great sign for a Manhattan restaurant on a Friday afternoon, hence, I assume, the closing. The answer to my second question takes longer, but in the end: No, those days appear to be over. It’s a couple cans of cold soda for me and Kent, who is from Illinois—he attended Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington—and has a delightfully sly sense of humor. At one point in the conversation he directs my attention to a gentleman wearing an impressive mullet (business in the front, party in the back), a hairstyle we both recognize from our days in the Midwest.
Before moving to the Friedrich Agency, Kent was an agent at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. He got his start in publishing on the editorial side, at the independent press Dalkey Archive, before working as a literary scout at McInerney International, then moving to Harcourt, for which he was the subsidiary rights manager until 2008, when he lost his job as a result of Harcourt’s merger with Houghton Mifflin.
“This is a very relationship-based business,” Kent tells me after we get settled and I ask him if agents are a particularly competitive bunch. “Whether it’s me or somebody at ICM or somebody at, God forbid, the Wylie Agency, we’re all good at our jobs; we all have the same relationships, but sometimes authors look for different kinds of experience, and some prefer being at a boutique agency like the Friedrich Agency because we’re very hands-on, and you don’t have to go through layers of nameless assistants—you know, like binky urban assistant at icm dot com—to get to me, Lucy Carson, Heather Carr, or Molly Friedrich,” he says, referring to the sole members of the Friedrich Agency team. “But some authors prefer someone in accounts payable who processes their checks, or the allure of a foreign-rights team, or an agency that has their own book-to-film division, and those are things we can’t provide as an agency. But if you look at our track record, it speaks for itself.”
This is true, and among the agency’s impressive roster of clients, one in particular jumps off the page: Carmen Maria Machado, who is represented by the guy sitting across from me.
Just as Julia Kardon reached out to Brit Bennett after reading an essay she had published online, Kent got in touch with Carmen in 2015 after reading a piece she’d written for the Rumpus. Throughout our conversation Kent drops a number of references to literary magazines—Ploughshares, Guernica—that he scours, looking for new talent. I ask him if he can list more of his favorite journals. “If I tell you, then other agents will start reading them,” he says, which makes me think my earlier question about competition among agents was on point. Saturdays and Sundays, he says, one can find him in the reading room of the Center for Fiction, just around the corner from where he lives in Brooklyn, reading stories and manuscripts. He found another of his clients, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, after reading a story of hers in Guernica. Her debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, was published by Doubleday in July 2018.
Doubleday, of course, is a part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is itself a part of Penguin Random House, the multinational conglomerate formed in 2013 from the merger of Random House, owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and Penguin Group, owned by British publishing company Pearson.
Carmen’s story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, did not find a home at Penguin Random House, or any of the other publishers comprising the Big Five that currently dominate the commercial publishing market. As a matter of fact, close to thirty publishers, including some small indies, declined before Kent found an editor and a press willing to take a risk on the debut story collection. “Graywolf was our last port of call,” Kent says. “It’s difficult to say what would have happened if Graywolf had turned down the book. Maybe another small press out there would have taken it. The independent presses are the ones that can take risks because they don’t have shareholders to answer to.… The big trade publishers are just notoriously risk-averse, and they’re getting increasingly so.”
The initial response from publishers to Carmen’s debut reminds me of what happened with the first book by Nathan Hill that Emily Forland was unable to sell. “It’s cliché now, but you hear it all the time,” Kent says. “It’s this exact sentence: Stories are hard. And they say it in this soft, apologetic way—gentle. ‘Send us the novel when it’s ready.’ I was in a meeting with a scout, and I was talking about Carmen’s collection, pitching it for foreign sales. And the scout, that was the first thing she said: ‘Mmm, stories are hard.’ She was like twenty-two. What do you know? Your boss says that, so now you’re parroting it. I told her she was never allowed to say that to me again,” he says, grinning.
In the end, Ethan Nosowsky at Graywolf Press bought Carmen’s story collection, and it was published in October 2017. The book that was passed on by the New York publishing establishment went on to be named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award. Last year the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
“There was a lot of revisionist history going on in New York” once it was clear what all those editors had passed on, Kent says, then adds: “You can write that my eyes rolled so hard my irises disappeared.”
When I ask him to elaborate, he gives me a kind of side-glance, grins, and says, “This is a risk-averse industry, unless they can see an audience for something. That’s why they’re always insisting on comps.” Comps, by the way, is short for “comparable titles,” which are standard ingredients in any query letter or proposal. Agents and editors want to know the titles of some recently published books that have proved successful (but not too successful) and that share some characteristics with what you’ve written. “A book doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Kent says, repeating what a couple of the other agents said earlier in the week. “So if [editors] can point to this particular recent success, or something that recently won an award or was turned into a movie or whatnot, if they can see that there is an audience for something, then they can more comfortably get behind that.”
On the other hand, writers often hear publishers and editors talking about how they’re looking for the next new thing: something exciting, something they haven’t read before. There is an inherent contradiction at play here, and it triggers one of Kent’s biggest complaints about the industry. “Here is one thing I hate about this business: publishers massively overpaying for debut fiction. It’s the worst. Two or three million dollars for a debut novel and everything else on that publisher’s list gets eclipsed by that book; they put all of their efforts behind it,” he says. “They circle their wagons around one, two, three books a year, and everything else is getting lost. This is not a sustainable model. It’s bad for publishers, it’s bad for authors, it’s bad for readers.”
Carmen’s second book, a memoir, In the Dream House, will be released by Graywolf in November, and despite the early rejections of her debut, it is difficult to see how her career would have been launched any better at one of the bigger publishers. “With Graywolf, it’s a smaller list, and the attention they pay to each book is noticeable,” Kent says. “What’s nice for an author being published by a press like Graywolf is that they’re more part of the process. And I think authors are given more agency, or at least they are able to be part of decisions in a way that a [larger publisher] couldn’t offer because of the layers of bureaucracy.”
MONDAY 1:00 PM
Taylor Street Baristas
28 East 40th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues
Granny’s chopped salad: romaine, cucumber, avocado, tomato, feta, smoked salmon
Smoked tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich
Nishi Sencha tea, filter coffee
I was warned that Taylor Street Baristas would be loud, and as I make my way through Grand Central Terminal and walk two blocks south on Park Avenue to the specialty coffee shop and café, I take Emily Forland’s advice to hope for the best and expect the worst. Unfortunately, my fears are realized when I walk in the door. I believe clamorous is the word. So many people talking so close to one another (the Midwesterner in me will never get used to tables positioned this close) that I worry I won’t be able to hear my lunch companion, Marya Spence, an agent at Janklow & Nesbit. As I wait for her at a corner table in the second-floor dining room, music is added to the din. I would be annoyed if not for the playlist (sweet sounds of the 1970s, “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne, followed by Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” offer an appropriate soundtrack for this rainy day), and soon enough my ears adjust and Marya arrives.
Having studied literature at Harvard, followed by an MFA in fiction at New York University, during which she had paid internships at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair—she also wrote reviews for Publishers Weekly and taught undergrads—Marya seemingly could have had her choice of careers in the editorial or academic arena. Toward the end of her time at NYU, she began to look into teaching, a profession that was familiar to her. (She grew up on college campuses; her father is a prize-winning professor and administrator who taught at schools across the country). But while Marya was applying for adjunct teaching jobs, the writer David Lipsky (Although of Course You End Up Being Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace) suggested she look into agenting. “I really had no idea what agenting was at that time,” she says, but Lipsky knew someone at Janklow & Nesbit, an agent who specialized in young adult fiction and is no longer with the firm, so she sent her résumé, which floated down the hallway to another agent, PJ Mark, who brought her in for an interview. “I came in, wrote an editorial response on a manuscript, and we were off to the races,” Marya says. She started as PJ’s assistant while doing what many assistants do: try to build their own list of clients. “I was working on some projects of my own…doing that thing young people have to do in publishing, which is working double triple time. I was my boss’s assistant during work hours, and then I would stay late editing some manuscripts that I hadn’t formally signed yet. But that’s how you get your foot in the door.”
One of the books that landed on her desk in those early days, in January 2015, to be precise, was Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel by Rachel Khong, then senior editor at Lucky Peach, the irreverent food magazine that would shutter two years later. The novel, about a thirty-year-old woman who returns home to Southern California for Christmas and ends up staying to care for her ailing parents, made an immediate impression.
“I read Goodbye, Vitamin overnight, and I cried on the subway and I cried at my neighborhood bar, where I would sit in the corner and they would pour me tea—it was very romantic, my life then,” Marya recalls. “And I walked into PJ’s office and said, ‘Look, I haven’t asked to sign anyone yet, particularly one that came to both of us, but [she pauses] this is my book. It has to be.’ And PJ was drowning, as I am now, and was like, ‘Please, you have more than my blessing.’”
So Marya sent Rachel an editorial letter—she calls them love letters—in which she put all of her thoughts and visions and desires for the book, comparing her work to Renata Adler (Speedboat) and Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation), and explaining some of the editorial work she thought the manuscript needed, including tightening the pacing in some places and building up some of the characters. “I will admit I’m a sucker for romance or a crush story, so I wanted that to be built out a little bit more too,” she says.
Rachel happily agreed, and for the next ten months or so, the agent and author worked together on the manuscript. Meanwhile, Marya made her first sale: Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia to Ben George at Little, Brown, in a six-figure preempt—not a bad way to start an agenting career. When Goodbye, Vitamin was ready for submission, it too received an “overwhelming response,” attracting more than a dozen interested editors. Before the auction, Marya scheduled what she describes as “a week of back-to-back, on-the-dot forty-five-minute phone calls” between Rachel, who lives in San Francisco, and her suitors.
I ask Marya what exactly happens during these kinds of phone calls—or typically, if the author is in New York, in-person meetings—before an auction begins, and whether the conversations are primarily for the editor’s benefit or the author’s. “First and foremost it’s for the writer,” she says. “Editors’ responses to a manuscript can range from ‘I’m interested but with some qualifications,’ in which case a talk is really important for them to just speak directly and get a sense for each other’s styles and personalities, to ‘I’m just freaking out, I’m losing sleep over this book, and I just want to tell this person how much I’m dying to work with them,’ which is also good for a writer to hear.”
In Rachel’s case the responses were similarly varied, so it was important for her to get a sense of where each editor stood before the auction began. As a result of one of the phone calls, an excited editor made a preemptive offer. “With all of the interest, we didn’t take it,” Marya says. “It was a really nice preempt from an amazing editor and house, but I wanted Rachel to know where some of these other houses and editors were coming from.” Instead Sarah Bowlin, a senior editor at Henry Holt, won the auction and the rights to publish Goodbye, Vitamin.
Fantastic news, but then what? I’ve always been curious about the moments, days, and weeks following such a momentous decision. Here’s a debut novelist whose life has just been changed by a series of e-mails and phone calls on the other side of the country. What’s the next step?
“The next step is getting on an e-mail chain together, and there’s lots of exclamation points,” Marya says. “I think it’s really important to celebrate. This is a moment where everything has gone right. Cherish that.” This is solid advice. But an agent doesn’t just raise a glass, then hand over the keys and wish the writer well. There are a number of things that require her attention: The finer points of the contract need to be settled—the formats and markets in which the book will be published, subsidiary rights, payment schedule, due dates, options, and so on—and the publisher’s contracts department likely needs a little nudging. And then there’s getting everyone together—the author, the editor, the publicity and marketing team—so they can draw up a game plan for publication.
Still, on some level there is a handoff that happens naturally after the author and editor have been introduced. “I like to be looped in on everything, but I also want writers to have direct relationships with their editors,” Marya says. “As much as I would love to be a part of every step of the editorial process, I just can’t be, so they need to get comfortable as soon as possible. I think of it sometimes like a relay race. Up until that point, for months or maybe years I’ve been working with my writer on a super-familiar basis; now the ball is more in the editor’s court, and they might step into that role of editorial and creative collaboration.”
But then sometimes, as was the case with Rachel, the unexpected happens: Sarah Bowlin left Holt. As a matter of fact, she left editing altogether: She moved to Los Angeles and is now an agent at Aevitas Creative Management. “So then the book was reassigned to Barbara Jones, who is wonderful,” Marya says. “I could think of no better editor to take up the mantle than her. She had said that she was the first person to raise her hand to take it on because she read it and cried during submission.”
Marya calls the departure of an editor mid-process “very disruptive,” but in this case it didn’t spell disaster. The publisher was already fully behind the book, and it had already been edited, but there were still many things to be done before publication, including finalizing the cover. Marya stayed on top of the situation. “I think authors need to hear, ‘Don’t worry, I’m on top of them. I’ll make sure that these balls don’t get dropped.’”
Agents, of course, are good at juggling, and after Goodbye, Vitamin was published in July 2017, it was named a best book of the year by nearly a dozen major publications, including O, the Oprah Magazine; Vogue; Esquire; Entertainment Weekly; and BuzzFeed. It went on to win a 2017 California Book Award and was a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
I ask Marya if she has any advice for authors in the middle of the publishing process, who may be juggling a bit of anxiety themselves. “Recognize that there will always be surprises along the way,” she says, “and know that we’re on your team.”
Talk to an agent long enough, over a good meal, and inevitably subjects will come up that are, shall we say, sensitive. As many of these agents reminded me, this is a business of relationships—one even said it’s a business of feelings—so there are stories, or bits and pieces of hard-earned wisdom, that they may not be comfortable having attributed to them. Rather than restrict our conversations, I offered to save such morsels for “dessert,” served cold, names removed. Here then is a collection of unattributed quotes gleaned from our conversations. Some verbal tics and tones have been edited to preserve anonymity and to avoid giving any agent indigestion.
I never predict what someone’s advance is going to be. I tell people that I work on commission, and therefore I don’t take on projects that I think are not going to sell well. But I will never say, “Oh I think this should be around $150,000.” I would just never guess that, because it’s a losing game. You either give them this false hope that you can’t deliver on or you look like you undervalued them, which is also not a good look.
I’ve never been on the phone and said to a client, “No way in hell are you taking this.” We talk it through. I try to give them as much agency in the process as I can, and complete transparency. I’ve never not conveyed an offer to an author. But there are some agents who will keep information from their clients.
The kind of agent who makes a decision that they’re going to represent the most moneymaking clients regardless of what their ideology is—I’m not there. Maybe I will lose money in the long run because of it, but I don’t think that I could be a passionate advocate for a writer whose political opinions I abhor or felt were actively damaging the fabric of society. I mean, it’s not like Steve Bannon approached me and asked me to represent him, but I can at least say that I’m not interested in those kinds of books.
If I share a rejection note from an editor with you, and then you write the editor directly about it, that’s not a good idea. I don’t work with that author anymore.
The numbers are always so made up. The profit-and-loss statements that editors use for debuts are truly nonsense numbers; they’re actually insane.
I like to say I work in the margins of a very commercial space so I take on those things that I feel need to be seen but that I also think I can get into a big trade place and make an advance, which is hard—I’m an agent and I get to choose what I give my time to, but unfortunately it’s also about the money on some level because I have to also make a living. And some of these decisions are also economic.
If your agent gives you honest feedback on the first draft of your novel, that should be considered private correspondence. It is bad form—as well as being really unconstructive—to post it on social media or vent about it on your blog.
There’s a funny story about FSG. I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, but the story goes that an agent and author asked for a marketing plan for a book, and it was just a photo of the spine with the colophon.
Make sure you’re writing for the right reasons. If you’re writing a novel because you’re trying to work through your own personal issues, that’s not why you should be writing a novel.
I’ve definitely talked to people where we disagree about a book, and I very, very rarely say, “I can see your side of things here.” No, my side is right. I knew that book was going to be a big deal, and if it hadn’t been I would have left the industry, because I would not have been able to work with people too stupid to understand what they had in front of them.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinLarimer.
The Business of Relationships: How Authors, Agents, Editors, Booksellers, and Publicists Work Together to Reach Readers
It is often said that book publishing is a business of relationships. Behind every successful title there is a small crowd of people who, over the course of many months and even years, worked together—via e-mail and in person, on the phone and over lunch—to turn an idea into a vision, edits into finished pages, a manuscript into a book. A work of art conceived and created in solitude is carried forth by a team, passing through many hands before it reaches the marketplace. I asked five debut authors to describe their first steps toward establishing the initial relationship, the one that starts the whole process rolling: finding an agent. I then asked those five agents to explain how the relationships with their clients grew and how they introduced their clients to the ideal editors who would shepherd their books into print. Next, I contacted those editors and invited them to walk us through the acquisition and editorial process that turns the raw material into finished products. And finally I spoke with five indie booksellers who convey the enthusiasm, the passion, and the purpose of author, agent, and editor in their efforts to place the books in the hands of their intended readers. Along the way I was introduced to marketing directors, publicity managers, events directors, sales reps, and other agents, editors, and authors who aided in forging connections that proved crucial in the process. The result is a series of illustrations offering a glimpse at how the book business operates on the strength of personal and professional bonds among dedicated people working toward the twin goals of creative expression and smart business.
Jordy Rosenberg author of the novel Confessions of the Fox, published in June by One World, an imprint of Random House
According to my e-mail records, it was seventeen days from when I first e-mailed Susan Golomb to our initial phone call. However, this does not take into account the seventeen years that I spent writing and throwing away manuscripts. During that time I had been fortunate to discuss my different projects with several agents with varying specializations: noir/mystery, creative nonfiction, popular fiction. These conversations ultimately became a part of Confessions, which interweaves all these genres—speculative fiction, thriller, metafiction, autotheory—into a single novel. With such a formal composite, I needed and wanted to work with an agent who specialized in high-concept literary fiction. I knew Susan had worked on this kind of thing with a number of her other clients, so I had hoped Confessions would attract her attention, and to my great fortune it did. But I could not have predicted the storm of activity that would ensue once she took me on. Susan was tireless with her edits. It was a little sublime and terrifying, actually, and I don’t know how she did it. We went through three full rounds of line edits—as well as larger structural edits—in the space of three weeks. This mania was surely responsible for the fact that Susan was struck with pneumonia midway through the process. Which still didn’t stop her: She was calling me from the hospital about edits. I believe she was still on antibiotics, in fact, when she made the connection between me and Chris Jackson and Victory Matsui at One World. I’m very much in her debt for the clarity of her vision, not only about the book’s bones, but also for intuiting that the horizon of the book’s potential lay with Chris and Victory and the deep working relationship we would go on to establish.
Susan Golomb of Writers House
When Michael Szczerban interviewed me in your pages in 2014, I made reference to my “shaggy dogs.” Jordy’s novel was one such animal. It came bounding into my slush pile with a mention of my client Rachel Kushner as a referral, wagging its tail with charming yet acerbic wit and playful language that included the actual lexicon of the demimonde, which put me in mind immediately of A Clockwork Orange, but with a bursting heart. There were probably fifty words for sexual intercourse, each more delicious and descriptive than the next, and a thriller frame with extremely topical, political subtext dripping with atmosphere. Like all shaggy dogs, however, its ambition exceeded its reach, so we set to work, and in a hurry, to have it on submission for the Frankfurt Book Fair. I worked with Jordy to trim the plot and imbue it with more suspense, to deepen the characters and raise the stakes of their desires. And I felt the title, while quite apt and intriguing, could be off-putting. So we came up with an interim one—and the final was by way of brainstorming with Writers House colleagues at a party and back and forth with Jordy and the One World team. While racing to meet the Frankfurt deadline, I came down with pneumonia, and Jordy plied me with bone broth, which came by messenger from Brodo and endeared him to me even more than his spectacular talent and, yes, I’ll say it, dogged willingness to make the manuscript as brilliant as it could be.
Victory Matsui editor at One World
When Susan Golomb sent the novel to me and Chris Jackson on submission, I had just joined One World a month earlier. I was searching for fiction that fulfilled the One World mission—books that “challenged the status quo and subverted dominant modes of thinking.” I was especially looking for a novel that celebrated the political resistance and joyful weirdness of queer and trans communities. Can you imagine how I felt when I first read Confessions? Jordy had merged a radical sensibility with the pleasures of great storytelling to write an epic queer love story through the histories of capitalism, imperialism, and imprisonment. Chris and I quickly set up a call with Susan and Jordy, and we immediately fell in love with his electric mind, his sense of humor, and his ambition to make this book both intellectually engaging and richly entertaining. We set down the phone and agreed we had to publish this book. So we offered a preempt—an offer that takes the book off the table before other editors have the chance to offer—and were overjoyed when Jordy and Susan accepted. Of course that was just the beginning: Our work together would take us from nights of e-mailing back and forth about character backstory to long phone calls about narrative structure to a tearful meeting at Le Pain Quotidien about footnotes—ultimately resulting in one of the most fulfilling editor-author relationships of my life.
Alex Schaffner at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts
First an advance reader’s copy (ARC) arrived addressed to our backlist buyer, Shuchi Saraswat, who keeps an eye out for booksellers’ interests as ARCs come in. She and my co–events director, Lydia McOscar, heard more about the book directly when they visited Penguin Random House’s New York offices. The publisher’s contagious enthusiasm spurred me to dig in. LGBT literature is one of my key interests, and I wrote a thesis on eighteenth-century literature, so this was a natural path from publisher excitement to store to just the right bookseller. Fans of Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson will love it, and with hand-selling and shelf-talkers [printed cards or other signs attached to a store shelf to call buyers’ attention to a particular title], I expect the book to be a success at the store.
“Rosenberg’s masterful debut is, at once, a work of speculative historical fiction, a soaring love story, a puzzling mystery, an electrifying tale of adventure and suspense, and an unabashed celebration of sex and sexuality.”
—Christine Mykityshyn, publicity manager, Penguin Random House
Nafissa Thompson-Spires author of the story collection Heads of the Colored People, published in April by 37 INK, an imprint of Atria Publishing Group
In 2015 I started querying agents with a novel I’d written as my MFA thesis at the University of Illinois. No one was sure about its genre—YA or adult literary fiction. After a lot of partial requests and a dozen full requests, lots of rejections, and lots of agents ignoring me—I queried about a hundred—an agent asked me to revise and resubmit. I grew bored with trying to write to his suggestions; to distract myself I wrote several short stories. One of them, “Heads of the Colored People,” gave me the idea for a full manuscript. In early 2016 I ran into an old colleague, Jensen Beach, who recommended that I submit my completed collection to some contests and mentioned that he could refer me to his agent, Anna Stein. Two weeks later the collection won a small-press contest that came with publication, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best route. I contacted Anna and the three or four other agents I’d submitted to, strategically this time. Anna responded enthusiastically that I should talk to her instead of giving the book to the small press. We clicked on the phone, and the rest is a blessed history.
Anna Stein of ICM Partners
Nafissa’s collection came to me thanks to my client Jensen Beach, who had recommended us to each other. I remember my assistant at the time, Mary Marge Locker, started reading before I did and said, “You’d better take this home with you.” At the time I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with my husband and two young daughters, so I headed off to a café to read. I was immediately immersed and engaged. The collection was just so surprising, so refreshingly unexpected. There was a kind of cool intellectual perspective that made the stories feel like they were operating at different registers simultaneously. I didn’t have to think twice; we started working together the very next week.
Dawn Davis vice president and publisher of 37 INK
The submission came in via Anna Stein of ICM, a literary agent who has represented two of my favorite contemporary novels, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple. I jumped right in and was struck by how fresh the stories were but also by Nafissa’s mordant use of humor to talk about race and isolation. It was dark at times, which I was used to; novels about black life are often dark. But the irony and wry wit was strikingly original—and at times bold. I ate it up. When Nafissa and I spoke on the phone, I expressed my enthusiasm for what I loved about Heads of the Colored People—the title story and “Wash Clean the Bones” broke my heart, while “Belles Lettres” had me laughing with glee—and I was candid about what I thought was missing. She was respectful, curious, and open.
Rick Simonson at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle
Dawn Davis and I have kept in touch for more than twenty years—for however long wherever she’s worked—including wide-ranging talks on books and publishing, above and beyond any particular title. But there have been particular books over which we make a special connection. Maybe most memorable was The Known World by Edward P. Jones. She sent early manuscripts of that book out to a few of us, and so, too, with Heads of the Colored People, which she told me about some time ago. Then I’ll get a galley with a note: “Finally, this.” It is, without fail, extraordinary when she makes these connections. She has that eye. Also playing a part, in her own way, is our Simon & Schuster sales rep, Christine Foye, who is attuned to editors’ books, Dawn’s among them. Heads of the Colored People is very much of the present time, and it is finding readers here at Elliott Bay from the get-go.
“Her stories are exquisitely rendered, satirical, and captivating in turn, engaging in the ongoing conversations about race and identity politics, as well as the vulnerability of the black body.”
—Stephanie Mendoza, senior publicist, Simon & Schuster
Rachel Z. Arndt author of the essay collection Beyond Measure, published in April by Sarabande Books
I was lucky to have met some great agents when I was in grad school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. The most substantive conversations with these agents took place during my third year, when I had an idea of the book I wanted to make. I honed my pitch as I met with more and more people and as I learned to describe my essay collection in terms of what I was working toward, not necessarily what I had then. One of those people was Samantha Shea. I gave her some essays when I was still in school, and after I graduated, I sent her my thesis—which would eventually become a good chunk of my book. The summer after graduating, Samantha took me on, immediately offering invaluable guidance and feedback.
Samantha Shea of Georges Borchardt, Inc.
Rachel and I first met when I visited the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in early 2016. She reached out a few months later to say that she had a complete essay collection and an offer from Sarabande. I quickly read the work she sent me and was so impressed with the thoughtfulness of her writing—its searching quality, its currents of existential frustration, fear, and longing. We began working together right away—first negotiating the deal with Sarabande and, later, placing other work of hers, including some of the essays in the collection, with journals and magazines like Woolly, the Believer, Literary Hub, and Longreads.
Sarah Gorham president and editor in chief of Sarabande Books
I first came to know Rachel Z. Arndt on a scouting trip to the University of Iowa. I was taken by the elegance and clarity of her writing, not to mention the originality of her project. Rachel recognized how measurement—in pounds, “likes,” temperature, train schedules, and so on—is running our lives, not necessarily the other way around. We wrote up a contract. I suggested she give us three new essays. Then, after a preliminary line edit, I passed the manuscript on to our marketing director at the time, Ariel Lewiton, for another look. We mailed off a detailed editorial letter, encouraging Rachel to flesh out her scenes a little and add more reflection to the essays. Turns out she’s an excellent reviser. One or two more passes later, we had a ready-for-prime-time collection.
Jan Weissmiller at Prairie Lights in Iowa City
The buyers at Prairie Lights were made aware of this new book last season when the extraordinary John Mesjak of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution alerted us to its forthcoming publication. His job, selling us Rachel’s essay collection, was certainly made easier by her relationship to the University of Iowa and, therefore, to Prairie Lights. Her book was acclaimed in catalogue copy by poet Robyn Schiff and essayist John D’Agata, both on faculty at the university, as well as Vivian Gornick—one of the preeminent memoirists of our time. With that in mind we knew we would be able to feature and sell this book, and we assumed that Rachel would come to read at Prairie Lights. All that has since come to pass. The book is front and center in our New Nonfiction section, and we are glad to recommend it—particularly at this moment, when it resonates so strongly with women of Rachel’s generation. Sarabande has been publishing exceptional work since its inception in 1994. Its cofounder Sarah Gorham has discovered just the right book for Prairie Lights. Independent bookstores rely on publishers like Sarabande and sales teams like that of Consortium to publish and publicize the kinds of books that discerning readers find in our stores. We are grateful and fortunate to have this timely collection gracing our shelves.
“With poignantly obsessive and imaginative detail, Arndt carries us from sleep study labs to judo competitions, from Nine Inch Nails concerts to the repetitive drone of first dates, and from wacky Airbnb reviews to the oppressive limitations of kitchen design. Never to be confused for a mathematical word problem, Arndt’s writing is witty and deftly humorous as she probes the patterns and structures that permeate our every action.”
—Joanna Englert, director of marketing and publicity, Sarabande Books
Aja Gabel author of the novel The Ensemble, published in May by Riverhead Books
I was a baby writer when my first agent signed me on the promise of a short story. We worked well together for a bit, placing stories, but parted ways when I was close to finishing the novel. I think she and I always had different working styles, but it took a big project, and some maturing on my part, to realize that. I decided then to look for an agent who made me excited about my work instead of nervous about it, who believed exactly what I believed about myself, without convincing. So I dug up a nice e-mail Andrea Morrison at Writers House had sent me and wrote her back. I remember it was a sunny day in March when she called, and I was sitting on the floor of my living room, unemployed, feeling like if I didn’t sell this novel I would suffocate. And immediately I knew. Andrea just got what I was trying to do. She was young and hungry and smart. She was like me.
Andrea Morrison at Writers House
I didn’t know Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead before I submitted Aja’s novel to her. But I did of course do some online sleuthing to get a sense of her taste and the titles she’d worked on previously. It seemed like she would really connect with Aja’s prose. And when we did submit the novel, Laura read the manuscript immediately and was so incredibly passionate in all the right ways. Aja and Laura meshed editorially and on a personal level from the start.
Laura Perciasepe editor at Riverhead Books
When Andrea Morrison called and pitched me The Ensemble, it sounded like a story I hadn’t read before, which always intrigues me. When I opened the manuscript that night to start reading, I couldn’t stop. I was fully immersed in these characters and in their creative, competitive world—which Aja writes about in such an authentic way, pulled from her own experience. I came into the office the next day, all riled up, pushing the book into everyone’s hands, and we ended up preempting the novel. It had to be mine!
Annie B. Jones of the Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia
In a problem my younger self would have only dreamed of having, I am bombarded with books, and it often takes a persistent sales rep to convince me that a new title is worth trying. The Ensemble had a few things working in its favor: an intriguing premise, in-depth character development, well-conducted research, even a striking cover, all “sold” to me by a team of agents, editors, and reps whom I trust and who know what I like to read. This novel by Aja Gabel quickly moved to the top of my pile. The Ensemble is poetic and memorable, one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I can’t wait to put it on my store’s shelves and into readers’ hands.
“Aja Gabel masterfully conveys the all-consuming flame of youthful ambition, the tension between raw talent and hard work, and the intense love shared between members of a family brought together not by blood, but by choice.”
—Elizabeth Hohenadel, senior publicity manager, Riverhead Books
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Ruth Joffre author of the story collection Night Beast, published in May by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic
When I began researching agents, I focused my attention on those who represented story collections and/or queer writers I admired. In the process of putting together a list, I spoke to a friend of mine—Rebekah Frumkin, author of The Comedown—who suggested querying Ross Harris, who had just sold her novel. He was interested in books with queer characters, so it seemed like a perfect fit. I queried him and I think eight other agents right after Thanksgiving—a difficult time, I soon learned, as most of the agents who requested the full manuscript were about to go on vacation. In the end the timing worked out in my favor, because it served as a kind of litmus test gauging who was going to be the most dedicated advocate of my work. I signed with Ross in January, and he sold my book in April.
Ross Harris of Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
I offered Ruth Joffre representation based on the sheer strength of her collection and on several fruitful conversations we’d had regarding her works-in-progress. It also didn’t hurt that she came highly recommended by a cherished client. But it was Ruth’s confidence on the page that made me fall for her; she wasn’t afraid to go there and get weird. Ruth knew her comp titles, she knew her space, she knew the boundaries she wanted to push, and she knew where she fit—which is sometimes a tricky thing to own and celebrate if you’re writing about queer people and the underrepresented. I loved Night Beast a great deal, but I loved Ruth even more. It signified the promise of many exciting things to come.
Nicole Nyhan former assistant editor at Black Cat, now managing editor of Conjunctions
The acquisition of Night Beast was serendipitous, if not a worldly miracle. Just as I began writing Ross Harris to follow up on a client he’d mentioned, the phone rang; it was Ross, pitching Night Beast. I’d been searching for provocative, imaginative new fiction—work with a strong ethical impetus and composed with poetic precision—and suddenly there was Ruth Joffre, a fierce, uncompromising author of tremendous talent, offering deeply empathic stories about women who felt so familiar but somehow, in 2017, I had still yet to encounter on the page. The book would be a challenge to publish, I knew—publishers usually lose money on debut collections—but this was clearly an initial step in a long, important writing career. Thanks to the generous good faith of everyone at Grove, we were able to take on the book.
Lauren Banka of Elliott Bay in Seattle
As a young bookseller I’m still building my relationships with publishers and with our local reps, who are our main points of contact with the publishers. I do this mainly by reaching out about books I’ve already discovered, usually advance review copies that the publishers sent to the store. I also benefit from the rich bookselling community at Elliott Bay—for Night Beast in particular, Karen Maeda Allman and Rick Simonson spoke with our Grove rep, Cindy Heidemann, and brought the book to my attention because I’ve been actively promoting experimental and diverse science fiction at the store. As a buyer I balance my trust for my colleagues and reps with my sense of our customers. Night Beast is exciting because there’s real enthusiasm on the publisher side, and I know that our customers are so hungry for more queer, literary SF collections.
“With exquisite prose and transfixing imagery, Joffre explores worlds both strange and familiar, homing in on the darker side of humanity. Powerful, unsettling, and wildly imaginative, Night Beast is a mind-bending, genre-hopping debut, a provocative and uncommonly raw examination of relationships and sexuality, trauma and redemption, the meaning of family, and coming-of-age—and growing old—as an outsider.”
—John Mark Boling, senior publicity manager, Grove Atlantic
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work
To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.
No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.
These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.
Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency
Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)
What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.
When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.
Where she can be reached: e-mail dsvetcov@lgrliterary.com
Why you should want her as your agent: To quote my clients: “relentless,” “wolfish,” “and she always calls you back.”
How she wants to be contacted: Send query letter with attached proposal or sample of fiction (say, twenty-five pages).
Renée Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents
Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)
What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.
When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.
Where she can be reached: e-mail renee@mmqlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.
How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.
Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc.
Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)
What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.
When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.
Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen
Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.
Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management
Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J. Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)
What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.
When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.
Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”
How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.
Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)
What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.
Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.
Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)
What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.
Where she can be reached: e-mail ahunter@janklow.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.
Carrie Howland, Empire Literary
Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)
What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”
When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.
Where she can be reached: e-mail carrie@empireliterary.com
Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.
Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)
What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.
When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed...” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.
Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.
How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.
Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency
Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)
What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.
When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).
Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.
Adam Eaglin, Cheney Associates, LLC
Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)
What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.
When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.
Where he can be reached: e-mail adam@cheneyliterary.com
Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.
How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).
Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners
Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)
What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.
When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.
Where she can be reached: e-mail aatlas@icmpartners.com
Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.
How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.
Julie Barer, The Book Group
Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)
What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.
When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough.
Where she can be reached: The Book Group, c/o Julie Barer; 20 West 20th Street, Suite 601; New York, NY 10011; thebookgroup.com; e-mail submissions@thebookgroup.com
Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job.
How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Agents & Editors: The Complete Series
Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.
Agents
The Book Group
By Michael Szczerban
6.14.16
Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.
Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib
By Michael Szczerban
6.17.15
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.
Jennifer Joel
By Michael Szczerban
2.10.15
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
PJ Mark
By Michael Szczerban
6.18.14
PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.
Susan Golomb
By Michael Szczerban
5.1.14
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.
David Gernert
By Michael Szczerban
1.1.14
Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it's like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.
Eric Simonoff
By Michael Szczerban
7.1.13
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he's learned about staying creative.
Georges Borchardt
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.09
Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.
Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.09
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.
Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.09
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.
Molly Friedrich
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.08
Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.
Nat Sobel
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.08
Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.
Lynn Nesbit
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.08
With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.
Editors
Rob Spillman
By Michael Szczerban
10.12.16
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.
Michael Wiegers
By Michael Szczerban
10.14.15
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
Dawn Davis
By Michael Szczerban
8.19.15
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
Jeff Shotts
By Michael Szczerban
10.15.14
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.
Amy Einhorn
By Michael Szczerban
2.12.14
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.
Jordan Pavlin
By Michael Szczerban
9.1.13
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.
Jonathan Karp
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.09
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.
Jonathan Galassi
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.09
Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.
Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.09
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.
Chuck Adams
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.08
A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.
Janet Silver
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.08
Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.
Pat Strachan
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.08
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.
Agent Advice: The Complete Series
The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org
Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.
Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.
Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.
Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”
Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.
Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.
Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.
Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.
Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.
Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.
Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.
Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.
PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.
Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent's role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
Agents & Editors: A Conversation With Four Literary Agents
Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the recession that followed, the book business has shuddered through intense turbulence: corporate mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, and bankruptcies; startups that sizzled and then ceased; the fall of Borders and the rise of Amazon; new book formats, business models, imprints, and agencies; litigation; technological upheaval; and a host of other unexpected challenges and radical transformations.
And yet writers keep writing and readers keep reading. In the midst of such tumult, that’s just about all the stability I could ask for—and perhaps all our business really needs.
But what of the publishing professionals who came of age in the business during those disruptive years? Could it be that the agents and editors who took root in this new climate are of a hardier stock, and that their perspectives on culture and commerce will differ significantly from the generations that preceded them? As this group of up-and-comers becomes the establishment, they will shape what gets published, why, and how.
I recently invited four young agents—Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib—to my office to talk about what it means to be a literary representative today. Each of them has achieved success in the postcrisis years. Over a couple of six-packs of beer and some chips and cookies (blame the new economy for my chintzy spread) our conversation took off. Here are brief biographies of the participants:
Seth Fishman started his career in publishing at Sterling Lord Literistic in 2005, and has been an agent at the Gernert Company since 2010. His authors include Kate Beaton, Anna Bond, Ann Leckie, Randall Munroe, and Téa Obreht.
Claudia Ballard is an agent at William Morris Endeavor, where she has worked for nine years. Her clients include Marie-Helene Bertino, Marjorie Celona, Amelia Gray, Eddie Joyce, and Emma Straub.
Alia Hanna Habib became an agent at what is now McCormick Literary in 2010, after working for five years as a publicist at Houghton Mifflin. Her clients include John Donvan, Ophira Eisenberg, Elizabeth Green, Josh Levin, and Caren Zucker.
Melissa Flashman became an agent at Trident Media Group in 2002, after working as a “coolhunter” and an assistant at ICM. Her clients include Stephanie Mannatt Danler, Kristin Dombek, Stanley Fish, Emily Gould, and Kate Zambreno.
Let’s start with your first interaction with a writer. How does their material find its way to you, and when it does, what makes you respond to it?
Fishman: I was all about the small magazines when I first started out. My first client came from reading Tin House. People ask now whether those magazines matter; they do. Even if we don’t have time to read them now to look for new clients, our assistants are reading them—at least I hope they are. That first client led me to a number of other clients, including Téa Obreht and her book The Tiger’s Wife, which was my first sale. Those connections are incredibly important.
Habib: Whether I’m reading the Atlantic or a literary journal, if something grabs me the way it would grab anyone as a reader, I’m going to write to that person. Don’t we all look for clients that way? But I do a lot of nonfiction, and in many ways that process is different.
Aren’t there also many similarities: story and voice and that elemental thing that makes someone pay attention? What’s universal about how you respond as a reader and an agent?
Habib: I’ll give you an example. I was reading an article in the Atlantic about the first diagnosed case of autism by two writers, John Donvan and Caren Zucker, at a moment when I thought I had read more than enough about autism. The first line caught my eye. The reader in me noticed that I was reading the article really quickly. Then the literary agent part of me asked, “How do I help make this a book a lot of people will want to read?” I think our job is partly to see what the writer doesn’t see.
Ballard: There’s also a real community of writers out there, and incredible resources for unpublished writers to connect to the publishing community so that agents can find them. Tin House is a fantastic magazine for that, because they publish new voices every issue. It isn’t easy for writers who are just starting out, but writers refer other writers. The more you are tapped into a community, the more you’ll benefit from that flow. It’s about getting your feet on the ground and getting your name out in the universe.
Flashman: Two questions always come up when I’m at writers conferences. People in MFA programs always ask if they need to be in San Francisco or New York City, and people in New York always ask if they need to have an MFA. I don’t think either one matters, necessarily. What matters is that they are both cultural ecosystems. Maybe you don’t have an MFA and you live in Austin or Louisville. What matters is being around other writers, supporting one another’s work, and reading. Maybe you start a literary magazine, or maybe someone gets into the Oxford American, and through that door, three more writers come in. That’s how it works.
What about social media?
Habib: Social media can create those communities too. Roxane Gay did that so brilliantly—she created a ready readership for her books by engaging so openly and honestly on Twitter. She’s not my writer—I wish she were! But that’s another way to open the door.
Fishman: I’ve learned that different social media systems are for totally different things. For me, Twitter is for professional contacts, and Facebook is personal. I’m an agent but I also write, and when I put something on Facebook about my book publication day, I get three hundred likes—it’s like a super birthday. But if I put it on Twitter, I might get six retweets and fifteen likes.
Ballard: I don’t tweet, but I use Twitter to see what everyone else is talking about.
Flashman: I make secret lists on Twitter for different ecosystems. For instance, I’ve been thinking about a type of fiction you might call an art-school novel, and where to find the girls who like reading it. I know where they are on social media, and I know there are certain publishers and editors who can publish that type of book well. And I keep track.
So, social media is a way of being part of a community, rather than what publishers might call “platform”—thousands and thousands of followers who are primed to click Buy?
Ballard: Being tapped in doesn’t necessarily translate to platform. It’s a way in which you can engage. It makes it a lot easier for people who don’t live in places where a lot of writers happen to congregate. Still, when a writer sends me a query, I connect first and foremost with the writing.
What’s important for you to see in a query from a writer?
Fishman: All I want from a query letter is reasons to go to the next page—reasons to read the book. While I’d like to say I read everything, I have an assistant and we have interns who look at things first. When I look at a query letter, I read the first and third paragraphs. I don’t care about the synopsis—not because I don’t care what the book is about, but because a lot of writers don’t know how to write a good synopsis. The first paragraph is where writers will tell you about any direct connections to you.
Flashman: It will also tell you if this book is even in a category that you represent. I wouldn’t know a good science fiction novel if it punched me in the face. So if someone is pitching me science fiction, either there’s a connection or they liked one of my other novels, in which case I might be interested. But if there’s no connection to any of the authors I’ve represented, I’m just not the right agent. There is a great agent at my agency, John Silbersack, who does science fiction. He represents the Dune estate. He’s edited Philip K. Dick. He is the man. Those writers should be e-mailing him, not me.
How much material comes in to you in comparison to what you take on?
Ballard: Well, if your name is listed on the Poets & Writers website, you will get a lot of queries. I probably get a query every ten minutes. I have to engage with them very, very, very quickly. It’s important to make your query succinct and to target the right agent for you.
Fishman: Otherwise it’ll just get put away. My assistant filters things for me. Now I probably get only three or four every other week that the assistant thinks are good enough. I’m not looking for much more to represent right now. But the last book that my assistant brought to me and said, “You have to read this now,” I stopped what I was doing, read it, loved it, and sold it.
Ballard: I personally read all my queries, but it’s hard. It’s a volume game. But when you have a lot of volume, you pick out the things that you feel most connected with even more quickly. I do take referrals more seriously. It’s a two-way street. You want to feel a connection to the work, but you also want a writer to feel connected to you.
Do writers need to write better query letters to get your attention, or do they just need to write better books?
Flashman: They need to approach the right agents. I think there’s a way of focusing queries to ten or fifteen agents: Sit down with a legal pad, or your iPad, and find roughly ten novels that are similar. Writers usually thank their agent at the back of the book. Keep a running list of novelist, novel, agency, agent. Go to the Internet, make sure the agent’s still alive and taking on clients, and go from there.
Habib: I’d add, when you’re looking at those books that you love, to also look at lists of successful debuts and see who represented them. I think we’re all saying that when you get a query, and it’s from someone who’s read and liked one of your client’s books, it helps.
Fishman: There are so many other simple things. Make sure the person is the correct gender!
Flashman: “Dear Mr. Flashman…” no.
Fishman: And sure, we’re overwhelmed, but we want to find something good. We want that desperately. We’re not being assholes. We’re just being human. We connect with the things that we connect with. We have bad days; we have good days. If someone goes online and says, “Don’t submit something to me today,” on Twitter, then you shouldn’t, because that person’s really trying to tell you something.
Let’s talk about MFAs. Seth, you have a master’s in writing, and Melissa, you wrote a great essay about them in the anthology MFA vs NYC.
Flashman: I think some people might think I’m on Team NYC, and against MFAs, because I’m here in New York publishing. But I’m actually very pro-MFA, because I think some of those programs are like the WPA for writers—the good state programs especially, where they give writers money to go study. You don’t need to go when you’re twenty-two. It’s often better to go when you’re thirty, thirty-five, when you have more of a life behind you. But you don’t need to go to an MFA program at all. You can hang out with other writers and write anywhere.
Ballard: My take is that MFA programs attract like-minded writers. People who want to be a part of the writing community, or want to take the time to say, “I’m going to focus on this.” It doesn’t create talent, but it can provide you a lot of feedback and time. Some people feel the workshop scenario is not for them, but I find that people who are serious about a writing career tend to seek them out. It’s not a necessity. But it signals seriousness to an agent. Seth, you went to one—what do you think?
Fishman: I don’t necessarily perk up based on where a writer went. We’ve all seen work from writers who went to the famous places and we’ve passed on it. There are other hybrid programs that I would like to recommend, though. In the speculative-fiction world, the best thing I’ve seen is called Clarion. It’s five thousand dollars for six weeks, and features huge teachers like Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin. I represent a lot of people from there. It’s like a boot camp.
Flashman: So you’ve found that ecosystem.
Fishman: Right, I’ve found the ecosystem that’s perfect for me. And I love it and I shouldn’t be telling anyone about it. At the same time, I’m sure there are versions of it in other genres. There have to be.
Ballard: There are also writers conferences like Bread Loaf or Sewanee where writers seek out like-minded people who can’t take much time away from making a living, but are often incredibly talented.
Habib: And to get back to query letters: At least in our office, our assistants and interns do give a closer read of the material in the slush pile that says the writer got an MFA.
Fishman: I’m looking for expertise. If a book is about geology, I want to know if you’re a geologist. Same with fiction and an MFA.
What else matters?
Flashman: Like all agents and editors, I want a novel that, as one of my writers said, “has blood in it.” I want a novel that’s very deeply felt and urgent. I went to a PhD program almost right out of college and realized very quickly I did not want to be an English professor. There’s a tendency among writers to go straight into an MFA program, and for some writers, like Téa Obreht, it’s great. She had a great story and something urgent to tell. But a lot of writers don’t know their story yet. It might not surface till later.
Habib: I was a publicist before I became an agent, and when we’d have to publicize novels, the goal for fiction was always to develop a nonfiction hook. That’s the stuff that you can talk about in interviews, and it can develop naturally with writers who have life experience. When a book lands at a publisher and the writer has had a world of experience and can talk from a place of knowledge, that’s gold. That gets publishers excited to publish a book well.
When I read submissions, I try to say no as quickly as I can—because the most fun, and most time-consuming, part of my job is to say yes to a project I’m excited about. That could be because the writer has made something I didn’t know I cared about seem urgent or relevant, or demonstrated undeniable artistry, or shared some unique expertise on a subject of interest. Projects that I immediately connect with are rare, but they’re what editors live for.
Fishman: The hardest query to get is the average to just-above-average one, because you have to read the whole thing, thinking, “Well, maybe I can do something with this.” By the way, I think it’s okay to get rejected.
Ballard: Also, taste is incredibly subjective. We see things that we’ve passed on go on to sell all the time, but if you aren’t the person who believes in the book, you should not be selling it. And that’s the bottom line.
Flashman: The trick is, if you’re a writer, you don’t just want an agent who could sell it. You want an agent who must sell it. We all get query letters, and think, “Yeah, I could probably sell this.” But are you really the best agent for it?
Editors know the difference between the agents who represent whatever they think they can sell and the ones who are more selective.
Fishman: I think the easiest thing to do, in a lot of ways, is to sell a good book. Everything else is the hard part.
Ballard: I often take people on and then work with them for a very long time. The first novel I sold this year was something I had worked with the author on for four years. It wasn’t that I was editing every line. We just had to find out what the story was. I work very closely with my clients, and I bet everyone in this room does. The better you make the book, the better the sale.
Flashman: Your point is really important because sometimes writers think, “Oh, I’ve got an agent! We’re sending it out, it’s going to be a best-seller tomorrow!”
Habib: There’s a lot to be said for the long game. Look for an agent who’s in it for the long haul.
What has been most surprising to you since you became an agent?
Ballard: It’s surprising that the most beneficial thing for my long-term career was, in a funny way, to get promoted in 2008, right when the financial crash was happening. It felt like everything we knew about publishing was going to change dramatically. I remember some older agents bemoaning the fact that things used to sell more easily, that there was a guaranteed number of hardcover copies sold if you were paid a certain level advance. But all those guarantees went out the window. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But I didn’t have any false expectations of what success would look like in the industry. I think that agents who came of age in the nineties experienced a very different business than what we’re experiencing right now.
Flashman: Another thing that’s surprising is the sales numbers. When you compare movie box office receipts to how many books you have to sell to hit the New York Times best-seller list—it’s pretty astonishing.
The best-selling books aren’t reporting millions of dollars of sales over a weekend like the top movies do.
Flashman: Right. And I’ve had books that end up in what I hear publishers call the “power backlist,” where they maybe hit the list once but then go on to sell and sell and sell just beneath that level. And sometimes the literary novel that you hear about everywhere and think will be a massive best-seller ends up selling four thousand copies.
Fishman: I think literary fiction in particular is a big echo chamber in New York. I represent a lot of literary fiction at different levels of success, and I love it. But when I send out a science fiction novel, I can send it to five, six people in a first round. I can send a literary novel to fifteen to twenty people. And you can pour your heart and soul into a literary novel and be shocked by how few sales there are. In other genres that have dedicated groups of followers, you may have less shelf space, but if you get on that shelf, you sell more copies at a minimum. Each genre has its own dynamic.
Flashman: Each industry is weighted to different sorts of backgrounds, too. One thing I realized pretty quickly when I got into publishing is that it’s heavily weighted to English majors. I love literary fiction, but I don’t ever worry that there aren’t going to be enough editors to buy literary fiction. I do worry about books about science and technology.
Fishman: I want to comment on what Claudia said a minute ago, because I came up in 2008 as well. A lot of people from my class—the people we were drinking with when we were starting—are all moving from publisher to publisher now. When you sell a book, you sell it to a house. The editor is the point person, but editors move quite a bit. That’s been a learning process for me. Now it’s not just “Are you the right editor for this book?” but also “Are you going to be around at this place when the book comes out?” In the last two years I’ve had eighteen orphaned books.
Habib: The last, like, five books I sold were orphaned.
Flashman: I’ve had books become best-sellers that were orphaned. Sometimes those books have even had three editors.
Ballard: You just want the house to carry on the enthusiasm of the original editor.
How do you conceive of a perfect match between author and editor?
Habib: A lot of us go to a lot of lunches with editors, and when I go out to lunch I want to get know the person. I hate talking about their list. I want to hear about the books they loved as a child. I want to hear about their dog. I want to hear about their quest to find the perfect preschool. Part of it is just matchmaking—some nebulous quality that helps give you a sense that an editor and an author will understand each other. That is, that the editor will understand the author—but also be able to crack the whip.
That’s important. I’ve been too close to a book before.
Ballard: I think that’s an interesting thing about our relationships with writers, both on the editorial and agenting sides. You have to feel close to the work, almost as close as the author, but never quite as close as they do. Because it’s not originating with you. It’s not your art. You’re art-adjacent. I come from this place of being a deeply sympathetic reader: Do I love reading this book? That, to me, is always the first indication of a match. And that registers in an editor’s first phone call to you, and that letter expressing their love for the book. The feeling in-house. It is this connection that has to really feel organic and real and based in a deep reading of the book.
Habib: Some writers think that an agent can somehow convince publishers to buy their book, just by their sheer charisma and personality and power. The real thing we do is find the most sympathetic reader for the book, the editor who will best help the writer. I’m not going to convince someone your book is good. That’s your job. I can convince them to read it, and I can help make it the best book possible, but my job is to find the best reader for you.
Fishman: We build lists over a long period of time, and people pay attention to your track record. There’s also another level that we mess around with, which is our experience. Every day we work with someone, we find out whether we want to work with them again.
So, do editors still edit?
Fishman: Yes!
Habib: Of course!
Ballard: Yes!
Flashman: And we know who edits more.
Do you mean there are editors who don’t give their all to a book?
Flashman: Well, there are editors who buy books that don’t need very much editing. Sometimes that’s just a whole different business. They might be books that have outside editors or ghostwriters on them, so there’s a lot of editorial processes happening before it ever gets to the editor. And they’re in the business of making a certain kind of hit at a publishing house. But editors totally edit, Poets & Writers readers!
Fishman: There are some editors who are better cheerleaders than other editors in-house, which is totally different. They all edit, but in addition to good editorial vision, I’m looking for the editor who has the muscle and excitement to get something happening in house.
Habib: One of the things I was surprised by when I moved over to the agenting side was the skepticism a lot of first-time writers have about publishers. They’ve heard all these horror stories, so they think editors don’t edit. They think publicists don’t care. They have this hierarchy of who’s good: Publicists are the lowest, then editors, and then agents. The writer trusts the agent to find them a good home. I want to believe that all of us do that in good faith, knowing that editors do edit. Ideally, the publicity and marketing department will do their best job, and if they’re not, we try to help them, and to be there, and to be honest about when it’s not happening.
Flashman: If editors wanted to make a lot of money, they would have gone into another business. The people who work in publishing love books. They really want to make it happen. They love to edit. I think most editors wish they had more time in the office to edit because they’re doing a thousand other things.
What qualities do you try to bring into your own practice as an agent?
Ballard: I think that the people who’ve lasted in the business are the people who conduct themselves in an honorable way and are deeply passionate and incredibly knowledgeable about their field of interest. It’s meaningful to say that we all do what we love, and that you see agents who have achieved a lot of success in the industry who really love and care about it. When I first started out in the business, I thought for sure I was going to be an editor, just because I was an English major. I didn’t realize how much editing happens on the agenting side, or how much I valued the kind of personal relationship you have with your writers.
Flashman: I think we’re somewhere between a shrink and Karl Rove. Nothing about my politics, but there’s a lot of strategy and a lot of psychology.
Fishman: Yeah. I don’t know if writers realize how collaborative being an agent can be, especially within an agency, because we really do work together.
When do you feel competitive with other agents?
Flashman: When we’re competing for the same project! Which we often are.
Habib: I never ask who else is offering to represent a book.
Flashman: I don’t either, but some agents do. I don’t want to know.
Ballard: I tend not to ask until the very end, or right when I sign the person. I’m curious. We’re inherently competitive, and I think you want a competitive agent because she is going to be that way for you no matter what situation you face.
Fishman: I don’t want a book to go to Claudia when I competed against her for it. Heartbreaking stuff.
Ballard: But also, if Seth wins something over me, it’s a sign that it was a good book.
Flashman: You’re like, “I was right!”
Ballard: “I cared about this, but at least I lost it to someone whose taste I really respect and feels similar to mine.”
Flashman: And if you lose it to someone who you don’t respect, you’re like, “Oh, that writer is just making bad choices.”
Fishman: That’s true!
Ballard: Look, I would rather be in the mix and lose than not be in the mix at all.
Fishman: Every once in a while there’s an author who leaves his or her agent for some reason, and I didn’t even know, because I don’t want to poach. I don’t want to be an aggressive person.
Ballard: And sometimes you’re going to lose something just because it just goes more quickly than you can read it. That’s because we’re busy human beings. We’re not reading machines. We have, hopefully, rich lives outside of work where we have families and friends and hobbies and pastimes.
That’s not so different from competing for a book as an editor.
Ballard: The problem is that the decision isn’t based on money, so when we do lose, it’s all personal.
True—but as an editor, if you lose to an underbidder, it’s even worse!
Ballard: Then you can take it personally!
Fishman: I’ve done that twice.
Flashman: I’ve had someone take a lower advance…maybe never?
Habib: Oh, I’ve had that happen a couple times.
How do you describe your agency in the context of others that authors might sign with?
Fishman: I try to think honestly about what other places offer. There are positives and negatives for everything. I don’t just try to point out the negatives. I try to point out how The Gernert Company specifically can address any of the things an author might bring up.
Flashman: As an agent, and as an editor, you have to figure out what’s important to each writer.
Ballard: Ultimately, what you get is representation from me. That’s more important than the size of the agency—if anyone ever feels lost at a big agency, then they’re just not being represented by the right agent at that agency. You’re first and foremost represented by me as your agent, and I’m the leader of a deep well of resources that exist within my agency, including UK representation, foreign representation, first serial rights, marketing.
What are some common mistakes that beginning writers can avoid?
Flashman: I’ve had this fantasy that someday I’m going to take a three-day vacation upstate, to a place like Woodstock or Phoenicia, and write a manifesto of my ten rules for writers. The biggest rule will be about finding the sweet spot of perfect communication with your agent and with editors. Some writers undercommunicate, and I call this a “high-school-girl” theory of being in the world—you want everyone to come to you and recognize how great you are. But you have to be out there with other writers and communicating with your agent. If you publish a piece in the New York Times, I really want to know about it so I can tweet about it and tell your editor and tell my foreign-rights people. For those people, I would say be less of a “high-school girl.” Be like a “high-school boy” who wants all these girls to know who you are. I don’t mean that in a sexist way. And then, on the other hand, there are writers who are trying to manage their anxiety and send seventeen e-mails a day to me, the publicist, the editor. We get so much e-mail, and we just want to make sure we’re answering everyone’s questions. When we get seventeen e-mails, we don’t know where to put our focus.
Fishman: A lot of authors don’t fully realize that we work for them. It’s a weird relationship because at the beginning, they’re trying to impress us. But the truth is that we work for them.
What about issues of craft?
Fishman: I think focusing effort on trying to grab someone at the beginning of your manuscript, instead of focusing on the actual story, is a problem. This is a personal thing, but I often see that issue in prologues that take something exciting from later in the book and move it to the front. I know there are exceptions. I admit to the exceptions. I have clients who have exceptions. But I always make my clients think about whether that prologue needs to be there, and where the beginning of the story really is.
Flashman: It is a subjective industry. Especially with literary fiction, we all have this sort of thing we gravitate toward. For me, it’s elegiac fiction. If your intro sounds like the beginning of The Great Gatsby or The Secret History, I’m a sucker for it. I call it “book voice.” I read the intro to Gatsby along with one of my author’s intros this weekend out loud just for fun. I’m not a poet—I don’t know much about poetry besides English 201—but I love that voice.
Ballard: I ran into Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House, recently, and he was telling me that he’s teaching a class at his MFA program this semester that’s all first paragraphs.
Habib: That is brilliant!
Ballard:All you can bring in is the first paragraph, and those paragraphs are all you workshop the whole semester. I think that is so brilliant. That is the thing that’s going to hook you, that you form that snap judgment on, whatever you’re reading—even if it’s a book that’s been published and widely acclaimed.
Habib: In some ways your experience as an agent should mimic the experience of a reader who picks up a book at a bookstore. I often read e-books, and, before I buy a book, I download the free sample. That’s how I decide. So, for me, I’d say, “Really think about your first twenty pages.”
Fishman: I read books that are not my own all the time because I want to find a query that makes me stop reading that other book. If I’m bored I will pick up my regular book, and enjoy it. If there’s something that keeps me from it, that’s a real sign.
What other advice do you have for authors?
Flashman: I’m always telling authors to storyboard their books with big Post-It notes. That’s valuable when I’m working on big-thinking narrative-nonfiction books—to look at a really great book and see the architecture underneath it.
Ballard: I think that story is undervalued, in literary fiction at least. The writing, obviously, is key. But you need to tell a really good story. It’s hard to do.
Habib: Story is undervalued in nonfiction, too.
Ballard: I actually think it can be simpler than you think it’s going to be—or, it can be more classic than you think it’s going to be. Your voice and your telling of it are going to make it more interesting. Some people are trying to whiz-bang their way through a novel. Others are just so quiet that it doesn’t matter how pristinely beautiful the writing is—it doesn’t have that thing that pulls you through.
Habib: The number one bad habit I see with nonfiction—the habit I have to break my writers of—is they all want to do a series of profiles instead of telling a story. Every submission comes in as, “I’m going to do a series of profiles that explains X problem.” But most readers are not going to finish a book unless there’s a narrative thread that brings them through to the end. It has to have a story.
What about bad habits in editors or publishers—the things we do that make you grimace?
Ballard: The good thing is that it’s not that easy to quantify. Any frustrations I have are specific to the occasion or relationship.
Fishman: Sometimes there is a feeling of defensiveness with agent involvement. I’m sure that is based on prior experience with other agents, but there have been a number of times that I would have loved to participate in the publication of the book in a more creative and collaborative way. I don’t want to just sell the book and step back. I like to be hands-on in publicity and marketing. In certain categories, I feel like I know a lot about those things. I get frustrated sometimes when there’s defensiveness in response to an honest attempt to make the book as good as possible.
Flashman: Writers may not realize that editors and agents tend to be specialists, but publicists are often just assigned to books. There are exceptions, but a publicist might be working on a novel, a cookbook, a diet book, a book on pets….
Habib: I worked on all four of those as a publicist. And, you know, publicists often don’t get the glory. It’s a pretty hard job. The publicist usually only gets a phone call from the agent when something has gone wrong. That’s not the way the model should be. A mistake that editors and publicists can make is trying to spin how a book is doing, or what’s happening with it, to the agent and author.
Fishman: Whatever it is, I’d much rather know.
Habib: Just tell me!
Fishman: The writing is on the wall pretty quickly. From what I understand, a marketing and publicity base budget is established early on. A lot of the goal, in my estimation, is to tick that up every second of the day. It’s very hard to do, and it takes a lot to make that happen. I focus on trying to get the publisher to a place where they’re excited about the book beyond what happened when they bought it.
Habib: Publicity is not always about the budget. It’s about how the book is being perceived, how it’s being pitched, and what the response is. Sometimes the publicist, for whatever reason, doesn’t understand the book and isn’t pitching it well, or it’s not going well and the publicist is too terrified to say, “No one cares about this. What are we going to do?”
Ballard: Having gone through that now a few times, unfortunately, you can tell when the energy’s there and when it’s not. It’s not manufacturable. You go to a publicity meeting and people ask, “Do you have a Twitter account? Are you on Facebook?” And you're like, “Oh, my gosh. That’s a very basic question, but yes, thank you.” What are the things that we can actually do to make this more tenable out there in the world? It’s hard.
I’ve asked agents to help push to increase a book’s promotional budget, but the best thing for a book sometimes has little to do with money and everything to do with creativity and effort. Money won’t improve a book that, God forbid, just doesn’t deliver, and it won’t create an awesome pitch or fix an uninspired marketing plan on its own. But it can make people pay closer attention and try harder.
Ballard: Not to turn the tables on you, Mike, but when do you feel frustrated? One of my frustrations is occasionally that the cover options presented to us are basically final. I’ve never really gotten into a situation where it’s been a problem. It’s just something that authors really have opinions about. And so, you are the representative for their artistic vision for this book, and the publisher has their own very strong opinions of how it should look.
Designing a book jacket can be like walking a tightrope. Editors stand right where the artistic ambitions of the author meet the commercial ambitions of the publisher, and we try to make everyone happy. But those ambitions are often signified in visually different ways, so it’s hard to have a compromise design that is crisp and strong. I’m sure you’ve seen covers that look like a hodgepodge of competing ideas and lose some power as a result.
Fishman: I wonder about designers at the publishing companies, and what happens before an author ever sees a jacket. Designers are probably the people I am furthest from and connect with the least. Yet they are arguably some of the most important contributors to a book’s success.
What has gotten easier since you got into the business?
Fishman: Submissions. When I was an assistant, we used to print out every manuscript and put them all in boxes and put labels on them. It would take all day to do a submission.
Ballard: For me, as someone who does a lot of literary fiction, there’s this incredible part of our industry that is so supportive of new voices, and so interested in publishing difficult literary fiction. The importance of those indie publishers has grown exponentially since I started. The ways in which they care about the creative atmosphere. The ways in which they’re perpetuating these incredible voice-driven authors who may not find a home in the mainstream. They have made my job easier, because I know that my author is going to find a home. You just have to sometimes dig a little deeper to find it.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown and Company.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Georges Borchardt
Every industry has its share of hidden gems—those people who are cherished by their colleagues and peers but barely known outside of the business. Book publishing is no exception, which is why the name Georges Borchardt probably doesn't ring a bell unless you've worked with him or are lucky enough to be one of his clients. Relatively unknown outside of publishing circles for more than fifty years, he seems to lack the gene for self-promotion.
Borchardt was born in Berlin in 1928. His early life, spent in Paris, was marked by war and heartbreak: His father died of cancer when he was eleven, and his mother and much of the rest of his family was killed in the concentration camps. As a teenager, Borchardt spent almost two years in hiding at a school in Aix-en-Provence, where his name did not appear on the official roll. "I was a sort of nonperson," he says. After the war he moved to America and found work at a literary agency that specialized in foreign writers. (When he arrived, it had just sold Albert Camus'The Stranger to Knopf for $350.) Borchardt served as the agency's assistant and soon began to look for authors of his own. In 1953 he came across an Irish playwright and novelist who wrote in French and, after selling three of his books to Grove Press, American readers were introduced to the work of Samuel Beckett. Other early authors included Laurent de Brunhoff, Marguerite Duras, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault. In 1959 Borchardt took on the task of finding an American publisher for Elie Wiesel's Night. After numerous rejections, he finally placed the memoir with a small press, Hill and Wang, for an advance of $250. Since then the book has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone.
Over the past half century, Borchardt; his wife, Anne; and their daughter, Valerie (who joined the Borchardt Agency in 1999) have built a staggering list of clients. They include poets John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Rafael Campo, and Philip Schultz; fiction writers T. C. Boyle, Robert Coover, David Guterson, Charles Johnson, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Susan Minot; nonfiction writers Anne Applebaum, Stanley Crouch, Susan Jacoby, Tracy Kidder, and Kate Millett; and the estates of Hannah Arendt, Samuel Beckett, Robert Fagles, John Gardner, Aldous Huxley, and Tennessee Williams.
While Borchardt's credentials are impressive—and go a long way toward explaining why he is considered a luminary within the industry—they pale in comparison with his extraordinary charm and personal magnetism. His laugh, a high staccato that welled up frequently during our conversation, is a particular delight. T. C. Boyle has especially strong feelings about his agent, once describing him as "the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth." After spending just a little time with him, I can understand why.
Your background is quite
different than a lot of people in publishing.
My background is different
primarily because most literary agents in America have English as their native
language. But I started out without knowing the language. I grew up in Paris. I
was in France during the war, so I spent pretty much two years in hiding. My
father died early on, when I was eleven, and my mother and most of my family
were deported to the concentration camps and died there. But I had two older
sisters who survived. I was in hiding in Aix-en-Provence. I was at the lycée
there. Through connections, the head of the lycée had allowed me to stay there
as a boarder. But I wasn't on any roll. In other words I was a sort of
non-person. So as a result I was able to get my two baccalaureates. And when I
went back to Paris, my sisters and I actually got our apartment back, but it
was emptied of all its furniture and it was rather gloomy to camp in the empty
rooms. I went to law school for a year but I was really too young for it—I was
seventeen—and too unbalanced by what had happened. I really didn't like it. My
sisters had worked in the American field hospital in Aix-en-Provence when
France was liberated, where they had met all of these gorgeous American G.I.s who
were distributing marvelous goodies like Spam and Wonder Bread, and they
dreamed of going to America. We had relatives who had gone to America. So I
figured I'd go with them for a year, which would be an honorable way of not
continuing with law school.
When was the first time that you
were really aware of books? Were you interested in them as a young boy?
Books were a big thing in my
family. Today if you give a book to a child for his or her birthday the child
feels rather annoyed. It's like a punishment. But when I was a child I had a
list of books that I wanted for my birthday. I would sometimes ask if I could
have one of my favorite books bound—French books are all softcover—and then
it was a matter of going to a shop and selecting the leather and the endpapers
and so on. I liked books as objects. I liked to read all the things that boys
liked to read then. Alexandre Dumas. James Fenimore Cooper. I remember one
novel that I particularly loved called Ivanhoé, which I think in English is called Ivanhoe. So I was interested in books but not any more than
anyone else. When I was sixteen or so, like most of the more literate people my
age, I was totally in love with André Gide. I remember walking down the street
in Aix-en-Provence and sort of reciting as a mantra the opening line of Gide's Les
Nourritures Terrestres: "Nathanaël, je
t'enseignerai la ferveur." Well, Nathanaël, of course, in English is Nathaniel, but somehow Nathanaël has much more resonance than Nathaniel,
which sounds ordinary. Nathanaël sounds like the trumpets in a Handel piece. I
don't think I ever really thought about the meaning of the sentence; I just
liked the way it resonated.
In France when I was in school, every year you read a play by Molière, a play by Racine, a play by Corneille, and you also had a special subject called "recitation" for which you memorized either poems or parts of these plays. In France you got not only a grade in every subject but you also got ranked. So you could be first in your class or twenty-eighth, or somewhere in between. It was a sort of public humiliation. Being first didn't make you popular but being last made you ridiculous. And in recitation I was practically always first. I was always assigned the major parts in these tragedies, which was usually the female role because in most of the plays, certainly the Racine plays, that was usually the central character. So I think language was always very much a part of what I was interested in. But I certainly never thought of working in publishing and didn't know anything about publishing. I thought I would work in the music industry because my father was the head of a phonograph record firm. So I always had a lot of records at home. It was mostly classical music except that the star of the firm was Édith Piaf, so I had a bit of everything.
What year was it when you came
over?
It was '47. I knew some English
because I'd had it for six years in school, just as I had Latin for six years,
and I knew English pretty much the way I knew Latin. I was very good at both,
in school, which meant translating texts from Latin into French and from French
into Latin as well as from French into English and from English into
French—and maybe memorizing the occasional poem about daffodils. But I didn't
speak the language. It wasn't taught that way in French schools at the time. So
when I came here, to my great chagrin, I didn't understand a word of what
people were saying. It would always take me a long time to get a sentence
together in my head. By the time my sentence was ready and polished, the
conversation was already miles away from where it had been, and what I was
going to say no longer fit it. I would also mispronounce things and, as I'm
sure you know from traveling in foreign countries, when you mispronounce
something and people start laughing, it's very embarrassing.
How did you get into publishing?
A friend of mine helped me compose
two ads that I put in the New York Times.
I don't remember exactly what they said but it was something like,
"Nineteen-year-old Frenchman blah blah blah," and the other one would have said
something similar.
These were ads that people would
place when they were looking for work?
Yes. They would say, "This is who I
am, and I'm looking for a job." There was a lot of that going on. I'd gone to
various employment agencies and they all said, "What is your American
experience?" Well, I had no American experience. When I put the ad in the paper
I expected a good amount of mail. Still, I figured I could carry it by myself,
so I went to Times Square to get it. There were only two letters, one for each
ad, but both from the same person. The letterhead said "Authors and Publishers
Representative." One said, "If you're interested in the letterhead, come in
next Tuesday at ten." The other one said, "If you're interested, call for an
appointment." My English was not very good, and it was even worse on the phone,
so I decided to go in person. The woman who owned the agency was named Marion
Saunders. She was the daughter of a British Foreign officer, so she'd spent a
lot of time in Berlin and Paris and all over. She spoke quite a few languages,
and she enjoyed speaking them, and our interview was primarily in French so that
she could practice her French. She was very pleased with the way it went, and
at the end of the interview she said, "I think I'll probably offer you the job,
but I wrote to one other person from whom I haven't heard yet." I took out the
other letter and said, "I am the other person." So that's how I got into
publishing.
What was the agency like?
It was primarily doing foreign
rights for other agencies but also representing a French literary agent who
controlled most of what was coming out of France because, in France, most
authors don't have agents. They give the rights to the publishers. And this
agent in Paris, who was represented by my boss in New York, had an arrangement
with Gallimard, the main literary house in France, to represent all of its
authors. The husband of the Paris agent had been a friend of Hemingway's and
various other American authors who had been in Paris at the time and had sold
Hemingway, Dos Passos, and practically all of the other major American authors
of that period to Gallimard. In exchange, Gallimard was giving her many of its
French authors who had come out of World War II, people like Sartre and Camus.
When I got there she had just sold a book by Camus called The Stranger to Knopf for, I think, three hundred fifty dollars.
I was nineteen and I was amazed that you could get paid to read books. Although
I was also a gofer. I did all the dirty work. I did the filing. I did the
bookkeeping. I'd go to the post office to get stamps or to the bank to get
money because in those days you still used those things. But the main thing I
liked was reading the books that came in. And instead of just limiting it to
the books that came from the agent in Paris, I started going through the French
equivalent of Publishers Weekly
to see if there was anything else that might be interesting. I had no idea what
we could sell, but when I'd see something that I wanted to read, I would ask
for a sample copy. It was a good way to build up a little personal library. You
have to remember that books were extremely valuable in France because during
the war there was no paper. There were really small printings. So if you owned
a book by André Gide, for example, all of your friends would want to borrow it.
You owned something really valuable.
So I'd go through these catalogues and if something caught my eye I'd ask for it. At one point I asked for three books by this Irishman who was writing in French called Beckett. I read them and thought, "This is really quite interesting." I started sending them around—they were in French—and I'd get letters saying, you know, "Pale imitator of Joyce" or "Unreadable prose." Finally, one day, a man named Don Allen came to the office. He was working for Grove but on a freelance basis. He was doing the same thing for New Directions. He saw these worn copies of the three Beckett books on my desk and said, "Oh, you have Beckett?" I probably said, "You've heard of him?" He took the books and about a month later Barney [Rosset] called and said he wanted to buy them. He made a very generous offer: a thousand dollars for the three of them. Since everybody knows that novels sell better than plays, we divided it up so it was two hundred dollars for Waiting for Godot and four hundred dollars for each of the novels, which were the first two novels in the trilogy, Molloy and Malone Dies. The third one, The Unnamable, wasn't written yet. And then it took ages for the books to be published because Beckett decided he wanted to translate them himself, which meant rewriting them.
Who were some of the other
writers who were important to the early part of your career?
There was Camus. There was Sartre.
Did you have relationships with
those guys?
Not with them. Sartre did actually
come to New York during that time. But he stayed in a cold-water flat that had
no telephone, so it was difficult to communicate and I didn't get to meet him.
I was only at the agency for three years before I got drafted into the army.
This was in 1950 during the Korean War. I had a choice of serving in the French
army or the American army. The French consul told me that I would be better fed
and better paid in the American army, so I decided to serve in the American
army, and I did for two years. I was sent to Fort Devens for basic training and
was put in a Tennessee National Guard unit that had been activated and needed
to be brought to full strength with draftees. We were sent to Iceland to defend
Keflavik Airport against a possible Communist takeover. This was in the days
before jet engines were common and planes couldn't cross the Atlantic without
stopping somewhere. When we got to Iceland, the army, which was not any more
efficient than publishing, realized there was no one to pay the troops except
for a warrant officer who was leaving. They looked for a volunteer to take over
the job. Most of the Tennessee boys were totally illiterate and couldn't do
arithmetic, so I started paying the troops. And when the air force came in,
they kept me because I had all the records. I was in charge of a little
division that looked after travel pay. I would compute officers' claims for
reimbursements or per diems and so forth. I had two air force people working
under me as well as an American civilian girl named Bunny, who I didn't consort
with after hours because she'd go to the officers mess and...who knows what she
was doing. [Laughter.] Anyway, I was
very good at my job and the officers loved me because they usually had a hard
time getting their money. As a result of that I got two thirty-day leaves to go
to Paris, hitchhiking on air force planes. So I spent two longish periods in
Paris and got to meet the French publishers for whom I'd been selling books in
America. One was rather terrified when he saw me because he was a member of the
Communist party—he was the rights director at Gallimard—and to be seen with
someone wearing an American uniform did not give him much pleasure. Those trips
were very useful because I'd corresponded with these publishers but I hadn't
met them.
When I got out of the army, I'd agreed to go back to the agency for a year, but I didn't really want to. I thought maybe I would work for a publishing house instead. But nobody seemed particularly interested in hiring me because having a language was not considered any more useful than it is now because nobody wanted to do translations. So when I left the agency after another year, I got a letter from the head of one of the French publishing houses, Editions du Seuil, that said, "Should you decide to start your own agency, I'd like you to represent us in America." I was sort of amazed by that because I was shy, I was in my early twenties, I didn't have much self-confidence, and the idea of somebody else having any confidence in me seemed amazing. So I decided to do that, sort of on the side, while also taking advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights and taking courses toward a master's at NYU, where I'd already, at night, gotten a B.A. in English. When I went down to NYU I met a woman in the elevator named Germaine Brée who had just become the head of the French department that day. We started chatting and I said, "Let me know if you ever need somebody to teach a conversation course. I'm very shy and maybe that will help me get over it." She said, "Fine," and the next day her secretary called and said, "You've got three courses." But they weren't conversation courses—they were languages courses. So that's what I did. I got a master's and taught French for six years and did agenting on the side. But I only represented French publishers. No one else was doing that. I would go over catalogues and go to France twice a year, which was tax deductible. Not that there was much to deduct since none of this was bringing in much money. But I was actually being paid by the G.I. Bill—it was different than the World War II G.I. Bill—and I didn't have to pay for my courses since I was a graduate student. I was getting a bit of money from NYU, maybe a thousand dollars a year, a bit of money from the government, and a bit of money from selling the occasional book for very little money.
Tell me about some of the
editors you were getting to know.
The one I knew best, and the one
who was incredibly nice and generous to me, even before I went into the army,
was Mike Bessie, who was then at Harper and later started Atheneum and then
went back to Harper. He was very interested in France. He'd been a journalist,
he was fluent in French, he'd been in army intelligence in World War II, and he
was very cultured. I did, of course, meet Blanche Knopf, who was also fluent in
French but knew very little about literature. I was somewhat intimidated by her
but I also found her slightly ridiculous. With Sartre she had decided that he
was a novelist and a playwright but systematically turned down all of his
nonfiction. So all of his essays and philosophical writings were published by
minor firms like Philosophical Library or Citadel. When I took him over it was
with The Words, which I sold to
Braziller. But all of those books should have been with Knopf. I remember
having lunch with Blanche. She was extremely gracious. If we had lunch in a
restaurant she'd say, "Last year when we had lunch you ordered gigot, but I
remember that you like it rare and I don't think they do it very well here.
Maybe you should try...." She was sort of amazing in that way. But I also remember
having lunch at her apartment, which was in the building where Michael's is
now, on Fifty-fifth, where the Italian Pavilion used to be. It would be the two
of us and her poodle, Fifi. She'd say, with her raspy smoker's voice, "Mr.
Borchardt, what is interesting in Paris right now?" I'd say, "Well, there's
Michel Butor, who's just written a new—" She'd lean over and say, "Fifi! Don't
do that! This is my Balenciaga suit! I'm not going back to Paris until next
spring! You were saying, Mr. Borchardt?" [Laughter.]
What other editors and
publishers made a big impression?
I became very close with Bob
Gottlieb, who was at Simon & Schuster. He knew French, and his French was
particularly fluent if he'd had a drink. At one point later I was very
impressed when he decided to memorize the whole of Valéry's "Le Cimetière
Marin," which is a very long French poem. That was really quite impressive. He
was a junior editor at Simon & Schuster when I started agenting on my own.
I had been introduced to someone important at Simon & Schuster, who of
course didn't want anything to do with a somewhat useless agent who had
practically no books, and she handed me off to Bob, who then called about once
a month and said, "They just gave me money to take someone out to lunch. When
are you free?" I think he called me so often because he couldn't take out a
real agent, who would have been insulted to be seen at lunch with this kid, who
not only was fairly young but looked ten years younger. He may have been
twenty-five, but he looked fifteen. He wore sneakers when nobody was wearing
sneakers. He looked terribly unimportant. And he was fairly unimportant, although by then I think he was
already allowed to buy the occasional book. So we would have lunch, sometimes
in a restaurant and sometimes in Central Park, and I actually sold him Michel
Butor and eventually de Gaulle's war memoirs, even though the first volume had
been published by Viking and had done very badly. He also asked me to help out
a friend of his named Richard Howard, who stupidly enough had translated a
short novel by Jean Giraudoux without checking to make sure the rights were
free. But they were, and I got it published by a little firm called Noonday
Press, which was an independent house at the time. And then this same Richard
Howard started translating other books, many of them for Grove. He also
translated de Gaulle's war memoirs for Bob and he got invited to the Elysée in
Paris.
So there was Bob. There was also a very smart editor at Knopf who spoke French named Henry Carlisle, who was the father of Michael Carlisle and who later became a writer. But the editors were all sort of in the background. They weren't listed in the Literary Market Place. Editors were considered, by many publishers, a semi-necessary evil who were nearly as unpleasant to deal with as authors or agents. [Laughter.] Agents were at the bottom, then authors, then editors. If all three of them could have been gotten rid of, publishing would have been a nicer, more clubby industry. I remember selling Henry a book called The Notebooks of Major Thompson that became a mini best-seller. Knopf had this little bulletin in which Alfred would write a letter, and in one of them it said, "Next spring we are publishing The Notebooks of Major Thompson by Pierre Daninos, which Blanche snapped up in Paris on her last trip." I remember calling Henry and saying, "This is outrageous! You bought this book here, from me, and you should be the one who gets the credit." He said, "Oh, no, calm down, that's just how it is...." [Laughter.]
I've already mentioned Mike Bessie. I was able to sell him The Last of the Just, which was Atheneum's first best-seller. There were the Wolffs at Pantheon, Kurt and Helen, to whom I tried to sell Night. But nobody wanted Night. I have a letter from Blanche Knopf saying something like, "You're wasting your time with Elie Wiesel. He will never find an audience in this country." I have a long letter from Kurt Wolff, which unfortunately says nothing. It says, "You're right. This is a great book. Usually when you send a book you don't make many comments. I assume that if you're sending it, it means you feel we should publish it. In this case you said it's something we have to publish. And you're right. But for reasons that I'll explain to you the next time we have lunch, we just can't do it." I don't remember if we ever had that lunch or if he ever explained their reasons, so I'm afraid that will be missing from your interview. I could, like most people who write their memoirs, invent a nice story. I've never understood how people can write their memoirs in such detail. I don't remember details about 99 percent of what has happened in my life.
There's Braziller, who bought a lot of French things even though he didn't know French himself. From time to time he would take out an ad in the French equivalent of Publishers Weekly, and many French publishers thought he was one of the biggest American publishers. Dick Seaver worked for him for a while before he moved over to Grove, where I dealt with him a lot because he was Barney [Rosset]'s French guy. Barney knows some French but Seaver was really quite fluent and he'd lived in Paris. Dick and I were friends for years and years.
Do you have any great stories
about Dick or Barney?
With Barney the relationship always
had its ups and downs. I liked him a lot, and I liked the books he did. I also
sold him a lot of books, including Story of O, which, later, during one of his bankruptcies, he had to give to
Random House. It's still selling very well. I remember him often being angry at
me for one reason or another. I remember complaining to Don Allen once and
saying, "What's wrong? I'm bringing him all these books and I'm certainly not
hurting him in any way...." Don said something like, "Barney is a rooster. You
can't have two roosters in one henhouse." [Laughter.] I think that is sort of true of Barney. But Barney
can also be very generous. And I like him.
But there were moments when he would get very angry at me for one thing or another. I remember once going down to Grove Press because they hadn't paid their royalties or something. The first thing Barney said was, "I never bought a book from you that I hadn't heard about before." I said, "That may be true, but you still owe me...." [Laughter.] But to some extent he was probably right. It was sort of irrelevant, but he was probably right because everybody had potentially heard of these French books. They were published in France. And I had heard about them and asked to represent them. Although by then I had exclusive arrangements with several of the publishing houses, two of which we still represent: Seuil, the original one, and Minuit, who have been Beckett's publisher and also publish Elie Wiesel's Night. Night, incidentally, now sells about six hundred thousand copies a year in its Hill and Wang trade paperback edition in America.
How did you meet Elie Wiesel?
I met him because I was trying to
sell Night, unsuccessfully. The French
publisher wrote to me and said, "Elie Wiesel now lives in New York," where he'd
come from Paris to be the UN correspondent of an Israeli newspaper. One day he
came over to my apartment, which was also my office at the time, limping with a
cane. I thought it was the result of his concentration camp experience but it
turned out that he'd been hit by a taxi and broken practically every bone in
his body and was still recovering. I have a letter, actually, where I wrote to
the French publisher saying, "I met Elie Wiesel and you're right, he seems
quite nice." We finally sold the book to Arthur Wang.
How much did you get for it?
Two hundred fifty dollars, payable
in two installments and on condition that I find a British partner to share the
translation cost.
[Laughter.] How much money do you think
they've made on that book?
That's the irony when you see how
publishing works. You don't necessarily make the money out of the flavor of the
month. The real money, if you're in it for the duration, comes from books like
that—from books nobody wanted—be they by William Faulkner or Elie Wiesel or Beckett
or many others. Unfortunately, that argument is totally unconvincing to
publishers now. If you're an editor at Random House or one of the other large
firms, you can't say, "We're not going to make any money on this book for the
next three years, but in ten years everybody will be envious of us for having
it." The guy you're saying it to has two years to go on his contract, which is
about to be renegotiated next year. What good does it do him to have a book
that will bring in money ten years from now? He couldn't care less! He wants
the book that makes money now so he can
tell his bosses, "You should give me another contract for five years at twice
the salary." So it's become different, and I think that's what's weighing on
publishing, more than any of the other crises that come and go.
Did you become close with
Wiesel?
I did. We were both bachelors at
the time. We had the kind of relationship where you call up at six o'clock and
say, "Are you doing anything tonight? You want to meet at the Italian place on
Fifty-sixth?" He lived in a one-room studio on upper Riverside Drive. It wasn't
much bigger than this room but it was filled with records and books. For some
reason he had a car and would sometimes drive me to the airport. I was living,
before getting married to her, with a woman who had been a student of mine at
NYU. In Elie's memoirs he says something like, "I drove Georges and Anne to the
airport and during the drive Georges mentioned that Anne had decided to change
her last name to Borchardt. That's how I found out that they had gotten
married." Whether that's true or not, I don't know. It could be. But we had,
indeed, gotten married, partly because we found it too complicated not to be
married. I would be invited to dinner by, say, Roger Straus. FSG was also
buying French books, and Roger had been very nice to me and would invite me to
dinner parties at his townhouse with really important people like George
Weidenfeld. These were fairly formal dinners and it was awkward to say, "Can I
bring a date?" If I was invited it was probably because they were a man short,
and by bringing somebody you upset the balance of the dinner. It seemed simpler
to be married. People had to invite both of you. So one day we went down to
City Hall and got married and then went back to work. [Laughter.]
My wife and I did the same
thing.
You probably had the same
experience. It gets too cumbersome to always have to explain the situation. And
your wife meets people who might ask her out for a date. It's just simpler if
you're married. I remember we were at a party, maybe at Henry Carlisle's, and
there were several people there. Somebody told Anne about this new firm that
was starting: Atheneum. But by the time we got home, she'd forgotten the names
of the people who were involved, including the name of the person who had told
her, who had also asked her for a date, which she had turned down. I said,
"This one you probably should have accepted! I want to know who's starting the
firm!" [Laughter.]
Did you make any big mistakes
when you were starting out that you look back on with regret?
I probably should have started to
take on English language writers sooner. But I was sort of nervous about it.
There were all these brilliant agents who had gone to Harvard and were members
of the Harvard Club, where all the editors would meet. Everybody in publishing
had gone to Harvard. Except the people at Scribner's, who had gone to
Princeton. [Laughter.] I was a sort of
outsider, and I thought I'd remain an outsider, so it took me a while.
How did you come to represent
John Gardner?
We had a group of writers who came
more or less at the same time that included Stanley Elkin, Bob Coover, John
Gardner, and Sol Yurick. For some reason I seem to remember that Sol Yurick
came to us through George Steiner. He was a very close friend of Bob Coover's,
who had been with Candida Donadio but became disenchanted with her. Bob had met
a marvelous editor named Hal Scharlatt who was at Random House at the time. He
had a collection of stories called Pricksongs & Descants. He told Hal Scharlatt that he was sick and tired of
agents and wanted to do the deal with him directly. Hal said, "You can't do
that. If you do the deal with me directly, I'll have to screw you [on the terms
of the contract]." Hal told him to come and see me. To humor Hal, he came to
see me, having already decided to tell Hal that it would not work. But for some
reason he decided to come to us, and he's been our author ever since. He also
sent us Tom Boyle. They tend to come to us through each other. I can't remember
exactly how John Gardner came to us.
Tell me about your experience
with him.
His editor was David Segal, who was
good friends with Hal Scharlatt. They both had been editors at McGraw-Hill and
I think both of them had been fired from there. The three of us became friends.
We were all sort of outsiders. They were interested in writers whom nobody else
wanted, and I was interested in the same writers. And since nobody else wanted
them, they were also the only writers I could get, particularly since people
would probably discourage American authors from coming to us by saying, "Oh,
isn't that the French agent?" If you say that in a certain way it becomes very
negative. It took us a while to change that image. So John probably came to us
through David Segal. I know that David had published one of John's books by the
time John sent us two manuscripts, The Wreckage of Agathon and The Sunlight Dialogues. I also remember, quite vividly, that, being an
extremely kind person, I gave Anne the shorter book to read, Wreckage
of Agathon, and decided to work my way
through the long one, Sunlight Dialogues, not realizing that I'd given myself the much better book. [Laughter.] And I loved that book. By then David Segal had been fired by McGraw and gone to
NAL [New American Library]. The person who had fired him at McGraw had just
been appointed editor in chief at NAL. David called me and said, "I'll be the
first editor to be fired twice by the same person." He had probably called many
people saying the same thing, and he didn't actually get fired, but I think
agents stopped sending him books because they figured he would. Then he moved
to Harper, which always seemed to have, at least briefly, a literary sort of
editor, although they were mainly doing nonfiction. And he acquired nothing but
duds. Not only did he publish John Gardner, but also Cynthia Ozick and Fred
Exley and other people who lost Harper money. So he got fired again. Then he
got hired by Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. But while he was at Harper I sent him Wreckage
of Agathon and Sunlight Dialogues. He said, "I can do the short book but until this
author acquires an audience we wouldn't be able to price the long one." So he
only bought Wreckage of Agathon.
When he left and went to Knopf, I sent him Grendel and Sunlight Dialogues and he said the same thing. I said, "You can't do
that. You have to publish Sunlight,
too. If you want to, you can publish Grendel first." So he talked Bob Gottlieb into giving us a
two-book contract. They published Grendel, which did quite well—it probably sold about twelve thousand copies,
which was good, then or now—and then David died, in his early forties, having
pretty much drunk himself to death. Hal Scharlatt died at age thirty-eight,
walking off a tennis court. Those were big losses, two superb editors with good
taste and good noses. You need instincts in this business. It's so
unscientific. You can never really explain why you love something. It's like
any other form of love: you can't really explain why you're in love with
somebody or something. I think of the often-quoted sentence by Montaigne, when
he was asked about his friendship for La Boétie. He said, "Because it was he,
because it was I." That's about as close to explaining it as you can get.
Did you become friends with
Gardner?
We became good friends. I remember
he and his first wife taking our daughter and their two kids to the circus when
they were in New York. I remember going to Chinatown with them. They'd just
been in Greece, and his daughter was being very obnoxious—she isn't anymore,
she's very sweet—and trying to get attention by offering her Greek change to a
Chinese vendor. I have letters from John saying, "I know I'm one of the major
writers of my generation. All these people who don't recognize me will regret
it." Of course he was right, and one of the admirable things about writers is
that they really know they're writers. I
mean, any normal human being would just give up. Why would you do something
that nobody wants? But they do, and they have this sort of inner feeling. He
was one of a kind. People often ask me, "What kind of relationship do you have
with your authors?" Well, each one is different, just as you have a
different relationship with each one of your friends. And you're not exactly
the same person for each one of them, either.
Do you have any great stories
about Coover?
One amusing story about Bob comes
to mind. Some years ago he was asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed piece about the Intifada and
Valentine's Day. The dates coincided. It was to run on a Monday, which was
Valentine's Day. He called me on Friday evening to say that he had just heard
from the editor that they'd killed the piece because some higher-up at the Times objected to its ending, which was something like "as
the birds do, do." Evidently the juxtaposition of the two dos was just too much for the Times. So they killed it. Bob asked me what I could do. I
said, "What can I do? It's Friday night. Valentine's Day is Monday. The most we
can probably do is get a story about what the Times did published in a magazine. But that would be
months from now."
I sort of tossed and turned all night, and the next morning I went to the office. It was Saturday morning. I remember that it was snowing. I called Jack Miles, who was also one of our authors and whom I'd met when he was the book review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Now he was a freelance writer for them and he knew everybody there. I told him the story and said, "I know the L.A. Times hates the New York Times. This is a very good piece. Do you think they could run it on Monday?" He said he'd make a phone call. I walked home for lunch in the snow. The minute I got home, Jack called and said they wanted me to fax the piece so they could read it. So I went back through the snow to the office. When I got there I realized I'd never used the fax machine, which at the time was fairly new. So I called Anne on the phone and eventually managed to fax the thing. By then I'd gone back and forth through the snow several times and wasn't in a very good mood. I knew nothing would happen anyway. We were having dinner with friends that night, and five minutes before we went off to dinner, the phone rang. It was the L.A. Times. They said, "We'd like to run the piece, but we can only pay three hundred fifty dollars." Well, the New York Times, at the time, paid two hundred fifty dollars, which I was going to make them pay anyway because they'd really accepted the piece. So now Bob would be getting six hundred instead of two-fifty. I said, "Oh, that's okay." [Laughter.] I remember telling the story at dinner that night. When I was finished my friend's husband said, "But how much money do you make out of this?" I said, "Normally we would have gotten twenty-five dollars before expenses, but this way we get sixty dollars before expenses." He looked at me as if I were totally insane. But to me this was one of the highlights of my career.
You also represent T. C. Boyle.
Didn't he say somewhere that in his opinion you are the greatest person who has
ever lived?
He tends to exaggerate, a little
bit, from time to time. But most of the time he's right, of course. [Laughter.] When I first met him, he was the assistant fiction
editor at the Iowa Review and Bob
Coover was the fiction editor. But Bob had moved to England and Tom was doing
most of the work. I think Tom was impressed by the fact that I was actually
submitting short stories to the Iowa Review, which was paying something like thirty-five dollars
a story. One day he wrote me and said he had a collection of stories. Many of
them had been published in literary journals but also magazines like Esquire, maybe Playboy, but not the New Yorker,
which at the time wouldn't have touched any of these authors because they were
using words that the New Yorker
didn't recognize. And we managed to find a publisher for his collection without
too much trouble. Maybe three people turned it down. We sold it to Peter
Davison at Atlantic Monthly Press. Then he wrote a novel called Water
Music, which was also published by
Atlantic. But Peter didn't like his second novel, Budding Prospects, so we had to find him a new publisher. We sold it
to Amanda Vaill at Viking. Paul Slovak was the publicity director. He and Tom,
both towering over everyone else, got into the habit of hiking together and
became good friends. And then Paul later became his editor. Tom doesn't really
require much editing. His books come in pretty much ready to go. And Tom and I
have become close friends over the years. It's been great fun, and we've been
able to get him published all over the world. He's a real writer. I often say
to people in the office that the kind of writer I like to take on is somebody
whose book you can open to any page, read a paragraph, and say, "Here's a
writer."
You also represent one of my
favorite nonfiction writers, Tracy Kidder. How did you meet him?
Tracy, too, is a superb stylist.
And there, too, we've become good friends. He had written a book for which he
had an agent. I don't remember who published it or what it was about, but it
was a terrible experience and he doesn't want to hear about that book anymore.
Then he wrote Soul of a New Machine,
which he sold to Atlantic-Little, Brown himself. I don't know how he got
my name, but I remember that he came to see me, feeling that he had made a big
mistake, that he should have used an agent, that the publisher wasn't going to
do anything for the book. This was before it was published. He was very upset.
I said to him, "There isn't much I can do at this point. The first thing you
should do is call them and ask what the book's advertising budget is." In those
days publishers still had individual budgets for each book. Sometimes it was
zero, but they still had it. Now they just advertise their two main books and
do nothing for the others. But I told him that, and maybe one or two other
things, and within two weeks—I think the book had become a main selection of
the Book of the Month Club—he sent me a bottle of wine with his thanks. I had
really done nothing. I explained to him that he was more grateful to me for
having done nothing than most of my authors were when I actually had done
something. [Laughter.]
Then he sent me three proposals for his second book. Two were business books and one was a book about building a house. Well, to me, building a house was of no interest whatsoever. In France, if you want a house, you buy some old stone thing and make something out of it. But putting all this wood together? I don't know. To me it was totally uninteresting. And, in addition, the obvious commercial follow-up to Soul of a New Machine was another business book. So he'd asked me to rank them, and I ranked the two business books first and House third. Two weeks later he called me and said, "You know, House is really the book I would like to write." I said, "That's fine. We'll get you a little less money, but we'll definitely get you a contract. Don't worry about it."
Had Soul of a New Machine already won the Pulitzer?
Probably. I think that had already
happened. Anyway, I think he felt a little annoyed by my reaction, and he then
produced the most amazing outline I had ever seen for House. I called him and said, "I've changed the ranking.
This is now number one and the business books are two and three." How he did
it, I don't know. It was an impossible book to write a proposal for because it
was going to be an account of what would happen but hadn't happened yet. I got
him an enormous contract for the
book. He was very surprised. He said, "Are you sure?" and so on. [Laughter.]
How did you sell it? Was it an
auction?
No. We just sent it to
Atlantic-Little, Brown, which had just been bought by Mort Zuckerman. We
asked for a certain amount of money and they reluctantly gave it to us. Mort
Zuckerman even came to see me at the time of the negotiation. It didn't start
out very well because he saw a copy of Harper's on our reception table and said, "Why do you have Harper's and not the Atlantic?" I said, "Because Harper's is giving us a free subscription and the Atlantic is not." [Laughter.] I thought he wanted to meet because he might want
to renegotiate the advance. But not at all. He wanted to see about the
possibility of getting first serial rights for the Atlantic. He didn't realize that if they had asked to make
that part of the contract I probably would have thrown it in. But they hadn't.
[Laughter.] So he went back to
Boston with his scalp—that is, my concession that he could have first look at
first serial—and I did end up selling them first serial for another
twenty-five thousand dollars or so, even though the book itself ended up being
published by Houghton Mifflin. We've been Tracy's agents ever since. And he's
lovely.
Are there any writers who got
away? Whom you wanted desperately?
Oh, many. The one I probably regret
most is Jhumpa Lahiri. She would have been perfect for us and vice versa. She
just did a marvelous interview with one of our authors, Mavis Gallant, for Granta. I got the impression that Mavis Gallant is her
favorite author, and it sort of reopened the wound because I thought, "Did I
mention to her that we represent Mavis Gallant? Would that have made a
difference?" But maybe not.
You've witnessed such a long arc of contemporary
literature. You've seen fads come and go, seen various schools of writing come
and go. I'm curious about what seeing all that has taught you about the craft
of writing and what makes great writing.
It's a gift, and I don't know where
it comes from. I don't think the writing schools bring you that gift. They may
help you develop it in some way, and they put you in contact with other writers
so that you feel less isolated and less lonely, but essentially what makes a
Cézanne a Cézanne or a Picasso a Picasso or a Proust a Proust or a Joyce a
Joyce, I don't know. I can't tell you.
So there's nothing specific that
you're looking for in a piece of writing?
No. I just want to fall in love
with it. Ask an eighteen-year-old kid who tells you that he wants to fall in
love, "What do you want to fall in love with?" What is he going to tell you? You don't know until you've found it.
But when you find it, you know. How, and why, I don't know.
I'm curious about your take on
nonfiction with regard to memoir and the issues of truth and accuracy that are
always being raised now, especially because you come from Europe where there
are different traditions.
I'm certainly not in favor of
lying. I think, basically, that nonfiction should be truthful. There are
certain liberties that the reader will accept. It's a sort of silent covenant
between the reader and the writer. The reader cannot really expect the author
of a memoir to remember absolutely every detail. The reader has to allow the
author to say, "It was a very gray morning when I was taken to jail" even if it
turns out to have been a sunny day if you look up the weather in the almanac. I
don't think that sort of thing really matters. There are things that are more
and less important. But I don't think the author should deliberately lie to the
reader.
I recently read a rather interesting book that the author quite honestly calls a novel. It's been published in France but doesn't exist in English. It's by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, and it's a book about his mother. His mother was not literate. She was married twice, had several children, and lived a long life. He wanted to tell her story, about how she was sort of married off. He says himself that she wasn't going to tell him the whole truth, and he had no way of finding it out. She's not a historical figure. There are no records. He said, "I'm telling the story as I see it, and I'm filling in some of the details with what I imagine it must have been like." That, I think, is fine. Even if he didn't call it a novel—which it isn't, totally, either—all he has to do is write a brief foreword to explain how he approached the story. He's not cheating. He's just giving his subject a bit more body and substance. And there is a truth that you can find in fiction that is just as powerful as the truth you find in nonfiction.
But you can't change things. I feel very strongly—it's one of my strongest feelings, I think—about lying. I absolutely hate lying. But we all lie in a way. As I'm talking to you, I'm not telling you everything I think. Nor are you telling me everything you think. But I don't consider that lying. It's part of social discourse. I lied constantly during the war, but it was a question of survival. I think that's fine. It's unfortunate, but I had no choice. But I despise gratuitous lies or lies that are meant to make you sound better than you are or, in a book, add more panache to a story that might not work otherwise. If you need to do that, you should write fiction. It's a question of not betraying the trust of the reader. But the fact that there's an error? That doesn't bother me at all. The writer says there were eight people at the party and it turns out there were twelve? I couldn't care less. We don't have perfect memories. You probably haven't been married very long, but you will find out that when you go to parties, your wife will tell a story about something that you remember being totally different. There may be elements that are the same, but it didn't happen when you were in St. Louis, it was when you were in Ottawa. As you get older there will be more and more of those things. You will also realize that you're not 100 percent sure that you're totally right either. And in the end it doesn't matter. In the early part of your marriage, which you're still in, you will still tell your wife, "That isn't the way it happened!" But after a few years you'll realize that it really makes absolutely no difference.
Let's
talk a little about the industry. You've been in it for several decades, over
the course of which it's changed a lot, or at least that's what people seem to
say. What's your take on that?
It
has changed. Mainly it's the shift from individual ownership to corporate
ownership. The individuals who owned the firms were, for the most part, the
sons of millionaires. They didn't need to take money out of the firm. They
lived well before, they lived well during, and they had something very valuable
afterward. Knopf became very valuable. Farrar, Straus became very valuable. So
the heirs, I suppose, got a good amount of money. But the purpose [of founding
those firms] wasn't really to make money. The purpose was the excitement
of publishing. It's totally different now. Not so much at Grove/Atlantic or
Norton—those are two firms for which what I'm saying doesn't apply—except
that they are competing against these giants. So if Grove/Atlantic has a book
that becomes a major best-seller, it can't hold on to the author, even if the
author has made lots of protestations about how he will never leave the firm
because he's in love with all the people who work there. Either he, or his
agent, or both, will decide that rather than taking a million from little
Grove/Atlantic, they're better off taking six million from somebody bigger. So
they are affected by it too. The corporate thing has sort of poisoned the whole
industry.
What has that meant for writers?
It's mainly meant that they've
become products. And that their main relationship is more with their literary
agent. In a way it has worked well for the agents. Their main relationship is
much more seldom with the editor because the editor's position is very
precarious. You've already changed jobs like four times. That was most unusual
when I started in publishing. If you were an editor at Knopf, you stayed an
editor at Knopf. There are still editors at Knopf who have been there forever:
Judith Jones; Ash Green, who just retired; Bill Koshland, who was not an editor
but more the business person. When Bill was chairman emeritus, well after
Alfred had died and Bob Gottlieb had taken over, he would still take all the
royalty statements home and look at them to be sure they were right. Now
there's no one on the editorial side of a publishing house who even sees the royalty statements. They have no idea what's on
them. They have no idea whether the reserve for returns is outrageous or
justified. The person who decides on the reserve doesn't know either. The whole
climate has changed.
What else has it meant for
writers?
Even the little things have
changed. There used to be a publication date for a book. Now nobody even knows
what the publication date is except when there's an embargo. The pub date used
to mean the author would get a bouquet of roses or there would be a party.
There was practically always a party for the author. The birth of the book was
something to be celebrated. Now it's just the question of "Do we admit to the
author that the actual printing is only one-fourth of the announced printing?"
It's totally different. In fact, even the idea of two different figures for
printings—the announced printing and the actual printing—has come with corporate
publishing. Before, you printed a certain number of copies and that was what
you printed. There wasn't the lie and the truth.
You've always been a champion of
so-called midlist writers. Has it become more difficult for those writers to
sustain their careers today?
I think publishers used to be more
committed to a specific author. But not always. I think the authors who are
really successful are even more successful today, in financial terms. Among our
authors, people like Tracy Kidder or Ian McEwan or T. C. Boyle. The authors
like Stanley Elkin always had to support themselves by teaching and would have
to today. So that isn't very different except for the fact that maybe they see
one of their students being offered a six-figure advance all of a sudden
because he or she is doing something that a publisher thinks it can really
sell. Now, if the book doesn't work, that's the end of that career, half the
time.
It's different. As I've already told you with examples like Beckett and Elie Wiesel, the doors were not wide open to those people either. The success of Grove Press, when it started, was due to the fact that there were all of these marvelous authors who nobody else wanted. Evergreen Review was a marvelous enterprise that not only opened its doors to interesting writers but also fed writers into the publishing company. Nobody has that kind of thing now, even though Evergreen Review was not unique at the time. There was also Ted Solotaroff's American Review and New American Review. I think Ted was the first to publish Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Kate Millett. These publications were very, very important, and there's nothing like that now. There isn't any publisher who's really interested in doing that—in nursing these seedlings and planning for the future. Everybody wants instant gratification. So of course that has affected the authors too.
But, in general, good authors have always been fairly miserable. They are now. They were then. It's always been a somewhat alien existence. Most authors still need to have a profession, usually in academia but not always, to sustain themselves. Especially the better ones, who don't want to compromise and just want to write what they feel like writing. But I don't think it has become much more difficult. It has always been difficult. I would not advise any of my friends to become writers as a career.
I think you're an artist because you have to be an artist. I don't think it's ever been easy. It's not easy for musicians. It's not easy for painters. But it has never been easy for those people. When Cézanne showed his first paintings, people laughed at him. They thought they were ludicrous. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. To be an artist has always been difficult. To be an artist in the United States has been probably even more difficult than elsewhere because the arts are not considered all that valuable here.
If somebody asks you what you do and you say, "I'm a writer," the next question will be, "But what do you do for a living?"
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How has your job changed as the
industry has changed?
I think there is more frustration.
We have to deal with all kinds of bureaucrats. We spend a lot of time arguing
about contract clauses. Every time a publisher hires a new lawyer or contract
manager, they decide to have new clauses and you have to argue about the
wording. And the bigger the firm, the less flexible it will be. Also, there
aren't that many publishers around, so they're all, in a way, in cahoots. It's
not that they would sit down together and say, "From now on we're going to do
this," because then they would have the antitrust people after them. But they
might ask the assistant house counsel to call his or her buddy who's the
assistant house counsel at such-and-such house and say, "What do you people do
about this?" And they find out that everybody—that is, the six big firms—are
now paying, say, 25 percent of net receipts on electronic rights. Okay, so
there may be a smaller firm that pays 30 percent, but why can't they all pay 50
percent of net receipts like they did a few years ago? They can't because they
have done a very close cost analysis and come to the conclusion, after weeks of
analyzing—analyzing what, nobody knows, because there are no figures to use
for this—that this is the figure. That
it really should probably be between 19.25 percent and 23.2 percent, but
rounding it out at 25 percent is a generous gesture and, in addition, that's
what everybody else is doing. Now, does this matter at all, since there are no
sales of electronic books to speak of? I don't know. But we spend a tremendous
amount of time dealing with these things because it might be worth something
and, like everybody else, we agents feel that if the publishers think it's
worth something to them, it must be worth something to us.
But basically we do what we've always done. I remember something my French mentor said to me years ago when there were other issues. He said, "In the end the only thing that really counts is the poor author in his attic in front of his typewriter with his blank piece of paper and what he puts on it." The only thing that has changed is that maybe now he is no longer writing in the attic, and he has a computer instead of a typewriter. But it's still what goes on the page that counts. And everything else really doesn't. Eventually publishers sort of have to do what the more important authors want. Look at the electronic thing. If electronic publishing really takes over, the authors may discover that they don't need the publishers at all. But the publishers will always need the authors to write something.
What would you change about the
industry if you could change one thing?
I would love to see half a dozen
sons or daughters of millionaires start their own firms, the way it used to be.
I think it would put pressure on the established houses to pay attention to
things they don't pay enough attention to anymore. But I don't think that will
happen. This question also isn't something I think about very much because of
my own temperament. I'm very empirical. I feel that you deal with a certain
situation and make the best of it. I don't really spend much time dreaming
about what could be. I'm not really interested in that.
One thing that always interests
me is how people view their jobs and their various responsibilities. How do you
view yours?
The main thing, obviously, is to do
the very best we can for our authors. To advise them as best we can. It's
really different from author to author. It's not necessarily advising them to
do what brings in the largest amount of money in the shortest period of time.
We have to think of their career—where they are, what their needs are—so it's
different with each one. It's not as complicated as it may sound. It's usually
fairly clear and simple. But you have to be able to figure it out, and then you
have to find a way to come as close as possible to getting them what they want.
Practically any of our more successful authors could make more money by moving
to another house—you always get more when you're auctioning the rights. But
you don't want to do that with every book. With some authors the amount of the
advance is not the essential point because there's a constant flow of money
coming in from their earlier books. For some authors, ego is the main concern
and the mere thought that someone else may be getting more money is much more
important. So everything has to be taken into account.
It feels like there are a lot of
different threats to authors out there today. What do you think is the biggest?
The main issue is that people may
read less. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's true—it's always been
true in this country—that people seem to read a lot in college and then get
out of college and get a job and basically stop reading. We have two
granddaughters. They read when they're on vacation, and one of them—the
younger one—has been reading all of these Stephenie Meyer books. But they
don't read the way I read or their mother read. They don't read regularly or
with the same kind of passion. They're busy with their computers and phones.
They're constantly chatting with each other in one way or another. And all of
that is changing reading. On the other hand, I'm encouraged by the fact that
more and more people are going to college. Some of our books that are read in
college—the Michel Foucault books, for example—are probably read more from
year to year. Beckett is probably read more. So all of the signals are not bad.
But there's no point in worrying too much about things over which you have no
control, and where your opinions have absolutely no effect one way or the other
except possibly to get you depressed.
Do you feel competitive with
other agents?
I don't really feel competitive. I
sometimes feel envious. Most people don't like to admit to one of the cardinal
sins, and envy is perhaps the worst, but I think we all feel envy. Authors feel
envy when they see a book, even if it's by a friend of theirs, reviewed on the
cover of the New York Times Book Review.
We're all human. So yes, of course I feel envy, just as you would feel envious
if one of your best friends, who is an editor at God knows where or even at
Grove, gets a manuscript that becomes a hit and is written up everywhere.
Are editors different than they
were thirty or forty years ago?
I think they used to feel more
self-confident because they were rarely fired. Now, nobody knows if they'll
still have a job the following week. I think they used to be allowed to spend
more time with their authors. In the old days, saying, "I don't know how Joe is
progressing with his book and I'm going to spend a week with him to find out"
would not have been considered just another expression of the editor's laziness
and unwillingness to do some real work in the office. The editor might even
have been encouraged to spend time somewhere with the author. Maxwell Perkins,
who is always held up as an example even though he turned down Faulkner for
Scribner's, spent a tremendous amount of time editing two of the authors for
whom he's best known, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. But now I think Maxwell would be
called in to his boss's office: "You're wasting too much time with this author.
His previous books haven't sold very well and this probably won't do any
better. Can't you bring in somebody like Dan Brown who will really bring us
money?"
What do you think the best
editors do for their writers?
First of all, they encourage them.
They stay in touch with them without nagging too much. You have to find the
right balance. It varies with each author. But they should try to spend some
time with them. I think most authors would like to have a close relationship
with their editor. I have several authors who were so disgusted with their
editors that they have an editor whom they pay to edit their books before they
get sent in to their editor at the publishing house. Nobody ever hears about
it, and if they win the Pulitzer Prize or whatever, the official editor is the
one who gets the credit.
You're not going to tell me who
those writers are, are you?
No. [Laughter.]
But can you tell me what editors
you work with in that capacity? Is it people whose names we would know?
The one who has done quite a bit of
this and is supposed to be terrific is Tom Engelhardt, who used to be at
Pantheon years ago. But there are others. Many editors who have been fired do
it.
What is your biggest frustration
with editors today?
The main frustration is one I share
with them: They can't make a decision on their own. They have to go to
marketing people or other people who know nothing about what the editor and I
are talking about to get an offer approved. It's not even just the
amount—different firms have different rules about whose approval you need in
order to go above a certain amount of money—as much as it is the mere
decision. When Bob Gottlieb was at Knopf, I'd send him something and he'd call
me three days later and say, "Why should I be publishing this thing? This is
not for me. This is not for Knopf." Or he'd say, "Okay, what do you want for
it?" I'd tell him. He'd say, "That's fine" or "We can't pay that much." One time
I even remember him saying, "The author can't do this book for that little.
I'll give you such and such," and it was more than the amount I'd asked for.
But the whole thing would take five minutes. When Jim Silberman was the editor
in chief at Random House the negotiation would take two minutes.
Now you have the feeling that it's such a cumbersome process. Unless you have an auction going for a book that everybody wants. Then, of course, it immediately moves to the upper levels within the publishing house. I remember that Valerie had an auction for a book that we'd gotten from England, and all of a sudden she had six or eight editors bidding on it and people whom I won't name but who are known to be totally unreachable were calling her and saying, you know, "Just call me on this number and I'll do blah blah blah." But that involved seven figures. At that level everything is different. But at the normal level, things are more complicated and you feel less of the enthusiasm. The enthusiasm gets eaten away by the bureaucracy. But there's still some of it. The amazing thing is that publishing still attracts a lot of really good people—young people, interesting people—who really love to read and want to make it work. They just accept that it's more difficult. And so do we. There's no choice.
That's a frustration you share
with editors. Is there anything that frustrates you about the way editors have
changed, or the way that younger editors are?
They aren't very different than
they were before. I mean, some start speaking this sort of corporate language
but others remain themselves. There are some things you see less often now, but
you didn't see them much before either. I can give you two examples. One
involved Bob Gottlieb when he was the editor in chief of Knopf. He was doing a
book of ours by a French doctor that was called Birth Without Violence. It was a new method of giving birth that involved
giving birth in the dark and so on. I remember that Bob called me and said, "We
just got the cover in for this book. I think you'll love it. Are you in the office? Can I bring it over?"
There is no editor in chief in New York today who would do that. But there
wasn't anyone else then either.
I also remember—I probably shouldn't say nice things about other agents, but I can't help it in this case—something that Steve Wasserman did when he was an editor at Random House. I sent him a long manuscript by Ted Draper, who used to write for the New York Review of Books. Steve called me the next day and said, "I started reading this in the office yesterday and all of a sudden I realized that it was eleven o'clock at night. This is terrific. Of course we want to publish it." I don't remember if he'd actually finished it, or if it took another week to do the deal, but that's the kind of reaction I'd like to get more often: people who act on their instincts; people who are genuinely excited about something. I don't get it often, but I never got it often.
Who else do you admire in the
industry? And what makes you admire them?
I admire people who have managed to
stick to their guns and do, essentially, what they set out to do. People like
Nan Talese, Kate Medina, Jonathan Galassi, or several of the editors at Knopf.
Of course they're influenced by the environment—we all are—but they've
essentially been doing what they've been doing all along. So has Morgan, for
that matter. I don't really know Morgan all that well, but I'm sure he could
have chosen an easier way of living. But he's stuck to it. I greatly admire
Drenka Willen. The main reason I'm not mentioning other agents is that I don't
really know them that well. Editors know agents much better. We know of each other, but we don't really know what we're
like. I've never seen another agent dealing with his or her authors. I've never
seen an agent dealing with an editor.
Tell me about some of the high
moments in your life as an agent.
One was meeting General de Gaulle
when I was in my early twenties. When I was a kid during the war, he was God,
and the only hope one had. If I'd stayed in France, of course, I never would
have met him. But because I'd come to America and done this thing that nobody
else was doing, it sort of made me different. So after I'd sold his war memoirs
here, his French publisher took me to see him. He was not in power then, but he
had these offices on the Left Bank. He was surrounded by nothing but people who
were six feet five and six feet six and so on. I went with his publisher, who
came from Monte Carlo and had this short Mediterranean build. So there we were:
two dwarves in the land of giants. That was incredibly exciting and heady for me. There was also an
interesting moment. The publisher, like many people from southern France, had a
tendency to talk a lot and very freely. He accidentally mentioned the name of a
magazine editor or journalist who was quite prominent at the time but had been
a collaborator during the war. When he realized what he'd done he tried to sort
of backtrack. But de Gaulle said, in a very kind voice, "Well, I know he was a
collaborator. But he isn't a collaborator any more." [Laughter.] So that's one highlight. I realized that I'd done
something with my life that led me into territory where I never would have been
otherwise.
But as the years have gone on I think I've become a bit blasé. There have been many highlights—when my authors have won prizes and so on. It gives me great pleasure, but it has become more frequent. For example I was with Anne Applebaum when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag. But I was also with her for the National Book Awards when she didn't win. I was with her at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes when she didn't win. I may have been with her at the National Book Critics Circle Awards when she didn't win. And just as I suffer from envy, I'm also a sore loser and I don't like to go to these events unless my author wins. But the Pulitzer Prize is much more civilized because you know in advance and it's not a public humiliation. So that was wonderful.
I also remember when Charles Johnson was nominated for the National Book Award for Middle Passage. I pretty much knew he wouldn't win because you only have one chance out of five and why would your author win instead of the four others? It's a black tie event and I hate wearing a tuxedo. I was trying to put on the little studs in the shirt that are very pretty and belonged to my father, one of the few things I have, and I was having trouble with them. I asked Anne to help. All of a sudden I saw that my white shirt had little pink polka dots all over it. Anne had pricked her finger with one of the studs and there were little spots of blood all over my shirt. So I had to change the shirt. Thank God I had a second one. I don't even know why I did because I never wear the wretched things. I thought we'd be late and I was in a foul mood. We sat at the Atheneum table. Atheneum had been bought by Scribner, which had been bought by Macmillan. The head of Macmillan was there, and the editor of the book and the publicist. But the head of Macmillan, who didn't know either of them, thought they were a couple. They were just two employees. But they happened to be young and good looking, so I had to explain to him that they were his employees and not a couple. Anyway, the whole thing was stupid and ludicrous, and I was becoming more and more annoyed, and somebody made a long speech, and then Charles won the National Book Award. [Laughter.] The mood changed totally. I can't remember any moment in my life when I had such a quick change in mood. The book had sold six or seven thousand copies and I remember that people came over from Macmillan saying, "Barnes & Noble just placed an order for x thousand copies" and so on. All of a sudden the book had become a best-seller. I remember Charles asking me, "What's happened? Isn't it the same book anymore?" And I said to him, "No, it isn't!"
When are you the most proud of
what you do?
It's usually when we have a new
author and I feel that we have really been able to change his or her life. That
would not really be true of people like Elkin and Coover and Gardner and Yurick
who had already been published. But it happens sometimes. I recently met a
writer whose life I feel I sort of changed because she didn't have a life as a
writer before in a sense. It's a young woman named Olivia Judson. She is the
daughter of a friend of Mike Bessie's, who as I told you was one of my mentors.
He called me and asked if I'd be willing to see her as a favor. She had a
doctorate in biology from Oxford and had been deputy science editor of the
Economist and was coming to America and
needed some advice. I immediately knew that she was incredibly bright. The
Economist had allowed her to do two columns
under the name of Dr. Tatiana. They were a sort of mixture of Dr. Ruth and Dear
Abby. Animals would write in about their sexual problems and Dr. Tatiana would
give them an answer that was totally accurate scientifically. They would ask
something like, "My wife bit off an important part of my anatomy last night.
What do I do?" Dr. Tatiana would say, "Well, that's what women are like, but
don't worry about it, you'll grow it back." I'm making that up, but I do
remember learning from her that most seagulls are lesbians. I was so surprised
that I'd gone through life without knowing that. Anyway, I told her she should
write a book. We sold it to Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan. It was called Dr.
Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation and it
did extremely well. We sold it all over the world. It was serialized in France
in Le Figaro, which is a daily
Parisian paper. We sold movie rights to the Canadian Discovery Channel,
although the result hasn't been shown in this country because the Americans
found it too obscene. Now she's writing another book for Metropolitan. She's
written a number of op-ed pieces for the New York Times. She's making a living as a writer. And she's become
a good friend. I love the idea of improving somebody's life.
There's also Bob Fagles, who did the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I met him at a dinner party. He was complaining about the fact that he'd translated a play that was supposed to be part of a series of translations for Oxford or somebody. But nobody else had delivered their translations so the project was stuck. He was very frustrated. The next year I met him again at the same friend's. Nothing had happened and he was even more frustrated. I said, "I'm sure your contract must have a pub date. You can probably cancel it and take the book somewhere else. Show me the contract." I sold the book to Viking, and then he did another one, and then he did the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, and then the Aeneid, and it totally changed his life.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
It's
when you can bring good news to one of your authors. Their book just went into
a fifth printing. We found a home for that short story that we both liked but
so-and-so didn't want. Or we just sold, say, Catalan rights to their book. Or
Basque rights. I didn't even know there was such a thing! I knew there was a
Basque dialect but I didn't know that people actually read in Basque. To be
able to make those phone calls gives one so much pleasure. Every day brings
some kind of crisis and unpleasantness, but just about every day also brings
something like that. I don't make the calls about the translation rights anymore
because that's our daughter Valerie's domain. But I get a vicarious pleasure
out of the pleasure she feels, and the author feels, when she gets to make one
of those calls.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: Georges Borchardt
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is back with another installment of his series of interviews with publishing professionals. For the September/October 2009 issue, he visited legendary agent Georges Borchardt at his New York City office and talked with him about changes in the publishing industry, the importance of independent presses, and the question facing readers everywhere: Should I switch to a Sony Reader or Kindle?
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Literary Agents
It must be obvious to anyone who has been following this series that I have an unabashed affection for the old guard of book publishing—and an endless appetite for their insights, their war stories, and their wisdom. But after a year in which "change" of one kind or another was never far from anybody's thoughts, it occurred to me that the series could use a shake-up. Why not give the graybeards a breather and talk with some younger agents and editors? And while I was at it, wouldn't it be more valuable to writers if I could get a few drinks in them first?
With that idea in mind, I asked the editors of this magazine to select four up-and-coming literary agents to take part in a roundtable conversation on the fine points of contemporary writing and publishing. One night after work we rode the subway to Brooklyn and congregated in the offices of the literary magazine A Public Space—located in a renovated horse stable with huge wooden doors that swing in from the street, vast ceilings, and an abundance of modern furniture and art—which were loaned to us for the evening by its gracious founder and editor, Brigid Hughes.
Within moments of making the necessary introductions, it became clear that I would need to confiscate everyone's BlackBerry if we were going to get anything done (a problem that had not arisen in my previous interviews). Then the panelists sat down to a spirited conversation that was fueled by Mexican takeout, multiple bottles of wine, and several highly off-the-record digressions—some of which appear as anonymous exchanges at the end—that are probably inevitable at gatherings of this sort. Here are brief biographies of the participants:
JULIE BARER spent six years at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates before starting her own agency, Barer Literary, in 2004. Her clients include Zoë Ferraris, Joshua Ferris, Kathleen Kent, and Gina Ochsner.
JEFF KLEINMAN was an agent at the Graybill & English Literary Agency for seven years before cofounding Folio Literary Management in 2006. His clients include Robert Hicks, Charles J. Shields, Garth Stein, and Neil White.
DANIEL LAZAR is an agent at Writers House, where he has worked for six years. His clients include Tiffany Baker, Ingrid Law, Jennifer McMahon, and Matt Rothschild.
RENEE ZUCKERBROT was an editor at Doubleday before founding her eponymous literary agency in 2002. Her clients include Harley Jane Kozak, Kelly Link, Keith Lee Morris, and Eric Sanderson.
Let's cut right to the chase. What are you people looking for in a piece of fiction?
BARER: I like what Dan has on his Publishers Marketplace profile: the book that makes me miss my subway stop. I think everybody's looking for a book that you can't put down, that you lose yourself in so completely that you forget everything else that's going on in your life and you just want to stay up and you don't care if you're going to be tired in the morning. You just want to keep reading.
ZUCKERBROT: Doesn't that have to do with voice? It's about the way that somebody tells a story. It's about a person's worldview. There are probably very few new stories. We're probably all ripping off the ancient Greeks—tragedy, comedy, yada yada—but it's the way someone sees the world and interprets events. It's their voice. It's how they use words. It's how they can slow things down when they need to. It's how they build up to a scene. It's how they describe ordinary things. Walking down Dean Street, for example. If I described that it would be the most prosaic description on the planet. But a really gifted writer will make me see things I've never seen even though I may have walked down the street a thousand times. At the end of the day, for me at least, it comes back to voice.
LAZAR: On my Publishers Marketplace page I say—because I'm so wise and pithy—that I want writers to show me new worlds or re-create the ones I already know. I generally find myself liking books that are not set in New York. Give me a weird little small town any day of the week.
BARER: That's why I love international fiction. I love reading a book where I don't know anything about the setting. I have this wonderful novel I sold this year that's set in Sri Lanka. I didn't know anything about Sri Lanka when I read it. Anything international, anything historical, anything set somewhere really unexpected. This is going to sound crazy, but I read a novel this summer that blew me away, and it's science fiction. I'm not usually drawn to science fiction, but it was so inventive and original and smart, and it took me somewhere I'd never been. Finishing that book and having it blow my mind was such a reminder of why I love my job: You can read something so unexpected, and fall in love with it, and think, "I never would have thought this would be my kind of thing, but now I can't stop talking about it."
KLEINMAN: That's my second criterion: can't-stop-talking-about-it. I have three criteria. The first is missing your subway stop. The second is gushing about it to any poor slob who will listen. The third is having editors in mind immediately.
BARER: That's soimportant. If you can't figure out who you're going to sell a book to from the get-go—if you finish it and think, "Who on earth would buy this?" and you can't come up with more than three names—it's a bad sign.
KLEINMAN: Not only that. I want to be thinking, "Oh my God, I've got to send this to so-and-so. So-and-so would love this."
BARER: I have found myself going on and on about books I don't even represent, books where I've lost a beauty contest. I remember one book I was going after. I was so obsessed with it that I couldn't stop talking about it. I'd have lunch with this editor, dinner with that editor, and then I lost the beauty contest and the book went out on submission and five editors e-mailed me and said, "This was the book you were raving about, right? It's awesome."
LAZAR: What was the book?
BARER: It's an incredible debut novel that's coming out with Ann Godoff called The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet. Denise Shannon sold it and she did a fantastic job. It's just one of those incredibly original books and I couldn't stop talking about it. It was the same thing with The Heretic's Daughter. I kept being like, "The Salem witch trials! Oh my God! Did you know that they didn't burn people, they hung people? I didn't know any of this!" You couldn't shut me up. I was probably really annoying.
Aside from referrals, where are you finding writers?
LAZAR: I get most of my fiction through slush.
BARER: I found The Heretic's Daughter in the slush pile. The author had never written a novel before. She had never been in a writing class or an MFA program. She came out of nowhere. She simply had this incredible story, which is that her grandmother, nine generations back, was hanged as a witch in Salem. Just because you have that great story doesn't mean that you can necessarily tell it well, but it was an incredible book.
ZUCKERBROT: I still read literary magazines, and I'll write to people whose work I like to see if they're working on a novel or a short story collection. I found one of my clients—he's a landscape ecologist who has a book coming out with Abrams—when he was profiled in the New YorkTimes.
Where else?
BARER: Bread Loaf. The Squaw Valley writers conference. Grub Street, in Boston. I found the Sri Lankan novel at Bread Loaf last summer. I heard the author read for five minutes and was so blown away that I was basically like, "You. In the corner. Right now. Don't talk to anybody else!"
LAZAR: I got a query through Friendster once. It was a good query, so I asked to read the book, and I went on and sold it. This was two or three years ago, when Friendster was still cool.
BARER: I have a lot of love for certain MFA programs. Columbia. Michigan. I try to go to those schools at least once a year and maintain relationships with the professors so they might point out people to me.
ZUCKERBROT: I actually found a writer who had a short story in A Public Space. I'm going to be going out with her collection soon. She's been published in McSweeney's, Tin House, etcetera. But I also have a lot of clients who send me writers. I hear things from writers I used to work with back when I was an editor. People in my family will tell me about writers. You sort of hear about writers from everywhere.
BARER: That's exactly right. Clients come from everywhere and anywhere. And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about agents that some writers have. They think we're off in our ivory towers and our fancy offices in New York City. But the truth is that we're looking for them. We're waiting for them to come knock on our doors. I don't mean our literal doors. Please don't show up at our offices.
LAZAR: I once found a client through a mass e-mail forward. It was one of these funny e-mails. It had pictures of kids sitting on Santa's lap and crying. It took me almost a year to track down where it came from, and it ended up being an annual contest that's sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. So we put together a proposal and had a nice auction and Harper is publishing it this fall. It's all pictures of kids sitting on Santa's lap and crying. If any of my clients ever win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize, nobody's ever going to know it because I will go down in history as the agent who sold Scared of Santa.
BARER: I think finding an agent is a little like applying to college. If you know anybody who knows anybody who knows somebody who's heard an agent speak somewhere, you want to try to use those connections. And there are so many resources now. There are so many books and Web sites. The more research you can do to target your query to the right agents, the better chance you have. The thing that frustrates me is when I get queries for the kinds of books that I just don't do. Ninety percent of my list is fiction, and my Web site says I don't represent military books or self-help books or prescriptive nonfiction. When I get that stuff I think, "Wow, you just wasted all this time. You should really be focusing on the agents who clearly have done a lot of books like that."
When you're looking at all these query letters, what are some things that make you sit up and pay attention?
LAZAR: When Evan Kuhlman wrote to me about Wolf Boy—this is a novel that Shaye Areheart published—he wrote a description of the book, and you could tell from the letter that he was a lovely writer, but I remember that he wrote about one character and the "museum of fucked-up things." That one line stuck with me. I thought it was very specific and evocative. I think that's what makes the best query letters. It's hard to distill your magnum opus that you've been working on for ten years into one letter, but it's great if you can get some of the specific details in the letter.
BARER: As a writer, you should be able to articulate what your book is about in a few lines. Obviously, great novels are about a lot of things. But if you can't articulate the essence of what the story is, then maybe you haven't figured that out, which signals to me that maybe the book isn't coming together.
ZUCKERBROT: We don't need to hear about all of the characters. You guys probably get the query letters that are like, "Suzy, the housewife..." and it goes on and on and you hear about everybody in the book. I mean, we don't really need that.
BARER: It should be like flap copy. It should give you just enough that you want to read the book, but not so much that you feel like you already know everything about it.
LAZAR: I disagree with that a little bit. I've taken on lots of clients who sometimes have written rambling and kind of disorganized query letters. But there will be lines that jump out at you and you think, "Oh, I need to read this." Even if the manuscript comes in and it's rambling and long, if it has that spark that I saw in the query letter, then I don't care if it's rambling, because I can fix that. But I can't fix a lack of spark.
BARER: The one thing that scares me is query letters that come in with accoutrements. Pictures. Little food samples. And the letter is all design-y.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they come on pink paper. All that stuff is a distraction from what's important. It just tells me that they're not real writers. I mean, could you ever imagine Marilynne Robinson sending out a query on pink paper? It's not about the pink paper, and it's not about the fancy font you choose. It's about what's on the page.
KLEINMAN: I just think that when somebody knows how to write, it's so freaking obvious. It's in the voice, it's in the rhythm, and you know it immediately. It has nothing to do with anything else. It can be a letter that's three pages long or a sentence.
LAZAR: Exactly. I would buy a shopping list if it was written by Stephen King.
Tell me ten things in the query process that can make you want to reject something immediately.
ZUCKERBROT: When I get an e-mail that says, "Dear Agent..." and I can see that I'm one of seventy agents who got it.
KLEINMAN: Bad punctuation, bad spelling, and passive voice.
BARER: Is it wrong of me to say that handwritten letters make me uncomfortable? Does that make me ageist?
LAZAR: Writers who will have a lawyer send you something "on their behalf." It's ridiculous, and you also can't get a sense of the author's voice, which is what the letter's all about.
ZUCKERBROT: When people talk about whom they would cast in the movie version of the book. I received three of those this week!
BARER: Anything that says something like, "This is going to be an enormous best-seller, and Oprah's going to love it, and it will make you millions of dollars."
KLEINMAN: Desperation is always good. "I've been living in a garage for the past sixty years. Nobody will publish my book. You have to help me."
BARER: I love it when they tell me why nobody else has taken it on—when they tell me why it's been so unsuccessful.
ZUCKERBROT: Or they've come close and they will include an explanation of who else has rejected it and why. "Julie Barer and Jeff Kleinman said..."
LAZAR: If they're writing a children's book, they'll often say, "My children love this book."
BARER: Right! I don't care if your children, your mother, or your spouse love it. All of that means nothing to me.
KLEINMAN: When it's totally the wrong genre. When they send me a mystery or a western or poetry or a screenplay.
BARER: Don't lie. Don't say, "I read Kevin Wilson's short story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and I loved it so much that I thought you'd be great for my book." Because guess what? That book isn't coming out until next April. You just read that I sold that book, and you suck. You're a liar! That kind of thing happens because everybody subscribes to Publishers Marketplace, and nothing against Publishers Marketplace—I live for it, it's a very useful tool for me—but I think for writers it perpetuates this hugely obsessive cycle of compare and despair.
How else has technology changed things from your perspective?
BARER: The thing about technology that makes me sad is that we used to have a lot more conversations with people. And there are a lot of ways to misinterpret an e-mail. I sometimes have to stop and remind myself to pick up the phone. "It would be nice to catch up with this person and see what else is going on in their life. And we might get more out of it."
KLEINMAN: I have a question. One of the things that drives me crazy is when editors don't respond to me. What do you guys do?
[Expletives. Laughter.]
LAZAR: I have a trick that works every time. I use it a lot, so I should probably retire it at this point. But I write in the subject line, "People who owe me a phone call." Then they open the e-mail and number one is "The Pope." Number two is "Britney Spears." Number three is "You." Then I'll say, "If you can explain numbers one and two, that would be great, but I'll settle for number three. I'd love to hear from you." They always get back to me. [Laughter. Compliments.] It's good because it's a little passive-aggressive, but it's also polite.
BARER: I know an agent who once sent an editor who wouldn't call the client a fake phone and phone card and a whole little package of messages. Like, "Hello? Pick up the phone!" It's just astonishing and insulting.
LAZAR: I went over somebody's head once. I went to the publisher.
BARER: I hate doing that!
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's okay if you give them warning and say, "If you don't call the client, I have no choice."
BARER: But what about the editors who you leave a message with and say, "I have an offer on the table, are you even interested?" and they don't call you back. Oh my god! It takes five seconds to shoot me an e-mail or have your assistant call me if you're too busy.
LAZAR: I bide my time, and it never fails that a year later they're going to come crawling back when they need a book. "Why didn't you send me that?"
Why is that problem so common in our industry?
LAZAR: I think it's common in every industry.
BARER: There's no such thing as too busy. I have colleagues who are such huge agents, and they all find the time. I think it's an ego thing, to be honest. They feel like "You're not important enough. I don't have to call you back." Or sometimes it's because they don't want to give you bad news. That's the other thing.
I can attest to that.
BARER: The truth is, I would rather have the bad news.
In my head, I know you would.
BARER: But it's hard to give it.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's just bad business sense. I had the good fortune of working for a publisher once who returned every phone call, no matter who it was from, because it's good business.
BARER: You never know where that submission is coming from. As an editor, obviously you're inundated with material and you have thousands of agents calling you every week trying to sell you stuff. It must be hard to figure out how quickly you need to pay attention to something from some person you've never heard of. But the truth is, great things come out of nowhere. I always say to my authors, "Be really nice to your editor's assistant. Because one day that editorial assistant is going to be an editor, and they might just be yours. This is a team sport, and if you don't play well with others and give everybody respect..."
ZUCKERBROT: I also tell them that it's nice to call your editor sometimes and just say, "Thanks. I'm really happy. I love what you're doing." That's really unusual, and as someone who used to be an editor, that goes a long way. Thank the publicist. Send a letter to the publisher. Tell them how beautiful the book looks.
KLEINMAN: I like that moment, you know, when life is going along and you have this grateful author, and all of the sudden there's like this switch. You can almost hear it—click—and all of a sudden they become entitled. It's so cool to watch that. They become demanding. It's like, "Hold on. You were really grateful last week. When did the switch go off?" I've started having conversations with authors about this.
BARER: I think that's good. There are about five minutes where they're so bowled over that they have a book deal, and then, five minutes later, not so much. What also happens is that they start to compare themselves to everybody else. "How come so-and-so got a Janet Maslin review? How come so-and-so got an ad in the New York Times Book Review? How come this person got that advance?" You know what? Stop looking around. Focus on your own book. Focus on your own career. It's not about what everybody else is getting.
Tell me some common problems that you see in the work of beginning writers.
ZUCKERBROT: In a lot of cases, the story just sort of wanders off. You can say, "Well, there's great dialogue. There's great this or that." But if there's no real story anchoring it, who really cares, at the end of the day? You can have great characters, you can have interesting ideas, but there needs to be some narrative momentum, some narrative thrust.
LAZAR: I would say to start the story where the story starts. So often, the story doesn't actually start until page five. Sometimes it doesn't start until page fifty, but page five can be just as bad. As a reader, you just don't get that far.
KLEINMAN: The big problem I see is that people don't spend enough time with their books before they send them to agents. People are way too focused on getting published and not focused enough on really working on their craft.
BARER: You should revise it, and then you should put it away, and then you should revise it again. If you're going to come back to me in three months and say, "I have a better version that you should look at," then you should not have sent it to me in the first place. It's amazing how many people do that.
KLEINMAN: Or they say, "I knew there was something wrong and I was hoping you wouldn't notice."
ZUCKERBROT: I get those queries that say, "I just finished my novel...." And I think, "Well, now you need to write it three more times."
BARER: Keep working on it for another year. Show it to everybody but me.
Talk to me about your ideal client.
BARER: I think an ideal client is somebody who is obviously an incredibly gifted writer who also understands that, these days, being a writer is more than just writing a book. A writer who is willing to participate in the publication. Brainstorming. Working with their publicist. Working with their marketing department. Getting themselves out there. Using their connections. It's hard because I think a lot of writers happen to be introverts who are shy and kind of just want to be left alone to sit at their desks in solitude. I think it's somewhat unfair that the business has changed so much and that we now rely on them. But we do. And, truthfully, the writers who are the most successful sometimes are the ones who are really willing to be a part of the business aspect of it.
ZUCKERBROT: It's a business.
KLEINMAN: I would go a step further, or several steps further. I think it's not just the author who's really well connected—it's the author who's so well connected that he's sleeping with a producer at ABC News or something.
ZUCKERBROT: You have to get out there. Now is not the time to sit at home and catch up on Sopranos reruns. If you have a high school reunion or anything where you can spread the word about your book, get out there.
BARER: If you've written a book, you should want people to buy it.
ZUCKERBROT: From reading Publishers Weekly and Mediabistro and all the newsletters we get, it seems to me that people are still looking for the magic bullet. It's not Twittering. It's not videos for books. It's not whatever the latest trend is. So a lot of that falls on the shoulders of the author.
KLEINMAN: I want somebody who's well connected and whose subject matter appeals to a specific audience.
BARER: And you have to think about what that audience is and then say to yourself, "Okay, I've written a memoir about my mentally ill son. Now I'm going to write an op-ed piece about what happens when you're poor and a single mother and the state fails you, and then I'm going to write a Modern Love column about how I met my husband and how I should have seen the signs that he was also mentally ill but I missed it and then I realized it when my son became mentally ill...."
LAZAR: This is a real client?
BARER: Yeah!
KLEINMAN: This is her life she's telling you about. Her life.
BARER: My life. But yeah, this is a client, and she's doing all of those things. She's saying, "I want to do outreach to the mental health community."
KLEINMAN: But that's a memoir. The issue is novels.
BARER: But even novels. Look at The Heretic's Daughter. The author was like, "I'm going to reach out to genealogical websites. This is a story about my ancestor and I'm going to reach out to all these places." And her publicist and online people were amazing at helping her.
LAZAR: See, that's the thing about these kinds of books. As much as an author can do, you've also got to have Little, Brown paying a million dollars for the book and having everybody focused on it.
BARER: Yes. That is absolutely true.
LAZAR: An author who really hustles can sell maybe five thousand copies on their own. But you don't have a best-seller that everybody's talking about without having a publisher who's really throwing down. And they start throwing down by paying for it. Look at a lot of the books that work in a really big way.
BARER: You need the in-house support. Whether they paid five thousand dollars or five hundred thousand dollars, you need the whole company behind it.
ZUCKERBROT: It starts with the editor.
BARER: It starts with the editor. You need to have an editor who has passion, you need to have a publisher who's behind the editor, you need to have a sales force that loves the book, and you need a publicist who really decides to put their reputation on the line for the book. Without that entire team support, it's incredibly hard.
LAZAR: Can I clarify something? I'm not saying a book needs a million dollars. When I say a million dollars, I'm pulling a number out of the air, even though it's not so out of the ordinary these days. I've never sold a book for a million dollars. [Author's Note: This conversation took place two weeks before Lazar sold Anne Fortier's novel Juliet to Ballantine for seven figures.] But you hear about these books—Jeff—that sell for a million dollars. [Whooping. Laughter.] And that's how you focus people. Unless you're an Algonquin and you're smaller and more nimble and you can get the independent booksellers behind a book. Did anybody read that long article about what they did for Water for Elephants? They didn't pay a lot of money for that book—actually, for them they paid a lot of money—but they made a concerted effort that a larger house usually wouldn't make unless they paid five hundred or a million.
BARER: It's not so much the money, it's whether or not the house decides, "We are really putting all our energy behind this book. When we go out to lunch with [New York Times book critic] Dwight Garner or People magazine, we are going to talk about this book."
But that usually only happens for a few people a season at a house.
LAZAR: Exactly. It's a lottery.
So what are the other people supposed to do?
LAZAR: They've got to hustle.
Give me specifics. Tell me what they're supposed to do.
BARER: In those situations, I end up on the phone with that author brainstorming our asses off. Using every connection I have. Calling the editor and asking who they know, who their friends are. Calling the publicist and saying, "Please, we've got to come up with something."
ZUCKERBROT: You can do a bigmouth mailing on your own.
BARER: You send an e-mail to every friend and family member in your address book and say, "Help this book out."
KLEINMAN: At Folio we have a marketing director, and this is what she does for a living. But even then, there are certain titles for which there's nothing she can do. There's just nowhere to get a toehold. As opposed to books where you can say, "Okay. We have a clearly designated market for this novel, and we can clearly go after x."
LAZAR: Is there a book that she did that especially well for?
KLEINMAN: Yes. She worked on this Civil War novel I sold, Widow of the South, when it came out in paperback. She went and got a mailing list of five thousand Civil War groups and we sent them postcards and e-mails. Who knew there were five thousand Civil War groups? The point is, if you can figure out who the market is, you can go after them in a systematic way.
ZUCKERBROT: But sometimes publishers do that.
KLEINMAN: Publishers don't do that. Publishers never do that.
ZUCKERBROT: Okay, maybe not five thousand.
KLEINMAN: They're way too busy. They're going to pay for the co-op and everything else, but they're not going to do specific, grassroots marketing. They just can't. But the main point is that you've got to get a grasp on the audience for a book.
BARER: But that can be hard for literary fiction. Sometimes you have a literary novel that doesn't have a specific audience.
ZUCKERBROT: That's where the independent bookstores are still so valuable, even though there aren't as many.
BARER: But here's the thing. I am the biggest lover of independents ever. I worked in an independent bookstore. Toby and the people at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives, hand-sold Joshua Ferris's novel like nobody's business. But at the end of the day, there's a limit to the amount of stock that they are physically able to move. I think the ABA and IndieBound are amazing, and they're looking for ways to build their presence and be a powerful force, but I think it's still in development. They aren't always able to move the same number of copies as a B&N Recommends pick. Unfortunately. I think they should. I think more people should be giving them business. Can I get up on a little bit of a pedestal for a minute? This is something I say at every writers conference I attend. If you're a writer and you want to be published, go out and buy a hardcover debut novel and short-story collection tomorrow. And next month, do it again. Buy one every freaking month. Because if you want to be published and you want people to buy your books, and you are not out there supporting fiction and debut authors, you are the biggest hypocrite in the world and I don't know who you think you are. I mean, come on, people!
ZUCKERBROT: But when you're talking about literary fiction—books that can't be boiled down to a sentence, and where you can't target a specific group—how do books like that find their audience? You're saying it's not independent bookstores anymore. Do you think reviews still play a part?
BARER: I think it's word-of-mouth. I think word-of-mouth does more than anything else.
ZUCKERBROT: But where is that word-of-mouth happening now? The Internet?
BARER: Everywhere. It has to be one of those books where everybody you know is talking about it, you see it everywhere you go, it's being reviewed on every Web site.
ZUCKERBROT: Exactly. And the publishers are asking, "How are we supposed to get that buzz going when there's so much noise and everyone is buzzing?"
KLEINMAN: You know what the answer is? The answer is the editor. I'm convinced that if you have a choice between an editor who is a great editor—who really understands fiction, how it works, how to shape it—versus an editor who is a cheerleader, I will always, from now on and forever afterward, take the cheerleader. For a long time I kept thinking, "It's so important to have an editor who can shape the book." I was such a moron.
But let's talk about what your authors are doing that's working. What are your authors teaching you about selling books today?
ZUCKERBROT: I have a client who everybody really likes. She's smart. She's thoughtful. She's genuinely nice. Across the board, wherever she goes, everyone just wants to support her. That's a huge part of it. You've got to be on your best behavior, even if you're in a crappy mood. Always write thank-you notes. Help other writers. I have another client who's like that too. So aside from being smart and writing something really terrific, I think you have to have people rooting for you.
BARER: I'm going to say something that I think will be really unpopular. It always surprises me when seemingly smart writers—I can't believe I'm saying this, it's probably because I'm drunk—who are obviously really talented choose the worst subject matter to write about. I want to say, "Look around you." I respect and understand that some writers don't like to look at other books while they're working on something. But think about who wants to read about this character. If you have spent four hundred pages writing about a deeply unsympathetic person, or an event that's already been written about ten times, or...I mean, the unlikable character thing is really hard for me to understand. If I don't like a character, why would I want to spend four hundred pages with them? Why would you write a whole book about them? Am I wrong about that?
LAZAR: No, not at all.
ZUCKERBROT: But there are some authors who you tell that to—"This character isn't likable"—and they think the character has redeeming qualities and is likable. I have an officemate who has this wonderful nonfiction writer who was working on his or her next book and picked some subject matter that was so obscure. The agent said, "Who is the audience for this?" The writer explained that he or she was really passionate about it. The agent said, "But who's supposed to read this? You may be passionate about it—"
BARER: But you do want people to buy the book.
ZUCKERBROT: Right. It's not that you have to write for your audience. But you have to keep your audience in mind. That's a distinction you have to make. Every once in a while I'll go to a writers conference and meet someone who says, "I don't read contemporary fiction." I think, "Next." I don't want to hear that you're mired in the classics. The classics are great. They're an amazing foundation to have. But if you are not reading what is being published today, and what is selling, who are you writing for?
KLEINMAN: It just depends on what you want as a writer. If you want to write literary fiction that's beautifully done but will be published by a university press and won't get a big print run, then that's great. But don't come yelling at us because we can't sell something that's not commercial enough. I just think it's a different marketplace and a different kind of attitude.
I hear a lot of writers complain about how hard it is to get an agent. What do you guys think about that?
BARER: Try how hard it is to sell a book!
ZUCKERBROT: When you see a great query letter, or a book that's really great, it stands out from the pack. Everyone's all over it. Part of the problem is that most of the query letters we see are sort of generic sounding. People say, "I've written a book" but don't tell you anything about who they are. They don't list credentials. They don't have to have credentials, but they should just say, "This is my first novel." It's not easy, but just try to write a really smart and thoughtful letter. I always think about the people in all these writing groups who spend years working on something. Share your query letter with the people in your writing group. Does your letter interest them?
BARER: I would also say that the first twenty pages count more than anything. As an agent, you have a limited amount of time, and if those twenty pages don't blow you away...
ZUCKERBROT: And you get these people who say, "I enclose the first twenty pages, but it doesn't get good until page seventy." Wrong answer! I think, "Ditch pages one through sixty-nine." I can't send this to an editor and say, "Here's this really great novel, and it gets good on page seventy."
KLEINMAN: But on the other side of the coin, it feels like what people don't want to hear—readers, editors, agents—is that the premise has been done. Or that it's so bizarre that you can't figure out what to do with it. I'll give you an example. I went to this Web site for writers that I spend a lot of time on, and one writer had written a query letter about his book. The character is this guy who is sitting and trying to do something, and this client of his comes in, sits down, and blows her brains out in front of him. That's how the book starts. It's sort of interesting, but there's also this huge yuck factor. You're reading it and thinking, "Okay, I can't imagine calling up an editor and saying, ‘So, I have this really yucky book....'" This author is having a real problem selling the book. No agent wants to even look at it. So what's he doing wrong? According to everybody else, it's all about writing a great letter. And that's what he keeps doing: He's going back again and again and again to work on the letter and make the letter great. Dude, the problem is—
BARER: You have to think about the story.
KLEINMAN: Exactly.
BARER: Every once in a while I think you can transcend that. You'll have an author like Elizabeth McCracken who writes a memoir that sounds so devastating and yet she's so gifted and it's so well done.
KLEINMAN: But that's not even the same universe as what we're talking about. We're talking about first novelists.
BARER: That's right. You're right.
ZUCKERBROT: The thing is, I don't think there are any hard-and-fast rules. There are guidelines.
KLEINMAN: Do you think The Lovely Bones would have been published if it had been her first book?
ZUCKERBROT: I don't know what it looked like unedited, so it's hard to say. I only read the edited version. But I read it in bound galleys and I was hooked from the first sentence. I couldn't put it down.
KLEINMAN: Well, I so could put it down that I actually threw it out the window. I didn't even want it in the house with me.
BARER: I was a very bad judge of that book. I really liked it, but I thought, "This will be really hard to break out because it's so upsetting."
KLEINMAN: "I've got this great book about a dead nine-year-old girl."
BARER: It's so hard to say that to a woman. And let's just put it on the record right now that women buy fiction and men do not. Step up to the fucking plate, men out there, and start buying some fiction—I mean literary fiction—because otherwise we're all just going to keep that in mind when you're trying to get published. Show yourselves! Apparently, for some reason, they aren't. I don't know why. You have these incredibly talented young male writers like Ben Kunkel and Nat Rich who are publishing books, and where are the young men who should be buying them?
KLEINMAN: Totally playing video games, and I don't blame them.
What do you mean by that?
KLEINMAN: I just find that so much fiction these days doesn't capture me.
ZUCKERBROT: Have you read Knockemstiff? Donald Ray Pollock, debut collection, set in Knockemstiff, Ohio, in the sixties and seventies? I read a lot of things and think, "Eh, I like it but I don't love it." I went gaga for this book. It's one of the best collections I've ever read. I read it and thought, "I'm jealous that I didn't represent this." Now, I don't know who's buying it. It's probably women like me who love Lee K. Abbott, Ray Carver, Richard Ford, those kinds of writers.
KLEINMAN: See, I don't want to read short fiction. I don't want to curl up with a collection of short stories. It's totally boring.
BARER: You're what's wrong with literary fiction today.
ZUCKERBROT: It's not boring at all! How can you say that?
KLEINMAN: I want to get captured by a book and find myself five hundred pages later—
BARER: You can be captured by a short story collection.
ZUCKERBROT: You totally can. Did you read Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler?
KLEINMAN: No, I keep falling asleep before I can get started on those things. I see their covers and I want to fall asleep.
BARER: Lorrie Moore? Alice Munro?
ZUCKERBROT: Did you ever read Eudora Welty?
BARER: This is why story collections are so fucking hard. Ninety percent of the world doesn't want to read them.
Tell us what isn't captivating you.
KLEINMAN: If I want to read a book, and I'm going to spend thirty bucks, I don't want to read about a bunch of characters who are going to come and go. I want to fall in love with these characters. I want to fall in love with these characters and the world they're living in so completely—
BARER: Julie Orringer! Jhumpa Lahiri! Nathan Englander! There are so many great collections out there.
ZUCKERBROT: What about the people who say, "I don't have time to read a novel"? Short story collection! You can start and finish in a short period of time.
KLEINMAN: No, to me the reason they don't have time to read is because the books are not keeping their interest.
What is not keeping their interest?
KLEINMAN: I think there's so much MFA stuff with such a standard voice and such a standard protocol. Everything is—
BARER: Jim Shepard's last short story collection!
KLEINMAN: I'm falling asleep already.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's so personal. Seriously, that's why I love something and another agent turns it down. It depends on your life experiences that you bring to that book at the moment. Does it speak to you or does it not? It's the same thing with movies. There must be movies you love and I hate. It doesn't mean they're good or bad. I think that's the case with a lot of literary fiction.
BARER: Fiction is subjective, and I really believe that part of what I take on and what I pay attention to depends on the mood I'm in and what's going on in my life. If I have just had a horrible breakup, and a novel comes in that's all about some incredibly intense love affair, I'm probably not the best reader for that book.
KLEINMAN: I think it's much wider than that. I think the problem is that we're all sheep. I think we're all coming from the same complex. We're all either in New York or affiliated with New York and have the same kind of vision because "this is the stuff that sells." I think there's a uniformity.
Now you're talking about a problem with the publishing industry.
KLEINMAN: Let me tell you what I mean. I have a house in Virginia, and I have friends come down and visit. I had this friend of mine who edits diet books come to visit. We went to IHOP for lunch. She ordered an omelet. Have you ever had an IHOP omelet? You get an omelet and pancakes and toast and all this other stuff. When it arrived, she was frantic. She was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe there's all this food. What are we going to do? How can these people do this?" She sells diet books. That is her market. That's what she does for a living. I kept thinking, "You sell diet books and you don't even know that this is how America eats." And I honestly feel that's how it is with fiction, too.
ZUCKERBROT: People in New York are out of touch?
KLEINMAN: New York is a whole different planet. And I don't think writers and publishers are thinking about the market.
BARER: I disagree. I think there are still—and these might not be the seven-figure or even the six-figure deals—but there are still editors out there who fall in love with a story and feel there is at least enough of a hook that they can use as their marketing angle to take a chance that a book might be the next big thing. Or even if it's not the next big thing, it's still a worthy book to pursue. I have sold novels for not a lot of money to editors who feel like, "I just love this story and I can't let it go. I can't give it up." And maybe it'll be huge, because of some fluke, and maybe it won't, but clearly this writer is gifted and this is a wonderful book and hopefully they will go on to do bigger and better things and turn into somebody like...think of all those writers for whom publishers got in on the ground floor.
LAZAR: Stephen King.
BARER: Ann Patchett.
ZUCKERBROT: Lorrie Moore.
BARER: Writers who were published for years and years and somehow their third or fourth book exploded, and it was because somebody stuck with them.
But now there's so much emphasis on the first book because of how bookstores are ordering based on the sales track. If the first book doesn't sell, you can be in trouble.
LAZAR: My first New York Times best-seller was by a woman whose first book sold for not a huge sum of money. But the reason it worked was because her editor, Jeanette Perez at Harper, threw down for that book from beginning to end. She was there from the beginning of the publication to the end of the publication. She bought the author's next book, and she bought the author's third and fourth books. On the first book, they changed the title three times. They changed the cover four times. And because they didn't pay so much money for the book, it could have fallen through every single crack in the publishing floor. But Jeanette just did not let it happen. She's wonderful to work with because she will get behind a book and push and push and push. An author can make a world of difference, but the level of success we're talking about requires a publisher to get behind a book and get a lot of copies out there.
BARER: Put that book into stores. Convince your sales force that they need to convince booksellers to order that book. If the book is in stores, it has 100 percent more chance of selling than if it's not in stores. If you only print ten thousand copies and people walk into Barnes & Noble and look on the tables and it's not there, how are they supposed to know to buy it?
KLEINMAN: The publishers pay for that co-op.
LAZAR: Co-op is the most amazing thing. I have a couple of books that I'm watching, and these are not authors who are huge sellers. But they got three or four weeks of co-op and the books are selling twelve hundred or fifteen hundred copies a week. The week the co-op ends, the sales go down to two hundred. It's like the book just disappears. That's why I think it's fair to let authors know that distribution and placement are so important. If you put something in front of people's faces, they'll buy it.
BARER: Having worked at an independent bookstore, I think it's true that a lot of people don't know what to read. They want to buy a book but they don't know how to pick a book. And the easiest way to pick a book is if it's on a table. I think a lot of book buyers don't know that the reason a book is on a table is because it was paid to be put there. And I think publishers even choose which books are eligible to be paid for.
LAZAR: This is a really interesting subject because it's something we all know about and talk about all the time, but as agents, we have very little control over. As an agent, one thing that I like is having control over things. Sometimes, watching a publisher publish a book, and knowing everything that we know and all the tools you need and all the things that should fall into place, and just watching a book...it's so amazing when it happens and it's so painful when you can just feel in your heart that it's not happening.
KLEINMAN: That's the reason we started Folio. I was going so insane thinking about all these things that weren't happening. I kept thinking, "Why aren't people doing something?" So we have a marketing person, a lecture agent, a bunch of things like that.
BARER: You took it out of their hands and put it in your hands.
KLEINMAN: When Harper was publishing The Art of Racing in the Rain, they published the James Frey novel on the same day. I was just ballistic. But I could call up the publisher and say, "Okay, I know you have a book that is going to be much more media important for you," and I could at least say to them, "Let's use my person." It was this amazing power thing. All of a sudden I could feel the balance of power changing. "Oh, it's not always begging the publisher to do something." That was cool.
Do you guys think editors still edit as much as they used to?
ALL: Yes.
BARER: I think it's a myth.
ZUCKERBROT: I think it's a myth that might have been started by dissatisfied and unhappy authors.
KLEINMAN: Who says that stuff?
LAZAR: Just from having read [Michael Korda's] Another Life, it sounds like in those days, on a scale of one to ten, if a book was at three, an editor could buy it. Today a book has to be at six or seven and then the editor can take it to ten.
BARER: The difference is not that they don't edit. The difference is that they can't buy it if it's not at a certain level.
LAZAR: Yeah. They aren't any more or less talented than editors fifty years ago, but their hands are tied when a book is not at a certain level. That's why we have to spend so much time on the editing.
ZUCKERBROT: Also, editors today, as opposed to editors fifty years ago, spend most of their days in meetings. Editing is done at night and on the weekends. It's a very different thing.
BARER: I think Dan's point is really true. I will not send out a book until I've done three line edits and I cannot think of a single other thing that I can do to help it.
LAZAR: And the writers sometimes get—
BARER: They're ready to kill me! They're like, "Please, please let it go. Please, can't we just try it?" No! I will not send it out until it is perfect to me, and then it will be edited again by your editor. But it will have a chance at actually selling.
LAZAR: What Renee said about meetings is so true. This week, for some reason all of these foreign publishers are coming to meet with us. Yesterday, I had five meetings not including my lunch date. My e-mail piled up, my desk piled up, and I remember getting back to my desk and calling someone back after the whole day had passed and thinking, "I will never again get mad at an editor I like who takes a day to call me back." Now I understand that I may have caught them on the day when they had their editorial meeting, their jacket meeting, and their positioning meeting, and they just physically were not able to call me back. I remember getting back to my desk and going, "Where the hell did my day go?"
How else have things changed? Did everybody read that end-of-publishing article in New York magazine?
LAZAR: I read it and couldn't decide if I should buy up every issue I could get my hands on and throw them off the top of the HarperCollins building, or if I should throw myself off and make it faster. But I talked to Amy Berkower and Al Zuckerman and Robin Rue, who have been in this business for a lot longer than I have, and they all said, "We read that same article every single year."
BARER: People who are not in the business say that to me all the time. "Oh, isn't publishing dying?"
ZUCKERBROT: But the music industry is dead. Of all the media that's really dying or dead, it's music. Books are healthy compared to music. But when people talk about the Kindle and the Sony Reader? Books are pretty much a perfect technology. So all this stuff about how e-books are going to—
KLEINMAN: You freak! What are you talking about? These things [grabs a book] are Paleolithic!
ZUCKERBROT: It's portable. It lasts. If you want to read something, what's broken about it?
KLEINMAN: I don't want to read it there. I can't search that. It's heavy.
ZUCKERBROT: Are you serious?
KLEINMAN: I'm totally serious.
LAZAR: I agree with you, but I don't think the Kindle is the answer. It's going to be something that's not here yet.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe in fifteen or twenty years.
LAZAR: But whatever the iPod of books is going to be, it's going to come sooner than we think. It's going to change things.
ZUCKERBROT: But does that change the fact that people don't read the way they go to the movies or the way they buy music? That's the question.
KLEINMAN: No, the point is that you simply have to make the device and the medium more interesting to people who do listen to music and go to the movies.
ZUCKERBROT: Don't you have to make the words on the page more interesting? Or is it a combination of the two?
LAZAR: Yeah, I think it's both.
I just don't see how the iPod-for-books analogy works. Books and music are different. The problem with music was that you had to carry around all these CDs or tapes. But you're only reading one book at a time. Most people, anyway. And you want people in the café to be able to see what you're reading so you can look cool and pick up girls.
BARER: It's always all about picking up girls.
KLEINMAN: My wife and daughter do books on tape, and they love them. They take them to the car, then they carry them in to the CD player in the house, then they carry them upstairs and listen to them in the bedroom. The idea that an audio book is different from a printed book strikes me as just ludicrous. They're the same thing.
LAZAR: I listened to audio books all through high school, and I loved them. But it's different.
KLEINMAN: It's a different experience, but it's the same stuff, whether it's on the page or you're listening to it. It's the same book. I'm saying that we should be thinking about something totally different. There should be a device that deals with the text in whatever medium it's in, and obviously that's why Amazon bought Audible.
ZUCKERBROT: Reading the words on a page and listening to them are not the same experience. I wish I was a neuroscientist so I could really explain it.
KLEINMAN: You're doing the head of the pin thing. It's not important. The point is that you have content that you're downloading into your brain, and it doesn't matter if you're reading it or listening to it or touching the page with Braille. Words are traveling into your head, and however they're getting there, they're getting there. We need a single device that will do that and make it somehow interesting and exciting and fun and interactive. There's all this stuff that books can do, and they're not doing it. The answer is always, "This [holds up a book] is the perfect device. It's perfect. It's been perfect for five hundred years...."
ZUCKERBROT: What I meant is that when we talk about how to create more readers, people aren't not reading books because carrying them in your bag is so difficult, or opening it to the page is so difficult.
KLEINMAN: I think it is.
ZUCKERBROT: It's not. This is a technology that's been around for a long, long time, and it works, unless you happen to leave it out in the rain.
LAZAR: I bet the Kindle would break if you left it out in the rain, too.
ZUCKERBROT: The point is, how do we create a new generation of readers? That's one of the many reasons why Harry Potter has been so fabulous. We have to grow new generations of readers. And technology can help. I'm a dinosaur. I grew up with books and typewriters. But this new generation wants all the gadgets. They want to be able to play with it and they want to be nimble.
BARER: I have to say, I really hate this debate of either/or. That we're either going to become this electronic world or we're going to be dinosaurs. Hopefully we will continue to grow readers, and people will read in several mediums, whether it's on their computers or on their e-book-version whatevers or on the printed page. The goal of agents and publishers is to keep finding ways in which we can reach as many of those readers as possible and provide as many opportunities for them to read our books as we can. Not just one way, but many ways.
KLEINMAN: That's the problem. I don't think that's what publishers are doing now. They are going by the same old Paleolithic ways of doing things. They are translating this ancient technique of reading into the Kindle. But it's the same thing. And I think it needs to be something different.
How do you feel that the consolidation of publishers has affected being a writer today?
KLEINMAN: It's totally a drag.
ZUCKERBROT: As an agent, you have fewer places to submit. It's supposed to be about competition. But if you go to Penguin, only one imprint can bid. At Simon & Schuster there's a house bid.
BARER: At Random House they can bid but they can't be bidding against just each other.
KLEINMAN: It's not just that, it's the loss of personalities.
BARER: They all used to have such distinctive personalities.
ZUCKERBROT: And now every house has like twenty-five imprints. The editors have their own personalities and their own styles, but sometimes I can't differentiate which houses want what because there's so much crossover. After a while, they lose their identities. What's the difference between Imprint A and Imprint B?
KLEINMAN: It's so insane when you go to these various imprints that sound so similar—they're doing the same kinds of books—and they say, "This isn't the kind of book we publish. This isn't right for our list." You're like, "Dudes, your lists are all generic now. What are you talking about?" You don't always get that, but sometimes you do.
BARER: Look at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I love HMH. But I loved being able to go to both of them because I felt like they had distinct flavors.
ZUCKERBROT: It goes back to what an agent can do with your book, and how to place it. That's where it hurts writers.
BARER: Here is what kills me: Everybody is looking for a big book. Nobody wants to take the chance on a kind of unknown, odd debut novel that maybe you don't pay a lot for. Even the houses that you used to think of, now they read the book and say, "We're not sure we could get out fifteen thousand copies, and if we can't do that, we don't really want to do it." It's like, how do you know you can't get out fifteen thousand unless you buy the book and convince yourself to try? They want a sure thing.
KLEINMAN: But you don't know who the market is, you don't know how to position this thing, you don't know how to sell it to somebody. It's a commodity.
BARER: But I also think it's about the fact that every publisher wants a book that everybody reads. And when we're talking about fiction, it's impossible to know.
KLEINMAN: No. They just want books for which you can clearly delineate the market. It has nothing to do with everybody.
BARER: But I'm talking about literary fiction where maybe...I'll give you an example. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite books of the last decade. I must have recommended that book to at least fifty people, half of whom were like, "You're right, this is one of the best books I've ever read," and half of whom were like, "You're fucking crazy. I don't get it. It's weird. What is this book supposed to be? Is it science fiction?" If that was a debut novel, if it wasn't Ishiguro, and I had said to a publisher, "Here's a book that some people are going to love and some people are going to think is fucking weird," it's possible that a publisher would have said, "We're looking for something that everybody's going to love. We want a book that has mass commercial appeal." That is not that book, and the times when publishers are willing to take chances on those books are fewer and farther between.
LAZAR: It's true. But I think one of the reasons why agents exist is that after a while, fingers crossed, you get to a point where something like that can be a big book because you say so. "Because I say this is a big book, this is a big book." Even if it's weird. Look what Eric Simonoff did for The Gargoyle. Whether or not it sold well, he said, "This is a big book," and it was.
ZUCKERBROT: If Nicole Aragi says, "This is a big book," you don't think editors sit up and listen?
BARER: Now we've just convinced all these writers to send their books to Nicole and Eric instead of us!
ZUCKERBROT: Everyone already knows who they are.
That's an interesting point. How do you guys compete with people who have been around longer?
LAZAR: I compete. I either lose the author or I win them over with my enthusiasm, my speed, my ideas for their book, and the books I've done that I can point to.
BARER: I am so picky about what I take on. I really don't take on a lot of stuff. So if I am so crazy about a book that I want to take it on, somewhere deep inside of me I believe that it's not possible for somebody else to be as crazy about it as I am. So you will never have as passionate an agent as you will have in me.
ZUCKERBROT: But you also talk to them about your vision for the book.
BARER: You do a lot of editorial work with them.
LAZAR: You give free notes.
ZUCKERBROT: And sometimes you lose.
BARER: Sometimes it works against you. Some writers don't want those notes. I have lost books where I have said, "Here's what this book needs. I know exactly how to take it to the next level."
LAZAR: Then you know what? You would not have been the right agent. For example, when I read The Art of Racing in the Rain, I admired it very much but I thought it needed a little more x, y, z, let's say. I remember writing a very nice note to Garth and saying, "This is very impressive, but blah blah blah." Well, the next thing you know, some other motherfucker sells it for $1.25 million the way it was. [Laughter.]
KLEINMAN: Call me a mofo.
LAZAR: Okay, a mofo. If I had taken that book on the way it was, I either would have put him through editorial hell or I would have sent it out the way it was and maybe—not intentionally—underpitched it and if someone tried to preempt it for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars, I would have been grateful.
KLEINMAN: You want to know how I handled that, just because I think it's kind of interesting? I read the first fifty pages and knew exactly what was wrong with the book. I called him and said, "Here's what you need to do to fix it." He said, "Do you want to see the rest?" I was like, "No. There's no point. I know you have to fix this first." He was like, "Yeah, you're right. I see exactly what you mean." All I can say is, I don't feel like I'm competing against other agents.
BARER: You never feel like you're competing against them?
KLEINMAN: I don't want to think about it like that. I feel like I've got to have a relationship with the author, and it's me and the author.
BARER: Do you ever lose things?
KLEINMAN: Constantly.
Do the rest of you feel competitive?
LAZAR: I feel competitive with a certain pool of agents.
BARER: I feel competitive all the time. But some of the people I compete with the most are the people I admire the most. So when they get a book that I really wanted, I feel validated and really happy for them. But it's impossible to not feel competitive in this industry.
KLEINMAN: What I hate is when you don't know if something is out with other people. I had this woman, and I should have known that she had her book out with other agents. I wrote her this nice rejection letter, gave her my comments, and thought I was sort of done. Then she calls me up and we have a conversation about the freaking book. Then we meet at some conference and I talk to her about the book. She implements everything and sends me the book, and a week later I get, "I have an offer of representation."
ZUCKERBROT: But maybe she was taking comments from a whole bunch of agents.
KLEINMAN: Probably.
ZUCKERBROT: And you could have asked her.
KLEINMAN: Oh, yeah, I totally should have. But I don't think about it.
BARER: You don't have to give exclusives to agents, but you have to be up-front and say, "Other people have this."
ZUCKERBROT: I hate it when I'm in the middle of reading something and somebody e-mails me and says, "I just want to let you know that I've received an offer of representation and I'm taking it."
BARER: Yeah, kiss my ass! Thanks so much for giving me an opportunity! But I think it's okay to say, "I've gotten an offer, I'm considering it, and I'd love for you to read it as soon as possible and let me know."
ZUCKERBROT: That's the way to do it.
BARER: There's no clock on this. If one agent offers you representation, and you have the book out with other people, that offer, if it's genuine, will not evaporate. Take your time. Ask questions. Give other agents a chance. Don't jump at the first guy who offers you a ring.
ZUCKERBROT: But they get scared. The other thing to remember is that you're hiring an agent to work for you. It's been flipped in such an odd way. You have all these writers who are so desperate. But the truth of the matter is, they're hiring us to work for them.
KLEINMAN: So much of it's about responsiveness. My favorite story is about this book I got from a doctor in San Francisco. He'd written this novel. He sent it to me on a Wednesday, and I was doing the whole "I'm going to be an important literary person" thing and I thought, "I'll read it on my at-home reading day on Friday." So I took it home on Friday and read the book and totally loved it. I called the author and said, "I would love to represent you." He said, "Well, Elaine Koster just offered representation, and I'm going to go with her."
LAZAR: Oh, man.
BARER: Not even a conversation.
KLEINMAN: The book was called The Kite Runner. [Extended whooping and laughter.] And I think he did absolutely the right thing. She was totally on the ball.
LAZAR: You lost The Kite Runner? I lost The Art of Racing in the Rain, but you lost The Kite Runner? That trumps everything.
KLEINMAN: The point is, I think so much of this business is egotistical agents who make writers wait.
BARER: But you weren't making him wait.
KLEINMAN: I totally did. I was like, "I'll read it on Friday."
ZUCKERBROT: But that's only forty-eight hours!
LAZAR: You know what? Thank God for those agents who make people wait. Because then we have an advantage. We're faster.
What should writers know about agents that they don't know?
ZUCKERBROT: We're human.
KLEINMAN: Nooooo.
LAZAR: Don't tell them that.
ZUCKERBROT: We're overworked like everyone else?
BARER: We're subjective readers.
ZUCKERBROT: We're basically decent people who are just overwhelmed with submissions. What I always hear is, "Agents never get back to me. They don't do this, they don't do that."
BARER: I had 175 e-mails today. I just can't humanly get back to everybody in one day!
ZUCKERBROT: We're always looking for new writers, but our priority is our existing clients. It's a balance between taking care of our existing clients and finding new writers.
KLEINMAN: I have two things to say. First of all, I think all agents are sheep. I think they all follow the herd. They're subjective, but they're subjective within a limited vocabulary. They want to do certain kinds of things. So if they do commercial fiction, they like the same kind of commercial fiction. Because they know it sells. So that's the first thing—agents are sheep. And the second thing...crap, I had this really good second thing and now I can't remember what it is. Forget it, there's only one thing.
What about you, Dan?
LAZAR: I'm so irritated by what he just said that I can't think of anything.
BARER: I have to agree. I think that's so wrong. I'm not a sheep.
ZUCKERBROT: Maybe a lemming.
BARER: I'm not a sheep or a lemming!
KLEINMAN: I just remembered the other thing. I think agents are absolutely no busier than any other human being in modern times. So Julie got 175 e-mails today. I'll bet you most first-year lawyers get 175 e-mails a day. I honestly think it's a job like everybody else's—it just may take a little longer than others.
BARER: I'm not complaining about the fact that I get 175 e-mails a day. But I do want to speak to the busyness. Just because it may take me two or three days longer than another agent to read your material doesn't necessarily mean that I won't be the best agent once I read it and fall in love with it.
KLEINMAN: I actually agree. Because you could have a bad agent read it fast.
BARER: Absolutely.
KLEINMAN: However, I think responsiveness is important. I think there's a huge problem in this business because the balance is so shifted. I have gone out to lunch with big agents and felt like we had to order for three—me, the agent, and the agent's ego.
BARER: But to me it's not about ego. To me it's that I want to give all my clients everything I have. I spend my day giving my clients as much attention as they need. Which means that it's harder to find the time for new writers.
LAZAR: It's also supply and demand. There are just a lot more writers out there who need agents than there are agents.
BARER: But the thing is, I'm always looking for new writers, and I want to represent new clients, but I really want to take care of the clients I've already made a commitment to. So if I have a client who calls me and is having a meltdown because they're stuck in Arizona or something or they can't finish a chapter....
LAZAR: What are you, a travel agent?
BARER: Yes! I am shrink and mom and lawyer and editor and marriage counselor. There are days when I spend five hours handling problems for somebody.
KLEINMAN: I think that's a woman thing. I don't feel like I do that at all.
BARER: That is 50 percent of my job.
LAZAR: That's a dangerous thing to say: "I think that's a woman thing."
ZUCKERBROT: You don't get calls from clients who say, "My husband's left me," or "Oh my God, my house burned down"?
BARER: "I'm stuck on this chapter and my kid's in school now and I think that's part of what's making it so hard"? My job is to help them get through that.
LAZAR: You do become sort of an amateur therapist and an amateur financial advisor.
What is getting harder about your job?
BARER: Selling books. Selling good literary fiction is getting harder.
ZUCKERBROT: BookScan. If you have a literary writer with great reviews, but the sales aren't going in the right direction, it's really tough. The editor punches in the ISBN and there's the sales history. It's really tough if the writer's third book hasn't taken off.
So what are you guys doing, or trying to do, for writers who find themselves in that situation?
KLEINMAN: This is why we have people on staff. We have a marketing person and a lecture person. I think it's really important for people in this business to be thinking outside the box. I really feel like so many of these agents are dinosaurs. They have a model that works for them because they have a huge backlist. Those backlist books keep selling, and that's the way they work. But I don't think that's going to work in ten years. I think you have to be thinking of other ways of doing it. One of them, for instance, is speaking. People are speaking in different kinds of venues and selling books. The question is, How can you get those books tracked through BookScan? But there are answers to that kind of thing.
BARER: I think it's important to think carefully about what the next book is. I often say to my writers, "What are you thinking about writing next, and why?"
KLEINMAN: But that's still passive.
BARER: I disagree. I've had writers who had first books that didn't perform extraordinarily well hand me fifty or one hundred pages of their second novel and I've said to them, "This will not break you out. I can sell this book. It will keep you in the midlist, but it will not help your career. Put this book aside and start something else." And they have.
KLEINMAN: Can I ask a question here? I want to figure out how to change the dynamics of the power. Because no matter how you're doing it, it's, "Okay, write another book." It's always us saying to the publisher, "Please get that co-op." It's all about distribution. And we are powerless.
LAZAR: We aren't powerless. But we can't do everybody's job. If that were the case, then I should just quit being an agent and become a publisher and do it myself. Which I'm not going to do, because I don't know how to do it.
KLEINMAN: If you do, can I come work for you?
LAZAR: No.
KLEINMAN: He means that in a nice way. But to me a lot of it has to be a question of shifting the power and figuring out what the publisher can do really well and how we can get them to focus on the stuff they do really well. And the stuff that they can do really well and we can't is distribution and co-op and getting those books into stores.
LAZAR: And they can do it aggressively and excitedly when they have a book that's exciting. I think Julie's point is a good one. I had an author whose first book, without going into too many details, just tanked. It probably sold less than a thousand copies. We had a long, long talk, and she's really smart, and she changed her new book around. She got a new idea. She looked at books that were working and changed the way she constructed her second novel. And if that first book sold under a thousand copies, the new one isn't going to sell a million copies, but it's probably selling between five and ten thousand copies. Which is a step in the right direction.
BARER: It can sound really crass to talk in those kinds of terms. Sometimes I'll meet writers and they'll say, "Well, you're not talking about the craft, you're talking about the commercial aspect." No, I'm talking about both. If you're a really strong writer, then you should be able to really think about story. What story is going to appeal to a large number of people and what story is going to appeal to five people? The books that don't work these days are those wonderful little books that I loved in the eighties—those very quiet, introspective, interior, family coming-of-age books. I loved those books. But they just don't work anymore.
What is the worst part of your job?
LAZAR: Rejection on a book you love. When no one can see how brilliant you are. You think, "This book is brilliant and I'm brilliant for loving it," but nobody agrees.
KLEINMAN: For me it's getting fired. I've been fired by two authors so far, and I will never, ever forget it.
BARER: I would say that not being able to sell a book and having a book that you've spent two years editing, selling, and publishing die upon publication are equally horrible experiences. The other thing that writers may not realize about agents is that I lie awake in bed at night and I think about the books I couldn't sell or the books I sold that didn't work and it's all I can do not to cry myself to sleep. It hurts us as much as it hurts them.
ZUCKERBROT: And you do postmortems. I sometimes think, "Why doesn't everybody see this book's brilliance? Did I somehow not do my job selling it?"
BARER: "Did I let the author down? Was there another editor I could have tried?"
ZUCKERBROT: "Did I go to the wrong editor at this house?"
What's the best part about your job?
ZUCKERBROT: Discovering a great new voice and having lots of editors want to buy the book and then making a great deal. That's really what it's all about.
BARER: I have to agree. I think the first part is the greatest part of the job. When you finish a book and think, "Oh. My. God. This book is so amazing, and right now I am one of the few people in the world who knows how incredible it is, and pretty soon everybody will know. And I will help make that happen." But nothing comes close to calling a writer and saying, "Your book is going to be published."
LAZAR: Selling the book that you've had a hard time selling, and then having it work. Calling the author is really cool too. Their reactions are so funny because they range from dumbfounded silence to screaming in your ear. I'm like, "I'm not fucking kidding you, I'm not fucking kidding you." One of the absolute coolest things is being on the subway and seeing someone reading one of your books.
KLEINMAN: I like plotting. I love the whole process that you're all talking about, but I also love when you're sitting down with this team of people and coming up with these plans, and you're thinking it through, and you feel like you're all working together. That's really cool.
BARER: Acknowledgments! I love the acknowledgments! I love going to a bookstore and being like, "Look, there's my name!"
LAZAR: Authors should always do that. When I get a finished copy of a book and it doesn't have acknowledgments, I don't feel bad, but it feels much better when you get acknowledged.
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AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of the conversation, glutted with food and alcohol, the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of subjects that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. The participants swore a blood oath never to reveal who said what, and a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to throw any sleuths off the scent.
Tell writers something they should know about editors but may not.
Editors are worried about their jobs. It's a fact of life. It's a business, and they can get fired, and they have to keep their jobs.
You're probably going to have your agent for a lot longer than you're going to have your editor.
The smaller the editor's list, and the smaller the imprint, the more freedom they have to be selective about what they take on and the more time they have to be really responsive and really detail-oriented. It's a lot harder for an editor who's under pressure to buy a lot of books to be able to really be with you every minute.
Tell me about some editors who you think are really good for fiction.
I really like working with Stacy Creamer. I think she's really smart and has a great commercial eye.
Reagan Arthur. She's really selective, so when she loves something, you know that she's insanely in love with it. She will go to the mat and do anything for the book. And I never feel like she is lying to me or giving me company bullshit.
The best editors are the ones who can get people in-house to pay attention. And they have the track record to show for it. You said Reagan, who has an amazing track record, and I would say Sally Kim.
I would sell a kidney to have a book with Courtney Hodell. She's one of the smartest, most interesting people I know. When she buys a book, she is so passionate and articulate about it.
When writers are trying to pick an agent, what are some warning signs that they should watch out for?
They try to charge you money.
They promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars. They say, "I can get you six figures. I can get you national media."
Agents who say, "This needs an edit, and let me recommend you to someone" who will charge you ten thousand dollars. A real agent should be able to help you shape something.
Somebody who says, "I'm really excited about your book and I'd like to sign you up," and then three months later you still haven't heard back from them.
Tell me how you feel about lunch.
Lunch is part of the job. Some days it's really fun and you come back totally energized and inspired, and some days you come back and think, "In six months, that person is leaving publishing and I will never send them anything, they will never buy anything, and that was an enormous waste of my time."
Sometimes you come back from lunch and you feel small and insulted and insecure.
It's like having five blind dates a week.
Sometimes you score big time, and sometimes you're like, "Could I have the waiter call me on my cell phone and pretend that I have an emergency?"
My most terrifying lunch, which turned out to be absolutely terrific, was when I had worked up the guts to start submitting to Julie Grau. After a while she invited me out to lunch. She called me the day before and said, "I'm going to bring Cindy [Spiegel] with me, too. Is that okay?" It turned out to be lovely, but I was so scared.
I had that same lunch with Sonny Mehta. I was like, "I...I...I...I'm not even sure I'm going to be able to get through this lunch and speak coherently."
What are the dumbest mistakes that writers can make in terms of dealing with their editor or agent?
Saying bad things about them. Ever.
Sending seventeen e-mails about seventeen different things in one day. I mean, put it all together in one e-mail and think about whether you really need to be asking these questions. Think about how busy your editor is.
Going over your editor's head unnecessarily.
When they don't tell you about their next project. For example, they've written a great thriller that you sell, and then they write a horror novel. They say, "Guess what? I just wrote a horror novel." You're standing there with this horror novel and thinking, "What am I going to do with this?" They have to communicate about what they're thinking about doing next.
Be very careful about what you blog. Not just talking about the publisher once you're being published, but even before that. If I am submitting your book to publishers and an editor wants to buy it, they're probably going to Google you before they even call me. And if they find things out there that are curious or disturbing? Just know that whatever you're putting online is going to influence their perception of you.
If you take my rejection letter and post it on your Web site, there are few other agents who are going to be willing to put anything in writing to you. We look upon those writers in a bad way.
What are the biggest things that editors do that drive you crazy?
Besides not getting back to us?
I hate when an editor calls me and says, "I'm really, really excited about this project," and then a week or two later they call back and say, "On second thought...." That usually means the publisher shot them down. A lot of young editors do this. They think that if they call back and say, "My publisher shot me down," I won't send them anything else. In reality, it's the exact opposite. I'd much rather hear them say, "I love this book. I fought for this book. But the publisher said no." What better excuse is there?
At least I'll submit to you again. But if I think of you as a flip-flopper?
I hate it when editors toe the corporate line. They give you, "We don't do that. At our house, we don't do that." Or they say, "We're doing a great job. We are doing everything we can. I don't know what you would expect from another house. We are doing everything that any other publisher would do." You know what? It's not true. You people only know what you're doing, and I know what everyone else is doing.
I'd rather hear them say, "I have fought tooth and nail for more money for marketing, and they will not give it to me. I don't know what to tell you." At least they're being honest. In those situations I blame the marketing department, I don't blame them. Some of the most powerful editors in the world aren't necessarily going to be able to convince the publicity or marketing departments to give their books more money.
Then they can come to me and say, "Here's the thing. I fought tooth and nail for x, y, z. I couldn't get it. You might consider—off the record—calling so-and-so or emailing so-and-so. Or going to your author and asking if they can contribute some funds to this."
The editor who is honest with you about the real situation is giving you an opportunity to fix that situation.
But just to play devil's advocate, I will call editors up and say, "Look, it's just you and me here. We're working together. We both want this book to succeed, despite the fact that your marketing and publicity people suck." And the editor will say, "We're doing everything we can," as opposed to saying, "Okay, here's the problem." But if the agent is a certain type of very loud and powerful person who will go over the editor's head and cause problems, then I can see why they don't want to level with you.
But if you have a good relationship with the editor and they say, "Listen, here's the deal. We have these five books all publishing this month. The other ones have really obvious hooks. Ours doesn't. Sales is not responding to it. I don't know how we're going to get it attention," then at least try to do something about it. But if you hide behind the corporate façade, then there's no chance the book will ever work. And I will always feel like you are that team's player and not our team's player.
Are writers conferences useful for writers?
Yes, but not for the reason they think. The problem with writers conferences is that most of them are aimed toward getting the book published, and they should be aimed toward forming a community of writers who can communicate and help one another get endorsements and things like that.
When you're on the fence about taking something on, what are the things that will push you one way or another?
Am I still thinking about it when I wake up the next morning?
I think, "I shouldn't be on the fence."
For me, "maybe" equals "no."
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
A few months ago, I was at lunch with a literary agent who shall remain nameless, and the conversation turned to the subject of our favorite movers and shakers in the industry. When Molly Friedrich's name came up, my lunch companion—no small dealmaker herself—lowered her voice and said something that surprised me. "If I were a writer, I don't see why you would sign with me or any other agent when Molly is out there. What else could you possibly want in an agent?"
It's a sentiment that's hard to dispute. The daughter of two children's book authors, Friedrich was born in London, raised in suburban Long Island, and graduated from Barnard in 1974. She began her career in publishing a few days later as an intern at Doubleday. Over the next two years she was promoted twice, first to assistant editor and then to director of publicity at the company's paperback imprint, Anchor Press. After a year in publicity she took another new job—and a risky step backward—as an assistant to the agent Phyllis Seidel. Soon she moved again, joining the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, where she remained for the next twenty-eight years. In 2006, she set out on her own and formed the Friedrich Agency.
I don't think I can adequately convey the whirlwind of charm, passion, and sheer personal magnetism that Friedrich has spent the last three decades unleashing on the publishing world in service of her clients. Like many of her authors—Melissa Bank, Sue Grafton, Frank McCourt, Terry McMillan, Esmeralda Santiago, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Strout among them—she is a force of nature. But behind the deep voice and the big laugh, there is also a Long Island girl who was forced to grow up fast under challenging circumstances; a young wife who left the corporate world because she didn't want to raise her kids by telephone; a brass-knuckle agent who admits she will go to the wall for any novel—flawed or not—that makes her cry three times; and a mother of four who wrote a children's book, You're Not My Real Mother! (Little, Brown, 2004), after her adopted daughter told her precisely that one day.
When I arrive at Friedrich's office in New York City for our conversation, I am ushered in by another of her daughters, Lucy, who just graduated from college and is working as her mother's assistant for the summer. Friedrich's office is bright, warm, and unpretentious. The walls are painted with wide yellow-and-white stripes that run vertically from floor to ceiling. But its most remarkable feature has to be a memento that hangs on a wall in the corner: a framed newspaper clipping from Christmas Day 2005, when two of her clients' books, Sue Grafton's S Is for Silence (G. P. Putnam's Sons) and Frank McCourt's Teacher Man (Scribner), sat side by side atop the New York Times best-seller lists for fiction and nonfiction. As my lunch companion might have observed: How the heck are you supposed to compete with that?
I always like
to start with a little background. Where are you from?
I'm the daughter
of two writers. I grew up in a family in which language was very important. The
one who is known, my father, is the one who got published and didn't raise the
children. My mother, Priscilla, is the one who raised us. The two of them
collaborated on thirteen children's books. The best book they wrote is called The
Easter Bunny That Overslept, and it's been
in print since 1957. It has been illustrated not once but three times and was
even made into a miserable television show for a while.
The first exotic thing about me is that I was born in London. My parents met in France and were married in Paris—they were both writing, my mother was painting—and they lived a kind of faux-glamorous expatriate life. They had three children in quick succession. The first was in Frankfurt, I was in London, and my brother was in Paris. Then they moved from Paris to Long Island, and they were penniless. They had no support from either set of parents. Those were the days when even if you were educated and had children, you were expected to suck it up and fend for yourself. The first place they lived was with William Gaddis's mother. She had a home in Massapequa and her house had an unrenovated barn. And that's where we lived—in the unrenovated barn. My one claim to literary fame is that apparently there is a scene in The Recognitions in which the main character is describing a naked two-year old on a summer lawn who's putting pennies into a Woolworth's plastic beaded purse. Apparently that is yours truly. When I learned about it I thought, "God, full circle! Even then I was counting money!" But I haven't gone back to see if it's true. It's a piece of family lore. I'm not going to egomaniacally go back through that very long book searching for a possible portrait of my two-year-old self.
I guess the point is that I grew up very comfortable around books, comfortable around writers who would come out to dinner parties and were always sort of around. My father started out at Newsweek and then was at the Saturday Evening Post for years. He started writing books then. He wrote a couple of honestly not-very-good novels and then he wrote many books as a cultural historian. But he never gave up his journalistic work. He needed to earn a steady, consistent living because by then there were five children, the third and fourth of whom were retarded. Today I am their guardian. The fifth child was born eight years after the fourth one, and he's the one who died in a plane crash. So it's a large and noisy family that's complicated in the way of all interesting families.
Where did you
go to college?
I went to
college at Barnard and graduated with a BA in Art History. My father would not
allow me to major in English. He felt very strongly that if he was going to pay
tuition, which he did, and that if I was going to be reading books all my life,
then there was absolutely no reason for him to underwrite four years of
studying Melville. So I tried to figure out the thing I could study that would
be the one thing he didn't know about, and that was art history. I studied the
early Italian renaissance. Then, of course, there was the question of "What do
you do?" What do you do with a BA in Art History from Barnard, when you
basically can't do anything but analyze the diagonal composition of a great
painting? Not useful! My parents were very consistently clear that when we graduated
there would be no support. We were not to have any kind of meltdown, we were
not to reveal any learning disorders—if we had them we were to keep them to
ourselves. We were to get on with it, and sort ourselves out, and always live
within our own incomes.
How did you
get started in publishing?
When I was still
in Barnard I was renting a room from Connie and Tom Congdon, who was an editor
in the apex of his fabulous commercial book editing life because he was the
editor of Jaws. Tom said, "You should go
into publishing." I called my father because he was the one who could be
counted on for an honest response. He said, "Absolutely not. Publishing is what
people go into when they don't know what else to do." I said, "But that applies
to me!" Congdon said not to pay attention to my father. He said he'd get me an
interview at Doubleday. And I do give good interview, as you will learn by the
end of this evening. I was a great interview—very confident—and I had done
all kinds of interesting things because I'd been working every summer from the
age of thirteen on. I'd also gotten pretty poised about being around adults,
kind of old beyond my years, I guess, especially with my brother and sister as
they were.
But then I had to take the typing test. They knocked off ten points for every mistake, which gave me a score of negative thirty-five. They said, "We'd love to hire you, but..." and I went away. I decided to spend the second semester of my senior year typing the op-ed page of the Times every day. I went back for that typing test two more times, and I was finally hired at thirty-seven words per minute as an intern at Doubleday. I think I was hired really for tenacity alone. It was a great program that they have long since discontinued. You got to spend about two weeks working in every conceivable department: the different editorial departments of Doubleday, the copyediting department, rights and permission. You got to go out to Garden City and deal with the purchasing offices. You got to go on the road with a sales rep and watch books not get placed. Even back then, in 1974, books were skipped. It was really a devastating experience to observe secondhand.
At the end of four months you got to choose where you wanted to go, and naturally I said editorial because I have no imagination. I had the choice of working either in Doubleday trade or Anchor paperback, which back then was about eleven people. It was really big. I went to work as the assistant to Loretta Barrett, who was the editorial director. It should be noted that almost everybody who was at Anchor at the time—aside from Bill Strachan, who has no sense—has become an agent. Marie Brown, Elizabeth Knappman, Loretta Barrett herself, Liv Blumer. We are all agents.
Tell me what
those early days were like for you.
Anchor's list
was fairly academic back then. There were about 135 books published a year, of
which 60 percent were reprints and 40 percent were trade paperback originals.
The fact is, I had grown up in a family of extremes. My youngest brother, Tony,
was brilliant, and so was my older sister, Liesel. I didn't test well. I didn't
learn easily. And I didn't consider myself especially bright. But I was a huge
overachiever. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that if I
simply worked harder than anybody else, I would do fine. I saw the same thing
at Doubleday. It was great. People would give me work and I would do whatever I
was told. I had all kinds of time because my husband was still a sophomore in
college—I'd gotten married by then—and he had no time to talk to me anyway.
In those days you also got paid overtime, which was essential because I was
making six thousand dollars a year. We were really quite penniless, and
overtime was what kept the wolf at the door. So I did whatever I was told. I
wrote flap copy. I put books into production. I consulted the art department on
jackets. I gave books their titles when no one else could think of one. I read
whatever I was told to read and even what I was not asked to read.
Mostly,
I taught myself how to do the job. When I started working for Loretta, I had
inherited this adorable little office—it was really an outer office—with a
huge window. But I had no view because the window was blocked by old filing
that was stacked up and covering it. I decided that I was going to see my view
by the end of six months. That was my goal. Very Prussian. So every night I
would stay late and file. And I never filed anything without reading it. That's
how I learned how things worked. I learned how people were presenting books,
who was buying what books, what Sam Vaughan had decided to publish as opposed
to what Lisa Drew was doing in trade, etcetera. I honestly had nothing better
to do than to be ferociously ambitious. And there was nothing stopping me.
And you immediately
knew that you enjoyed the work?
Oh, yeah. It was
great because everybody was so grateful. People were so happy that I was there.
Loretta would always thank me. The authors were grateful. But even then I think
I had a sense of myself. I remember there was this one agent who called up for
Loretta. I guess Loretta hadn't returned her call, and the agent just started
screaming at me. I said, "Excuse me. You
are not speaking to Loretta. You are speaking to Loretta's assistant. You may
not talk to me like this. Would you like me to have her return your call? And
if she doesn't, you can count on the fact that it is not because I didn't tell
her. But do not scream at me." This woman immediately backed off. When I met
her years later, I said, "You're the screamer!" She had no recollection of it
at all. But I guess even then, if I think about twenty-two-year-olds and how
easily frightened they are, I had one thing that was working to my advantage. I
didn't realize it was an advantage until I was in the business a little longer:
I had a really good voice. I had a voice that was low, and a voice that bespoke
an authority I did not feel. I could use my voice to help me wing it. I would
speak to authors who I had never met—they were all over the country—when I was
impossibly young as though I knew what I was talking about. I would just try
and get the job done, solve the problem at hand, give my boss as little as
possible to get aggravated about. And the response from Loretta was enormous
gratitude.
So I'd put books into production. I'd say, "Would you like me to edit this book?" She'd say, "Well, yeah." And why not? Who says that I couldn't edit? Why not learn by doing? What is editing, really, except an experienced eye learning how to respond to a manuscript? Learning when a passage in a manuscript simply falls apart. Obviously Loretta read all the editorial letters that I wrote at midnight and one in the morning, showing off for her. My job at Doubleday was to distinguish myself. And I did.
How did you
work your way up?
Oh, fast. They
had a sort of indentured servant system. You know, first you were an intern,
then an assistant, then an assistant to the editor, then an editorial
assistant, then an associate editor.... I mean, talk about hierarchical! You
could die waiting. You could be thirty.
I had no time for that. I'd been there for about two years. Everything was
going very well. I was a fully contributing, noisy person. I went to all the
editorial meetings. People were learning that they could count on me. If
somebody gave me something to read, I would never let them down. I might let
them down with my opinion, but I wouldn't let them down by making an excuse of
my life. I made it clear that I was somebody who could be approached for almost
any problem. I spent a lot of time socializing, going to the cantina, whatever.
I'm very social.
So then the Anchor Press publicity director, Liv Blumer, left to become the director of publicity for Doubleday trade, and I was offered her old job as head of publicity for Anchor. That was a big jump. I wasn't sure that I wanted to be in publicity, but I recognized it for what it was, which was a big jump. It seemed like a really good thing to do—to learn how to run something, to hire people, to learn how to promote and publicize books. And I knew I'd be good at it. That job was very good training for me when I became a baby agent, a year later, because it taught me how to present books that no one really wanted to hear about.
Did you like
doing publicity?
In my opinion,
the two jobs that are the most exhausting in this business are the jobs of the
foreign scout and the publicist. The reason is that there is never an end to the job. If you're a scout, there is
always another book you can cover, another house you can do well by, another
report you can write. If you're a publicist, for every eighty letters you
write, and eighty ideas you try, there are seventy-nine that don't work. But
the only ones that the author hears about—and the editor hears about and your
boss hears about—are the ones that work. It is a thankless and really
difficult job. But I did it.
Were you any
good at it?
I had one
fabulous moment. I'd started, and I was doing everything. I had hired a woman
who had no experience in publicity. She had just finished getting her MA in
Shakespeare's Apocrypha at NYU, which proved to be totally useless. So there
were the two of us—clueless. Meanwhile, the big book on Doubleday's trade list
that year was Alex Haley's Roots, so no
one wanted to listen to a publicist for Anchor Press. Everyone was deliciously
over-focused on Roots.
After six months at the new job, I decided I had earned a vacation. One of the books I had been publicizing was from the "Foxfire" series. It was a wonderful book by Eliot Wigginton called I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. In my reading I had come across a newsletter that was written by a woman named Kay Sexton. It was a newsletter called the "B. Dalton Newsletter" that was put out by the bookstore chain. I read the newsletter and thought, "This woman really needs to know about the specialness of this book." So I wrote her one of my two-page letters introducing myself and telling her what the book was about and why she had to know about it and get behind it. "All the proceeds are going to Reading Is Fundamental.... Eliot Wigginton is wonderfulness himself...." I never heard a word from her. So I was going on this two-week vacation, and before I left I told my assistant that I was going to call at the end of the first week to check in. This was in the days before cell phones, obviously. So I called my assistant from a payphone in a bathing suit and said, "Anything going on?" She said, "Molly, you won't believe it. You've got three bouquets of flowers!" I said, "What?" She said, "It's so exciting—your entire letter is the subject of the ‘B. Dalton Newsletter.'" Kay had written something like, "In all my years of doing this newsletter, I've never heard from anybody at Doubleday until I finally received this extraordinary letter from one Molly Friedrich, who urged me to take a serious look at I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. Her letter is so powerful that I print it here in full. Please adjust your orders accordingly." The reason I was getting flowers is that you could see a direct difference from before the newsletter came out and after. Usually, the marketing people, who pay the advertising people, are always taking credit. You never know whether you have actually, tangibly made a difference. Except this one time. So that was my terrific moment in the sun.
Why did you
leave Doubleday to become an agent?
I did the
publicity job for a year and then I got a phone call from an agent at the time,
Phyllis Seidel. She worked out of her Upper East Side brownstone and she'd
never had anyone work for her. She said that she was interested in turning her
cottage industry into something a bit more fast-moving and professional, and
she said she'd heard wonderful things about me from two people who were so
different that she was intrigued. She asked if I would come up for an
interview. By this point I had learned that it is incredibly important to never
say, "No," and I'd been in the business long enough to see that agents were
really essential to the industry. I had also been in the business long enough
to see that, on the publishing side, there were a lot of meetings. There was a
lot of time spent gathering your insecurities together and having them
reflected in a group meeting where you got to shore yourselves up. You know:
"Well, nineteen of us like the jacket, what do you think of it?" That kind of
thing. There was a lot of inefficiency.
Plus, I was married by then and knew I wanted children. I didn't know if corporate America was that hospitable to having children, at least for somebody who really wanted to be around them and actively help them grow up. There weren't a whole lot of senior people at Doubleday at the time who had young children. I decided that I wanted to find an angle of this business that would allow me to continue working but to work around my life and my children. It was a really conscious decision. I also had been exposed to a lot of agents—some of them wonderful, some of them appallingly bad—a whole raft of agents from the sublime to the really questionably professional. But I had been around that angle of the business long enough to see that if you really worked hard to build up a stable of great writers, it might be a good way to earn a living.
So with that sort of young, unformed knowledge in mind, I took the subway up and interviewed with Phyllis. She offered me two things. First, she was willing to allow me take on writers of my own if it didn't intrude with the business. That was really important to me because, after all, I had been a boss already and this was already taking a step back and becoming an assistant again, apprenticing myself to her in order to learn the business. And second, she said she would give me 4 percent of anything I brought in, which was kind of the carrot before the donkey's nose. It wasn't going to cost her anything to give me 4 percent, and I don't think she even thought I would bring in anything interesting. So she did it. But it sure was useful later on, and it set a precedent that I used as part of my negotiation when I left a year later to join Aaron Priest. I took that 4 percent commission with me as part of my negotiation.
Tell me about some of your early clients.
The very first client I sold was
Phyllis Theroux, who has a book right now that I'm trying to sell and will die
trying. I began working with Aaron Priest in 1978, and six months into working
for him—it was just Aaron and me, impossibly small—Aaron decided that he
wanted to move to California to open an office in L.A. This was a huge job
change. He had made it very clear when I started that he did not want me to
take on clients. He wanted me to be his assistant. I said, "Fine. But can I
work on finding clients as long as it's not at your inconvenience?" He said, "I
don't care what you do, just don't inconvenience me." So I would work at night
because my husband was busy with law school I was writing letters to short
story writers at Redbook, all that stuff. When Aaron got in
his car and was driving across the country with his wife and kids, he would
call once a day. He'd say, "Hi. I'm in Iowa. Anything doing?" I'd say, "Nah."
But by the time he got to California, five days later, I had sold three books.
I had literally been waiting to be released. And the first book was Phyllis
Theroux's, which I auctioned to Julie Houston at Morrow for twenty-five
thousand dollars. It was called California and Other States of Grace.
It was absolutely wonderful, and she went on to write others. But that was my
first book, which makes me sentimental about selling all of her books.
Eventually it became clear to Aaron that I might be more valuable as a baby agent than as only his assistant. I said, "Come on, let me hire an assistant part-time. It's not going to cost that much." Then, when Aaron came back from California six months later, there was no question. I wasn't going to go backward. I got very lucky that way. I could have been his assistant for four or five years without ever having the opportunity to really step out. It was his decision to go to California that really gave me the breathing room I needed to show off. To show what I wanted to do. To show what I could do.
How did you build a list in those early years? Were you
getting referrals, was it the letters you were writing, were you reading the
slush?
Certainly I was reading slush, and nothing was coming out of
the slush. Some of it was the letters I was writing. And I never said, "No."
Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a movie agent named Geoff
Sanford. One day he came blowing through the Aaron Priest offices. When he walked
in, Aaron wasn't around. Don't forget that I had this scary voice, the gift of
gab, the ability to make someone feel at home, whatever you want to call it. I
said, "Geoff! Come on in! How are you?" We talked for a while and he said, "Oh,
you're going to be great." We didn't do any business, but about a year later he
called me up and said there was this writer named Sue Grafton. He said he
really liked her, she was a really good egg, and she had written a book called A
Is for Alibi.
Then he told me she was leaving her agent and asked if I might want to take a
look. I said, "Are you kidding? I'm starving to death. Of course I'm
interested." But I also said, "Why does she want to leave her agent?" And Sue had
told him and I can tell you because Sue has always been very straightforward
about it. Kathy Robbins was her agent at the time, and Kathy was in the process
of taking her authors from a 10 percent commission to a 15 percent commission.
Sue liked Kathy enormously, but she felt, like death and taxes, that no one
should ever charge more than 10 percent. She just felt very strongly about it.
I love finding something and getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody's life. Changing a writer's life.
What is the lesson there, beyond never saying "No"?
When you're an agent, you must be open to
every single person. There is no one who doesn't have an opportunity to see me.
I really mean that. There is no little person who will be turned away by me. I
mean, why not? What on earth does it cost me? The business of being an agent is
the business of forming relationships, and everything is a seedling. If you go
to a writers conference, as faculty, you will probably not take on anybody at
that writers conference. But within five years, if you have done your job and
been open to the universe—not to sound too California—you will eventually
have a terrific client approach you who knew somebody who was the brother of
someone who was at the conference five years ago and scribbled down your name.
This has happened over and over and over again.
I'll give you another example. Many years ago, an editor at the Atlantic suggested to me that there was a writer named Elisabeth Hyde who was working on a novel. He thought I should check it out. So I wrote to her immediately. You know, "I hear from so-and-so that you're working on a novel." It turned out that she had just signed on with an agent. The letter I wrote back was something like, "Oh, drat. I have a two-year-old so I'm not allowed to swear. Well, best of luck to you, be well, blah blah blah, and I'll look forward to reading your book between hard covers." Well, she held on to that letter. A couple of years ago—when my daughter who was then two was now twenty-five—Elisabeth Hyde wrote back to me. She sent me the letter I had written to her more than twenty years ago. She said her agent retired, and she inherited another agent who didn't much like her work, and then she went with another agent who didn't like her novel at all. She asked the agent if it was all right for her to try to sell the book on her own. This agent, apparently, said, "Yeah, sure. Fine." She said, "If I find a publisher, will you help me with the contract?" He said, "Yes." So she finds a publisher on her own, MacAdam/Cage, and the agent negotiated the contract for zero advance, a fifty-fifty world rights split, and took 15 percent. I mean, honestly! At that point it occurred to Elisabeth that maybe she should find an agent who really liked her stuff. So she went back to her file and that's when she found my letter.
See how important it is to be remembered in this business? When you interact with someone, you want to make the molecules in the air change a little. You want somebody to say, "God, she's good!" You want to be remembered. You want to make an imprint. As an agent, you have to be able to do that.
I just read this great novel you sold by James Collins called
Beginner's Greek. He came to writing late, and I'm curious how he came to
you.
He came to me
recommended by a magazine editor. I'm not going to tell you who it was because
if I do, then all the hard-working agents, if they're really doing their jobs, will
call this editor up and ask to buy him or her a meal. I have to keep some of my
fabulous contacts to myself. But I was totally in love with this book and
really, really wanted to get Jim Collins. I knew that he was seeing three or
four other people, and I knew that he was well connected. I knew that my competition
was going to be horrible. Hateful. You always want the competition to be
someone who is really different from you, not just someone who is another
version of you. So I didn't know what to do to distinguish myself. Jim decided
to come to New York to meet with people. Of course I had read the book really
carefully. I thought, "I'm going to take this guy to lunch. I've got to get
this guy."
So I blow-dried my hair and put on a suit and put on Erase under my eyes. I'm taking him to Patroon—this very manly place, a guy place—and of course I get there early because I'm nervous, which is so typical of me. I don't know what he looks like. I'm waiting in these seats against the wall. There's a guy next to me who is also clearly waiting for somebody. We're both waiting. So I decide to balance my checkbook in order to stay calm while I wait. A guy walks in and I ask him if he's Jim, and he says no. He goes off and sits with this other guy. About five minutes later, another guy sits down. And I say, "Oh, I love your book." He says, "You do?" And I start to go on and on and on about how amazing his book is. He looks at me and says, "I can't tell you how sorry I am not to be the person you are expecting." I say, "You're not Jim Collins?" He says, "No. I'm the owner of the restaurant. You ate here once before, so you're in the computer, and I was coming to introduce myself and say hello." I couldn't believe it. I was like, "Now I've lost all my mojo! Get out of here!"
So finally Jim came in and I said, "Are you Jim? You had better be Jim Collins." I was so exhausted by then that it was just ridiculous. But it was him. He looked kind of formal, in a double-breasted suit, and very tall, and slightly nervous, but in a way that was deeply appealing. I was just as nervous as he was. And we just talked. I asked if I was his last meeting—I wanted to be his last meeting—and then I told him that I thought he should not be allowed to leave the table without saying yes to me. "Just say yes!"
You said
that?
What did I have
to lose? I think he was charmed, and he could see that I was serious. What does
a writer want? A writer wants your passion. They want you to see the book in
the same way that they've written it, and they want you to go to your death
trying to sell it. They want to see that you are able to speak coherently and
articulately about why you love the book. And I told him it was too long. I
told him he needed to do this, that, and the other thing. I told him there were
places where it was overly precious, where there was too much throat-clearing.
I was very open with him. But he didn't disagree. So I did the best I could to
win him over. He was one of those very intimidating people because he really listened. I hate it when people listen too well because then
I tend to fill in the blanks and start talking too quickly and get really
Latinate and formal and nervous. Anyway, it was a great meeting. I said, "You
have to let me know. I really don't wait well. Please." And I told him something else. I told him there
were other agents who could sell this book as well as I could, but nobody could
sell it better. And then he called me up. Now it's in its fourth printing. It's
doing very well, and it's gotten very widely reviewed, and we've sold it around
the world. It's just been great.
You also
represent Melissa Bank, who has gotten all tangled up in this issue of chick
lit. Tell me what you think about that.
I don't consider
her chick lit. I don't know what chick lit is. First of all, is there anybody
out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the
thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of
stuck in the middle is character. So here we have a collection of short
stories—The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing—that doesn't have a single plot because it's made up of loosely
connected short stories with one story that isn't even part of the rest of it.
But what everybody loved about that book is what is absolutely not genre. I mean, chick lit has become a category,
right? But I didn't sell that book as part of chick lit. First of all I wasn't
even sure that I knew what chick lit was. And the thing that everybody, to a
person, loved about Melissa's book is that it had an original voice.
Now, what is an original voice? Well, think of it like this: Go to Bonfire of the Vanities and close your eyes and pick a page and have someone read you two paragraphs. If you can't identify those paragraphs as the rhythms and cadences that belong to Tom Wolfe, you're finished. I'm convinced that eight times out of ten, with Melissa Bank, you could do the same thing. Now that is saying something. So I don't know. What is chick lit? Does it mean fiction that primarily attracts the interest of women readers? Well, that would include Jane Austen. Is Jane Austen chick lit? Absolutely not. Has Jane Austen ever written about anything other than marriage proposals, linens, china, and who has a good dowry? No. I adore her. I read her every year. But that is what her books are about. So is she the queen of chick lit? I don't know. It seems kind of silly to me, to be honest. If I read a short story by Melissa Bank, I can always identify it as Melissa because of the voice, and my view of the world is altered for having read her work. That's a lot for a short story to have succeeded in doing, and that's what her stories do. So I don't know, and I don't care, whether Melissa Bank is considered part of the chick-lit world. What I do know is: One, that I love her; and two, that I respect her. And there are many writers who I love and many writers who I respect. But there are very few whom I both love and respect, and Melissa is in that small group.
Tell me how
Terry McMillan came to your attention.
Terry was
recommended to me by a young editor at Houghton Mifflin named Larry Kessenich.
She had sold her first book to Houghton Mifflin, and she didn't like the contract
and she didn't like the agent. Right in the middle of the deal, she decided
that she didn't want anything to do with the agent, and it just fell apart. She
wasn't under contract yet, and it just fell apart. Larry put my name out there
as an agent she should talk to. I always tell editors, "You don't have to
recommend me exclusively. I know that's a terrible burdensome thing for you if
things don't work out. But just put me on a short list. Or put me on a long
list. Just put me on a list. I promise you I will read this quickly. I will not
embarrass you. I will read this well. And if it's really wonderful, I won't
necessarily send it to you exclusively, but I won't fuck you over, either." I
was always good to my word, so it was easy for me to be recommended.
With Terry, I was on a short list of maybe six agents. I loved the pages, and she came to meet me. I said, "Oh, you're great. You're going to be a star. I don't know how effective I can be, but I will fight very hard on your behalf." She had already seen four people and she said, "I want to go with you. I like your energy." But I said, "No. Wrong. You've already made an appointment with this last person, who comes very highly recommended, and I want you to see that last person." She said, "Why?" I said, "Because if you and I ever have a fight, or a temper tantrum, I don't ever want you to wonder what that other agent would have been like. I want you to come to me with a full education of having met five other people who were highly recommended to you. Besides, you made an appointment and it's wrong to cancel your appointment. Go ahead and continue your education of finding an agent." So she did, and in the end she came back and told me that she still wanted me, which was great.
What was it
about her writing that you responded to?
I fell in love
with Terry's writing because she had an original voice. Go back and read the
first page of Mama, when Mildred, the
mother, is wielding an ax. It's like, "Whoa!" It springs off the page. That's
why it happened. But Terry built a career by believing in herself more than
anybody else did. She really worked hard. She had a two-year-old son, and she
was living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. She was doing programming or
something in a law office. Things were not easy for her. But she just got on
the phone with all these bookstores and said, "I want to set up a reading" and
"You're going to want me" and "You must want me."
I remember that Houghton Mifflin got an offer of ten thousand dollars for paperback rights. This was before we knew how Mama would perform. I called them up and said, "No, no, no, no, no. You have to understand who you are dealing with. You are dealing with a force of nature, and it's a force of nature has not been felt yet. You will make a terrible mistake if you sell reprint rights for ten thousand dollars. Believe me, if you hang on a little bit longer, you'll be rewarded." And they did, and they were.
So to go back to your question about how you build up a list, the answer is that you just keep fighting on your authors' behalf. Sometimes the fighting is not effective—it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference. But sometimes it is effective, and when it is, and your efforts have been proven right, people start to remember. They start to think, "Maybe she knows what she's doing." Then it gets to the point where it gets out of control with editors who want to see your submissions and become really upset if they don't.
Tell me about
that.
I remember one
editor who started to cry at lunch. This was one of the people to whom I did
not say "No." She's crying and she says, "I just really want to know what I can
do to get on your submission list." I thought, "This is really appalling. I am
now in an official tight spot." Sometimes you have lunch with people and you
know by the time the breadbasket is empty that you will not be submitting to
them anytime soon. It's usually when somebody says, "So! Tell me about your
list!" I think, "You jerk. You moron. How dare you have lunch with anybody
and not know that stuff." When I have a first lunch with anybody, I know what
they've published. I know how to spell their name. I take the time to learn who
my audience is.
But when this person started sobbing and saying, "What can I do?" I was very gentle with her. I said, "The thing is, it's not easy." I'm not a mean person, and there is a part of me that's deeply maternal. But I knew she was a disaster. I said, "You have to find your own people in the beginning. You can't expect agents to just submit their most beloved thing to you. If they haven't done business with you, that is a huge risk for them." I said, "Tell me about some books you have published that you have found on your own and won and done well by. Books that you've really published well. And this is not a test. I don't mean to put you on the spot. But if you don't have an answer—and I suspect you don't because you are, after all, very young—then two things have to happen. One is that you have to build a list a little bit, and the other is that you have to be right about a book at least two times in the next five to seven years. If you do that, people will start to send you things, because you will have stepped out on an editorial limb and proven yourself right. That's the way to get attention. You have to be right."
I think that's how it works. You hang around long enough, and you insist, like Scarlett O'Hara just before the intermission, "As God as my witness...this book will sell!" And if it does sell, and you were right, and everyone else was wrong, then you build up credibility. But it takes time. Here I am, thirty years later. I'm old! I'm fifty-five years old! But seriously, it is a business of staying with it long enough to really build up credibility and respect and a reputation for honesty. Always for honesty. God, this is a small business. I can tell you exactly which agents exaggerate the interest they have. I can tell you who lies. They're out there. I know who these people are. It's my job to know.
How should an author choose which agent to go with?
First of all, I don't think an author
should approach an agent before they have a manuscript. I had an author come to
me who didn't think he'd be ready for seven to ten years. He'd had a huge first
success and he was leaving his agent and wanted to sign on with somebody new. I
asked him why he was leaving his agent. It was clear the agent had done a
wonderful job selling the book, a wonderful job on foreign rights. And now the
author wanted someone new to exchange letters with him—talk to him, be his
friend, be his sponsor—for five years or seven years before his next book was
ready? He said, "I've left that agent because I want someone more prestigious."
I said, "I don't want you. I don't want to read what you've written. I don't
want to read what you will write in seven years. I don't want you. I want you
to go back to that first agent and show some loyalty, because you have a really
shabby reason for leaving that agent. That agent has done everything possible
to secure and establish your career. You've done something too—you've written
a good book. You have every reason to write a second good book. But for you to
leave because you want someone more prestigious? That sucks. Bye!" He wrote me
a letter saying he admired my moxie.
But you know what's really sad? That author did go with someone else, a very well-known agent, and that very well-known agent sold the book for three hundred thousand dollars. So you know what? I'm sorry to say it, but this author was sort of right. Not right to leave his agent, but right to think that going with an agent who was very well known might have helped him. We'll never know what the poor, sad, sorry, hardworking first agent who would have gone to bat for life for this guy would have done. But would that editor have paid ten times what the first book was sold for? I don't know, but it really stinks.
So how is an author supposed to know whom to choose?
Okay, so the first rule is that an author should never
approach an agent until they have something. If I met every person who wanted
to just have a chat before they sent their book, I'd go out of business. If
they have a book and they are sending it out, they should always say in the
letter if they are doing multiple submissions. That is common courtesy. I would
also say that I want to know the circumstances under which I am reading
something. Have you sent this to ninety-five other people? Have you sent this
to one other person? Do I have this exclusively? Because if I push aside my own
reading, which is the tyranny of all our lives, in order to be fast, at least
tell me what I need to do. The other thing is that the author should agree—if
the author is playing consumer here and sending it to five agents who want to
read it—that he's not going to make a decision until he has heard from all
five people. You should respect an agent's time. Do we get paid for our time?
No. Respect a busy agent's time. The thing I want to kill someone for is when I
read something over the weekend and I'm about to pick up the phone to tell them
it's the most wonderful book since War and Peace, and they say, "Oh,
sorry, I've signed on with Joe Blow who called on Sunday morning." No. No, no,
no, no, no. That is really wrong. Be fair. If you are going to put us on the
spot, give us all a fair chance.
The first thing you are going to look for is: Who responds? The second thing to look for is: What do they say? And what do they think about the book? Now this is where it gets murky, because a lot of agents get the author by saying, "Oh, it's wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!" Then they sign the author on and begin the hard work of getting the book into shape. That tends not to be my style. I tend to be very up-front about what I think the book needs from the very beginning. And I have lost authors because of it. Sometimes I wonder, "Should I become dishonest?" Should I say, "It's great!" to get the author and then deconstruct the manuscript over the course of twenty painful weeks? I don't know what the answer is. I know you always have to be true to yourself and your own style, and my style is to be utterly frank about what I think the manuscript requires, how I would position the book, and what I would do on its behalf.
Then the author may say, "Oh God, I can't decide! You're all so wonderful!" If that's the case I would say to get on a plane and come meet us. Figure it out. You should never be afraid to talk to your agent. Some authors are terrified of their agents. On the other hand, there are some agents who have very different styles and are overly friendly. They become "the girlfriend." They become so close with their authors that we arrive at what shrinks call "the boundary problem." This is also problematic, because then the agent loses the authority they are supposed to have in the author's life.
What kind of questions should an author ask potential
agents?
You are fully within your rights to ask an agent whom else
he represents. You are also within your rights to ask an agent to tell you
about a couple of authors whose books he's sold recently. You can't live on
your laurels and sit around bragging about your top five best-known clients.
"What have you sold recently, and how'd it go?" And maybe ask, "What did you
love that you weren't able to sell?" Everyone thinks I sell everything I touch.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There's loads of stuff I take on and don't sell. It's
extremely painful. So I think it's fair to talk about these things. I think you
want to see what kind of a match you are. Can you talk with this agent frankly?
Do you feel comfortable?
But it also goes the other way. It's a mutual interview process. There are many people I talk to and realize that I may love this person's work but I do not love this person. This person is going to be trouble. Big trouble. I had one author who I took on. It was a beauty contest, and I won her. She was a nonfiction writer, and I don't have much nonfiction, so I want nonfiction. She'd been published before and had a raft of fabulous journalistic credits to her name. I worked with her a little bit on the proposal—you know, shoring it up—but she was a true pro and didn't need much help. I got three offers and sold the book for six figures. It was great. But by the time the contract arrived, this woman had so exhausted me that I called her up and said, "I'm not going to tell the publisher this because I don't want the publisher to be nervous about it, but once the contract comes in and it's signed, I want you to know that I am leaving you. I'm giving you my full 15 percent. You can take it. I want you to thrive. But you have exhausted me. I'm sorry, but it just isn't a good match." Nonfiction books don't take six months to write. They take years to write! And the prospect of having this woman in my life for years filled me with such a chill that I thought, "I can't do this. Let's solve this."
Tell writers one
thing they don't know about editors, something that you know and they don't.
I would say that
they must view the fawning, deeply complimentary praise that marks the honeymoon
phase of their relationship with an editor for what it is. They must not buy into
it. They must realize that editors will say almost anything to get a book when
they have to have a book. The problem is that what you need from editors is to
have them be there for the long haul. Not just the long haul of the publication
process, but for the next book and the book after that as well. When the first
review comes in and it's terrible, you need your editor to say, "That fucker!
He didn't understand the book at all. Ignore it and go on." An editor needs to
be deeply, lastingly loyal to an author and a book that he decides to buy,
because bad things will happen and that loyalty will be tested.
Tell me what you're looking for when you're reading a
first novel or memoir.
That's so easy. I'm looking for the
first page to be good. Then I'm looking for the second page to also be good.
Really! The first page has to be good so that I will go to the second page and
the third and the fourth. It's true that sometimes I get all the way to the end
knowing that I'm going to turn a book down—I've come under the book's spell
but the spell is not holding me—and then I may feel committed to reading it
and showing off with a fabulous editorial letter. That does happen. But the
main thing I look for is immediate great writing.
I think the world of memoir is divided into two camps. One camp is the memoir of an unbelievably fascinating life. Huge! Can you top this? Death, famine, child abuse, all kinds of terrible and extraordinary events...but the author can't write. In the other camp you get beautiful writing—magnificent writing—with a kind of pointillist attention to every marvelous detail in the course of a life in which nothing interesting has happened. It's usually one or the other. So when you can combine those two things in one book—an interesting life and good writing—then you have pay dirt. But it's hard. It's hard to sell memoir, especially if it's not big in an obvious way.
What about with fiction?
Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are
higher. All editors say the same thing to me. They say, "I've got money to
spend. I'd really love to do business with you. I'd love to buy a book from
you." That's code. What they mean is they'd love to buy a book, for which they
can possibly overpay, that is big in obvious and immediate ways. And most books
are not big in obvious and immediate ways. They simply aren't. Something has to
change.
I have sold books for many millions of dollars and I have sold books for two thousand dollars and pretty much everything in between. I have experienced the fantastical joys of selling books for a whole lot of money. It is a joyous moment. But it isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. It isn't. Perhaps it's blasphemous for me to say that. But if you sell a first novel for a million dollars, you are putting so much pressure on that book to perform at a certain moment, in a certain season, at a certain level. And most books don't perform immediately. Something, I think, has to give.
If I'm going to say that maybe we shouldn't take a million dollars for a first novel, that we should take less money, then it seems to me that we all have to think more imaginatively—we agents and editors and publishers, all of us collectively. I think the place to do that is in the royalty rate. You're always taught, coming up as an agent, that the royalty is the thing in the boilerplate that essentially doesn't change. You know: 10 percent on the first five thousand copies, 12.5 percent on the next five thousand, 15 percent after that. We are told that these percentages are pretty inviolate, certainly for most fiction. But where is it written that you have to stop at 15 percent? If you don't want the burden to be up front, with the large advance that sunders all plans if it doesn't work out, then change the royalty structure. Give the writer 20 percent. Go on, do it! And if you're a small publisher, definitely do it. Hold on to your writers!
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But don't you
think most writers want the big advance?
Not necessarily.
You need to be able to read your author. Some authors don't want the big
advance. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about going from an advance of
a million dollars to an advance of ten thousand. It's really unfortunate, but
to some extent an advance is How much do you love me? I decided about ten years ago that the differential
of love in an auction is about seventy-five hundred dollars, which is really
unfortunate. So sometimes when I'm in an auction, and I know that the author
really wants to be with a certain publisher but the underbidder is determined
to have the book and will offer more to win the author, basically I go to the
underbidder and say, "Don't offer any more. Don't do it." Because the author
has made up her mind and I don't want the editor to be humiliated. I don't want
them to be embarrassed. I don't want to financially mug a publisher, get the
top amount, and then say, "Hey, guess what? Thanks for letting me use you, but
actually we never wanted you in the first place!" That's terrible. I have to
stay in business with these people. My job is to do the best job I can for my
author without ever being in collusion with the publisher. That's a very tricky
business.
Tell me
something that you often see beginning writers doing wrong.
I think they can
over-hype themselves. If they have a writing teacher, a letter will arrive from
the writing teacher. It's so transparent. It's not genuine. It feels like a
form of logrolling. And it doesn't really work with me. Or they will make false
comparisons between their book and other books.
This is the
magazine's Independent Press Issue. As you've watched the industry become more
and more corporate over the years, do you think it's been a good thing or a bad
thing for writers?
It's been a
terrible thing for writers.
Why?
First of all,
there are fewer publishers. When I started out, there were publishers all over
the place, all kinds of publishers that were legitimate companies, in business
legitimately, in New York. I mean, what's happening at Harcourt and Houghton is
just another nail in the coffin. I remember having a drink with Dick Snyder
maybe twenty-five years ago. He said something that I found appalling at the
time. He said that in twenty years—remember that this was twenty-five years
ago—there would be four publishers left. And we're not that far away from
that. We're really not. It's bad for writers in the same way that it's bad for
publishers to pick one or two big books and dump all your efforts and resources
into those books. It's great if you're the agent of one of those books. It's
terrific. Enjoy the ride. But you too will be on the other end of it if you
stay in this business long enough.
But I think the main thing that has been lost is a sense of diversity. I mean, everybody complains about this. There just seems to be a terrible sameness, and maybe it's because of the book groups and book clubs in this country, but it feels like readers in America are only having one of three or four conversations a month. Look, I love Khaled Hosseini. I love Elaine Koster. I love Susan Petersen Kennedy. I love everyone connected with The Kite Runner. But I read that book in bound galleys four or five years ago, and really, if one more person comes up to me on the beach this summer and says, "Oh! I love books too! Have you read The Kite Runner?" I really will kill myself. The opposite of that are the people who come up to me all the time saying that there is nothing to read. There is so much to read.
But what are
the implications for writers? Why is it bad?
It's bad for
writers because there is a sameness to conversations in the larger public. And
also because they have fewer choices. If you look at Publishers Lunch, you'll
see nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, romance novel, paperback original,
nonfiction, nonfiction, and then there will be one novel that was sold. Everybody wants it to be obvious
and easy, but most books aren't. It would really be interesting to see whether
a book like The Beans of Egypt, Maine would be published today. It's a great book. Or take Annie Proulx. How
about that? Try describing that to
your editorial department and see how far you get. She's an extraordinary
writer, but you wouldn't get far at all.
So where do
we go from here?
I guess you have
to just keep putting your face to the wind, and never stop trying, and you have
to give publishers a chance to build an audience and a sense of family. I mean,
were doing that with Leif Enger's second book [So Brave, Young, and Handsome]. Paul Cirone, in this office, is the agent.
Honestly, we could've had an aggressive auction for that book. The trade
paperback sales of his first book [Peace Like a River] is one of the great sales stories of all time. Do
you know what the returns on that book are? They're zero! It's sold eight
hundred thousand copies! But we didn't shop him around. We wanted to do what
was right for the author, and the author was very comfortable with the deal we
came up with. The deal we came up with wasunorthodox, but why not do that if you can? And Grove
was very happy. Their first printing is very hopeful, and it's on the extended New
York Times list, and he's doing this huge
tour. It might be a slightly old-fashioned business model, but it's one that
works for that particular author and that particular house. So why not stick
with it? I think that loyaltyis
very important. Just like reader loyalty is important, loyalty to a publisher
is important.
How has
technology changed the business from your perspective?
I'll tell you,
what is hard about being an agent now is the Internet. The Internet is both the
joy and the bane of everybody's existence. The bane part of it for me, for an
agent, is that it used to be that authors were in isolation. Which was partly
bad, obviously, but it was also a good thing because they really got to focus
on their work and confront what was on the page. They weren't distracted and
hyped up by too much information. Today, if you are a writer of a certain
genre, you feel that you've got to get blurbs, you've got to cultivate all
these people, you've got to go to this or that event, and on and on. So you
have writers who aren't really being given enough time to write the best book
they can write. And meanwhile they have become a kind of awful consumer. There
are a lot of conversations about who has what. Like, "Well, Joe Blow has shelf
talkers. Why don't I have shelf talkers?" No! I don't want to hear about Joe
Blow's shelf talkers. You don't have shelf talkers because your career is set
within an entirely different context than the person you just mentioned. They
all compare notes. They compare advances. Part of it is that they have been
told it's no longer enough to just write a good book. They are told that they
have to get out there, press the flesh, have blogs, have Web pages, and get
advance quotes from everybody and their dogs. Then they're told, "By the way,
don't you think it would be a good idea to do two books this year?" This is
insane! It is altogether too fast. Everything in this business is too fast.
But how can
you build a career anymore if you don't do that stuff as an author?
You can. You
have to have some luck. I mean, look at Paul Cirone's author, Megan Abbott.
She's building a career. She's on her third or fourth book. She just won an
Edgar. She's under contract. She's with the same publisher. She hasn't had
outrageously great sales, but she's building an audience. She is a great, edgy,
funny, noir mystery writer.
What about
for a literary writer? Maybe a writer who has published a couple of books that
haven't sold too well?
They are in
trouble. I'm not going to soft-pedal that. It's very, very, very painful.
So what do
they do?
Well, thirty or
forty or eighty years ago when people said, "Don't give up your day job," there
was probably some wisdom to that. Certainly, if you get a large enough advance
and decide to recklessly give up your day job, at least don't give up your
insurance. Hang on to one writing class, which gives you insurance and protects
you and gives you the potential for tenure. Don't give it up. The first thing I
tell my authors when they sell their first book is to try to live as though
they don't have the money yet. Don't start building additions on your house.
Don't start taking expensive trips to Sicily. Try to remember that this might
not happen again. It's very important to me that people live within their income,
whether your income is thirty thousand dollars a year or thirty times that.
Tell me how
you spend most days.
I would say
being on the phone. Of course I do a lot of e-mail now, and I see the
advantages of hiding behind e-mail. A lot of the day is spent getting
information. Learning. I really read every catalogue that is sent to me. I
genuinely want to know what people are doing. From the moment I take a project
on, there is not a book I'm reading—if it's remotely relevant to building an
argument or a case for positioning that book—that won't in some way inform or
aid me in selling that book, or in understanding that project or the
marketplace. A lot of time is spent doing that, and getting information. Who's
selling what? The stuff in Publishers Lunch, I'm sorry to say, is rarely the
big deals. Those can be the people who want the publicity, they want to be out
there. It's great for them. Good. Fine. But it's not the big deals. Sometimes
the big deals aren't even in the rights guides.
What is the hardest thing for you about your job?
The whining. I won't have it. I don't
whine. I don't want whining from editors. I don't want whining from my authors.
I don't want to read about authors I don't represent who whine. I want every
single person who gets published to be grateful that they get to be published,
because many of their colleagues don't get to be published. I don't want
whining about money or any aspect of the business. Of course that doesn't mean
I don't want to know when you have a problem. It is my job to help you figure
out whether a problem is legitimate or whether it is just nervousness,
paranoia, insecurity, fear, dread, the sense that the world is passing you by
and you haven't heard from anybody. You've got to get a writers group, a mother,
a spouse. You have to seek your support system elsewhere. Because that's not
the job of an agent. When I see a problem, believe me, I'm already going at it.
The question is: Do I get on the phone with the editor or do I get on the phone
with the author and tell him I'm going to get on the phone with the editor, and
then not have time to get on the phone with the editor? In other words, you
have to trust that your agent is doing her job. When your agent says, "I will
take care of this," chances are really good that the agent will take care of
it. But at the same time, you can't assume that agents are always effective. I
can howl, scream, beg, sob, and implore, but it doesn't always mean that my
howling will make a difference. Sometimes the answer is just, "No. We've decided
not to publish this book in paperback. The sales of this book in hardcover were
three thousand copies, and we won't publish it in paperback."
What do you love most about your job?
Here is the thing about me as an agent:
I am not only looking for literature that may be a contender. If I cry at three
different points in a manuscript—even if it is lumpy, and overlong, and deeply
flawed—then I am going to go to bat for it. I love finding something and
getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody's life. Changing a
writer's life. I love the thrill of loving something and really believing in
it, and then selling it really well. All agents know when they've done a good
job. They know when they've done a crappy job too. They know when they've let
their author down and when they've let themselves down by extension. It doesn't
matter if you've sold the book for a song or really aggressively. You know when
you've done well by a book and the book's author. And then having it all work out?
Having it be published well? Being part of that ride? I mean, it's great to be
right. It's wonderfully validating. It's thrilling to share in an author's
success. Frank
McCourt is an obvious example. What gets better than that? And to have an
author who remains unspoiled, like Frank has? It is just a joy to represent an
author like that. He always has been. He's so appreciative and never complains.
And when he does complain it's because he's making a joke out of it. He called
me up one time, maybe a year after Angela's Ashes had come out, and he
said, "Oh Lord, Molly, the taxes." And I said, "No, no, no, no, no. If you're
making enough money to complain about taxes, you don't get to complain about
taxes." He laughed and said, "All right, fine!" He's just a joy to work with.
Is there anything you haven't accomplished that you still
want to?
No. I just want to always be in the
game. I
want to work for at least another ten years. I don't want to retire when I'm in
a walker. The reason why this is such a great job, first of all, is
that I've been able to work around my children and my life. I have been able to
call my hours my own to an unusual extent, in a way that would not have been
possible if I stayed at Doubleday. But I have a very highly developed work
ethic. I work really hard. What is extraordinary about this business is that we
get to be more interesting than we would otherwise be. Because of our work.
That's really important. In other words, we do go to dinner parties, and we do
meet interesting people, and reading remains and will always remain a great
common currency. It's fantastic to work in the world of ideas, and great plots,
and the great insights that are given to us by writers. I don't ever want to be
far away from that. And I won't be. I refuse. I feel deeply privileged to be in
this business. So what if it's changing? I'm not going to change as quickly as
it changes—there's room for troglodytes like me. And I'm never going to rest
on my laurels. Because if you aren't always excited to get something in that is
fresh and new, then you shouldn't be in this business. If you're just going
along like a hamster in a wheel, then you've lost the pure white heat that
makes this business so much fun. And it should be
challenging. That's what separates the great agents from the good agents.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit
On a recent afternoon, I walked up Park Avenue from my office in downtown Manhattan to interview the literary agent Lynn Nesbit. The agency she founded almost twenty years ago, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, occupies an entire floor of a large office building on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. In the elevator, I couldn't help but think of the celebrated authors who must have taken the same ride to visit Nesbit, and my mind wandered to some of their memorable opening lines: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" (Hunter S. Thompson). "That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze" (Tom Wolfe). "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends" (Joan Didion).
For Nesbit, the beginnings of things were no less evocative. Raised in the small town of Dundee, Illinois, and educated at Northwestern, the Sorbonne, and in the Radcliffe Publishing Program, she came to New York in the fall of 1960 and took the first job she was offered. The position, as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal, was unsatisfying. She badgered Sterling Lord—even then a legendary book agent—for a job as his assistant, but he had nothing permanent to offer. So, in her spare time, she read manuscripts for him in French. Eventually a position opened up, and Nesbit leapt at the opportunity, despite a salary cut of ten dollars a week.
She worked her way up to being an agent in Lord's office; her early clients included Donald Barthelme, Michael Crichton, Frederick Exley, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. In 1965, she left Sterling Lord to start the agency that would become International Creative Management; in 1989 she joined forces with Mort Janklow to found another new agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, which remains one of the most successful in New York. Over the years she has guided the careers of luminaries such as John Cheever, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal; younger writers such as Ann Beattie, Stephen L. Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Price, and Scott Spencer; commercial superstars such as Robin Cook, Richard Preston, and Anne Rice; and nonfiction heavyweights such as Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, Jonathan Kozol, and Gay Talese.
In this, the first in a new series of interviews with veteran book editors, publishers, and agents, Nesbit talks about her life, her career, and her authors, reflecting on the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today's publishing world.
Why don't you start by telling me a little about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Illinois, in a town thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago called Dundee.
And you went to Northwestern?
I
went to Northwestern because I wanted to be a drama major. But then I
quickly learned, once I was involved in it, that I didn't want to do
it. It was such a serious professional school. So I switched my major
from theater to oral interpretation of literature. You'd do chamber
theater, for example. You'd take Don Quixote and present it
as a chamber theater piece. I was in a production and I played all of
the women roles. Of course they were all variations on Dulcinea or his
fantasy. It was an extremely good way to learn about the construction
of a narrative. Because when you're breaking it apart, often you will
characterize or have an actor play the narrator's role, so you learn a
lot about voice.
What brought you to New York?
I always wanted to come to New York. When I was a child I used to listen to Grand Central Station—"Crossroads
of a million private lives"—and think, "What could be more exciting
than New York?" I was wandering through the English department my
senior year at Northwestern and saw something about the Radcliffe
Publishing Program. I thought, "Hmmm, I want to come to New York, I
love to read books, this sounds like it's for me."
How did you get started in the industry?
At
the Radcliffe program, they told you to take the first job you were
offered because there were no jobs in publishing. They've been saying
that for forty, fifty years. Sterling Lord was the agent who came to
speak to the students, and I thought—I don't know why, I've thought
about this over the years—but I thought, "Agent, that's what I want to
do." But Sterling said he had nothing to offer. So I took the first job
I got, which was as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal.
And I hated it. It just wasn't for me. So I kept hounding Sterling. And
I read French quite well then. He was representing a couple of people
who wrote in French, Tereska Torres and Juan Goytisolo. So I would read
the books and write readers reports on them. And I hounded him. After
three months at Ladies' Home Journal he offered me a job, for
which I took a ten-dollars-a-week salary cut. I became his
receptionist, his typist, his file clerk, and I had to weigh the
packages and stamp all the letters.
Was Sterling Lord your primary mentor in the industry?
Sterling
wasn't very interested in fiction, which helped me. He was immediately
turning some things over to me. After I'd been working as his assistant
for a month or two, he went to the Staten Island Writers Conference and
came back and just threw these stories down on my desk. He said to read
them and write to any of the writers I liked. One of the stories was
"The Big Broadcast of 1938" by Donald Barthelme. And I read it and
thought, "This is extraordinary." So I wrote, Dear Mr. Barthelme, I'm
an agent and I just read this story and I think it's extraordinary and
blah blah blah and I'd love to represent you. And he wrote back and
said, "Fine." Now I don't think that happens today. There would be
thirty agents crawling all over that story today—there are more agents
than writers. And there are more writers than readers. I'm convinced of that.
Was Donald Barthelme your first big client?
Donald was very important because I sold the first story of his that I represented to the New Yorker.
And he went on and became such an important force in the short story.
But my first really big client—big in every way—was Tom Wolfe.
How did you meet him?
I pestered Byron Dobell at Esquire.
I told him I wanted to meet Tom Wolfe. This was probably 1963. He'd
published "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," the piece,
in Esquire, and every other agent was after him too. I still
ask him, to this day, why he signed with me. He says it's because I'm
the only one who suggested he do a book, which is hard for me to
imagine, but that's what he says. He was older than I was, and already
a big deal, and I was just this kid.
The other big writer that I got young was Michael Crichton. I left Sterling Lord in, I think, 1965, to start a literary department for Marvin Josephson. It was called Marvin Josephson Associates. The head of his television department was a man named Ralph Mann, and he had a friend who had been a television agent at the William Morris office, whose daughter was Michael's first wife. This man was determined to find Michael the biggest agent there was. Of course he knew everyone. So Michael was interviewing all these people and he interviewed me, too. He was in medical school then and he had published one of his paperback John Lange thrillers, and he only had one other contract. So he came back for a second meeting and said—and this I remember very well—he said, "Let's grow up in the business together." So that was great.
Who was Marvin Josephson?
He
was a very mild-mannered, shy, rather diffident television agent. He
went around and bought these other agencies. He bought CMA, Monica
McCall, Ashley-Famous. And this became ICM, this big corporate
behemoth. He was never really an agent; he was a deal-maker, a buying
agency.
And when you went there, you were the head of the agency right away?
I
started the literary department for them at age twenty-five. They
didn't have one. I went there and I was this kid. I was really young. I
got there because I was dating an agent who worked for Marvin who said,
"You should hire Lynn Nesbit." That's how I got there.
Tell me about some of the big personalities from those days in the book world.
Well, there were a lot of them. Bob Gottlieb was a genius.
From your perspective as an agent, what is his genius?
In
the first place, he, like Michael Korda, who is my client actually,
could read an eight-hundred-page manuscript in a night and come back to
you the next day and give you a perfect analysis. Also, Bob never let a
manuscript lay around. You would never hear from him, "Oh, I have seven
manuscripts on my desk, I can't get to yours until a month from now."
Bob also has such an incredibly big personality. And I always said that
Bob has a big ego, but he can lend it to his writers, so they can share
it. Bob Caro is one of my clients, and it's written into his contract
that he has to have Bob as his editor.
A
lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the
years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that—from the small
independent shops to the corporatization of it all.
I
say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You
couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is
very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What
was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People
began to worry about it.
The first novel is the easiest to sell. But if it doesn't do well, you're up a creek. You have to reposition the author...because the publisher doesn't want to take another bath.
Tell me about some more of the big characters.
We
just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have.
And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff,
Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more
colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion,
they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He
cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a
madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I
mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric
than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife
and the child. It was just different then.
So you miss the personalities
Yes.
I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed
the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort
of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's
now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an
agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these
drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One
night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up
Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget
that. There was just more of a sense of fun.
So why was that lost?
It's the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn't attract eccentrics anymore.
Where are the eccentrics going?
The movie business. [Laughs.]
When did you start to represent Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne?
My
daughter is thirty-seven and John told this story—it's still difficult
for me to talk about John—he told this story himself. He said,
"Remember what I said to you when we were talking about you
representing me?" I said, "No, I have no memory." He said, "Don't you
remember when I said, 'What if you were to have a child?' Nobody would dare
ask that question of a woman today! You would be stigmatized!" So I've
represented him since before my first child, and she's thirty-seven.
At that point were you already representing Joan?
No. I didn't represent Joan until the book After Henry,
when I came here. It's been a long time now, about eighteen years. They
were very good friends of mine. I knew Joan very well. She was
represented by Lois Wallace. Well, first Helen Strauss at the William
Morris Agency, and then she was inherited by Lois, and then she came to
me. It's been a long time now, but not back into the dark ages like it
was with John.
Were you surprised by the phenomenal commercial success of The Year of Magical Thinking?
Yes. So was the publisher. The first printing was supposedly thirty-five thousand copies, then the Times
magazine piece came out and they upped it to fifty thousand, then if
you look at later editions and the number of printings.… It obviously
touched a chord in so many people—young, old, people who hadn't even
had anyone die. I think the honesty of her voice, the way she directly
addressed the reader, without any sentimentality, was so moving.
How did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?
I
don't know how Hunter came to me. I can't remember the sequence. I
don't know who would have suggested it. Hunter was such a
larger-than-life character. I always said that he was the one writer
who always tried to say, "Oh, that didn't really happen"—talking about
his escapades—but unlike most writers, they probably did
happen. With most writers it's the opposite. He liked to go to these
very chic restaurants in New York. I can remember taking him to the
Carlyle and he'd be snorting cocaine right off his watch. He'd order
six bottles of beer, two margaritas, and some salad. But the funny
thing is, often he wouldn't even touch the stuff. Lunch would go on for
hour after hour and he really wouldn't be drinking all that much during
that time.
I read somewhere that you represented Fred Exley—and you sold A Fan's Notes?
That
was when I was a kid too. That was very early. I don't remember the
date, but that was when I was still at Sterling Lord, I think.
Do you remember how you met him? Were you close?
Oh,
yes. I had an incredible correspondence with him. Fred was a terrible
alcoholic and a tortured soul. Even more with Fred than with Hunter,
there was a very, very tender part of him. Very sweet. Fred showed it
more than Hunter did. I think that they couldn't deal with their
vulnerability, therefore they drank. Or in Hunter's case, he drank and
did drugs and everything else. They just couldn't cope with it. A Fan's Notes
got tons of rejections and finally I sold it to David Segal, who was
great. David was an eccentric. We need more people like him. He started
his career at New American Library, which was a rather commercial
imprint. But David had such a passion for literature and good writing.
For instance, he picked up Cynthia Ozick when no one else did. And
Fred. And Bill Gass.
You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a
kid. And when I went to sell Tom's first book, his editor, Clay Felker,
was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom's book
out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of
editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But
on the auction day, Viking didn't bid. So I thought that was curious.
But they didn't, and the book went to FSG.
A few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills's. I will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and he said, "You fucking cunt." I thought, "Oh my God!" I saw Tim Seldes coming up, so I said, "Tim, do you know Clay Felker?" And I walked away.
So what happened—the reason Clay was so furious—was that he thought he could deliver Tom Wolfe to Tom Guinzburg without anyone else looking at it. So of course he got mad at me instead of Tom. He was furious! Tom Guinzburg was furious too.
Now I'm going to skip forward many, many years. It's the publication party for Barbara Goldsmith's book Little Gloria…Happy at Last. It's a dinner at Phyllis Wagner's house. There are fourteen people invited. When she tells me the names, one of them is Clay Felker. And I said, "You know, he and I haven't spoken in years." And she said, "I think he thinks it's time to make up." So I go to the party and he comes over to me for the first time and says, "I'm really sorry about that. It wasn't your fault. It was that fucking Tom Guinzburg!"
But Clay's hatred of me got me a lot of good clients. Because around New York magazine he would scream that I was the toughest, bitchiest agent in town.
And it helps to have a little edge to your reputation?
Of course it does.
Why did you eventually decide to leave ICM and
start Janklow & Nesbit? Was the decision affected at all by how the
publishers were doing that—combining forces and becoming conglomerates?
No.
My decision to leave ICM was more because I wanted to become an equity
partner. I didn't want to just work for a big organization as a
salaried employee. That's pretty much what drove it. And I'd probably
been there long enough, and it was getting very big. I like the way we
can focus more here. I have much more time to focus on the clients here
because we have such a strong back office. It frees me to do more
representation, not to worry about things.
Looking back, what would you say were some of the crucial turning points in your career?
Going to Marvin Josephson was a big turning point—getting to start a literary division. And then I got Charlie Portis and True Grit.
That was a big deal. I had him from the beginning too. Tom [Wolfe] was
a big thing. He was a big deal before I signed him. Michael [Crichton]
wasn't. Victor Navasky was my first client. He was very helpful in
introducing me to people in New York. We used to have this thing at the
Algonquin, the round table—Victor tried to resuscitate the Algonquin
round table. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I used to go, Kurt Vonnegut,
Bud Trillin, Marvin Kitman, Knox Burger. People would come and go. We'd
have it like once a week. This was in 1961, when Victor was starting Monocle and signing a lot of good people on.
Donald Barthelme was a big turning point. Donald was the one who introduced me to William Gass. That's another book that was turned down everywhere and David Segal signed it, Omensetter's Luck. That was a huge literary event. David was crucial.
I never thought, "Oh, here's an obstacle." I didn't think about building a career. It just sort of evolved. James Mills became a client. He wrote Panic in Needle Park. That was a big book. That was when I was at ICM. And Joan and John wrote the screenplay. That might be how I met John, by representing Jim Mills.
When did you meet Jimmy Carter?
I
met him when I was at ICM with Marvin Josephson. He was just leaving
the White House and Marvin and I went to the oval office to meet with
him. I said to him, "You know, I'm one of the few Protestants in New
York publishing." And I think he liked that. So he signed with us and
Marvin and I divided the selling of the presidential memoir. After
that, he began to write more and I completely took him over, and then
he came with me here.
How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You
are part of a writer's support system—a very important part. The role
of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting
out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move
around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the
writer. That's one way it's changed. Another thing that I notice here,
with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of
editing, and we didn't do that when we were young. I think it's partly
because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in
with something that's almost ready to go that the agents are assuming
part of what the editors used to do.
When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last eighteen years, or ten years.
Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.
What is your editorial process like? Will you give notes?
Oh,
yes. For example, Andy Greer is a young new client of mine. I've read
the draft of his new novel, which is coming out next spring, five
times. That doesn't often happen, but with Andy it did. It was
fascinating because I kept seeing how he kept enhancing and changing
it.
What kind of specific thoughts would you give?
Just sort of general thoughts. Is this character really working here, or what about this scene.
But what you see with younger agents is more getting in there with a pencil and editing?
Especially on proposals.
What are the implications of that?
I
think the implications are that editors need to see something very
polished because everyone is so nervous. Books are an endangered
species, especially fiction. I do think that younger agents work more
on the nonfiction proposals, with extensive notes, before they go out.
But with fiction, everyone is so nervous about it.
What do you mean exactly by "nervous"?
Nervous
that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see
something that's more near completion, that the idea or the thrust
behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor
would say, "Oh, this has promise," and sign it up. Today, editors want
to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.
And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit
pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it's
almost that fiction needs to seem like it's going to be an event. It
almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the
editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive
literary acclaim, that even if it doesn't sell a lot you're launching a
real voice.
Everybody talks
about how the model for a writer's career has changed. You just talked
about a book opening like a movie. There's this blockbuster mentality,
especially for debut novels, with astronomical advances and very high
sales expectations. How do you feel about that in relation to writers
and their careers over the long haul?
Well, if
it works, it's fine.… If they spend a lot and the book works, then
everyone's happy and your career is launched. If they spend a lot and
the book doesn't work, then it's a problem. Because as you know,
everyone can see the numbers today. There is no fudging. And that's
because of the chains. There are two or three big outlets. It used to
be that we couldn't sell as many copies per book. We could argue that
this is very good, this new chain system, because you can sell more
copies.
Tell me how you feel about these changes, the blockbuster mentality.
I
think it's kind of unhealthy. Because a movie is a movie, but when
you're building a writer's career…. As I said, if it works, it's great.
If it doesn't, I think it's a huge black spot on that writer's career.
Everybody knows what's gone on. In the old days, we could fudge it a
bit better. But today everybody knows if a book's been a success or a
failure. There's no fudging. The problem is not the first book. It's
the second. At least nobody asks me that question anymore, "How hard is it to sell a first novel?" The first novel is the easiest
to sell. But if it doesn't do well, you're up a creek. You have to
reposition the author, probably move them to a new house, because the
publisher doesn't want to take another bath. So you sell it to a new
house and say X overpaid and maybe they didn't do as good of a job as
they should have, and the author probably understands that he probably
has to take less money.
If you were a first-time writer and you were offered a big advance, would you be wary of it?
I
think I would probably take it. There are very few who could resist it.
Sometimes an author—and it's happened here at the agency—they'll take a
somewhat smaller advance because they prefer the editor or the house or
whatever. But it's never that much less. It's not a hundred thousand
dollars less. Maybe it's twenty thousand dollars less. But you never
know what will happen. The Elizabeth Kostova book worked. I mean, I
don't think that's literature. It's sort of what we call, you've heard
this term, faux literature. But it sold. Can we think of a book that was a real bomb?
It can be devastating to an author's career.
Well, not devastating, but not hopeful. Let's put it that way.
In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What
worries me is that there aren't as many younger people who want to
become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get
frustrated. There's not enough money to make the job palatable, and
they don't have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this
corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they're not making a
decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming
agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can't believe how many there
are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number
there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments
with a telephone. Or they think they can. I can't imagine that because
in an agency you do need a big support staff of people who handle the
foreign rights, the first serial, the permissions. We have two lawyers
on staff who go over the contracts. So I can't imagine operating that
way.
What other changes are you seeing?
I
said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I'm beginning to think there
are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from
people who want to write their life stories. It's because of the
memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer
and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet
who have time to read. They all say, "I'd love to read, but I'm just
too busy." What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there
is a lot of that going on—but they aren't reading books. That
phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it's a product of
how our culture is changing. People's attention spans are getting
shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don't ever
look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I'm
tempted to because I hear about these great things.
What
does that mean for the future of books and reading? A lot of people
seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books.…
Great.
That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in
which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don't care if
they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they're more likely to
read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no
idea why people do. It's the content that matters, the intellectual
content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to
books on demand. Jason Epstein has been working on this machine for
years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too.
The modes of distribution are so antiquated.
Epstein
also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will
eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller
shops.
Like what's happened in
Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it's happening now, with all
these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the
distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become
effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books,
then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And
independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will
be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don't know
because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so
unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here that I
don't think it's ten years away.
I'm always thinking about this issue of
distribution—and returns, which is this convention that came about in
the Depression that allows bookstores to return unsold books for full
credit. It's very complex, very fraught, and it's a huge problem. But
nobody really talks about changing it because it would scare
booksellers.
I think the only way to
solve the problem is these machines, books on demand. Then we won't
have to have returns. We'd have a storefront with a display of books,
and you'd go in and print out the book you want.
But what would that mean for booksellers, and for the aesthetics of being a book lover?
I'm
right next to Borders. To go in there is such a nightmare. I love to go
in and browse up near my country house in Millerton, New York. We have
quite a good bookstore, an old-fashioned one. But even with these
machines, they'll still probably display books. There will probably be
some stores where people can go in and browse. I think it's going to
hurt the chains more than anyone. Or maybe it won't. Maybe Barnes &
Noble will get this machine. If there were print on demand, maybe some
independent stores would come back. I mean, people want to go in and
physically pick up a book, and it's hard at a big chain store. It's so
big and the sales clerks don't want to help you.
What effect has the decline of independent booksellers and independent publishers had on books in this country?
I'm
not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. Of course Barnes
& Noble and Borders—the chains—helped kill the independent
bookseller. But on the other hand, there are so many stores available
to people—in shopping malls, in places that probably didn't have a
decent independent bookstore. So, in a sense, we can say the chains
have helped the book business. They certainly have been able sell a lot
more copies. The blockbuster books sell commensurately much more than
they did thirty years ago.
I
don't think that many people have a real sense of what agents do all
day. Obviously all days are different, but walk me through a typical
day.
You spend most days divided between things.
You're reading the final draft, talking to the editor and to the
writer. I'm having dinner tonight with Jayne Anne Phillips, who just
delivered the final draft of her new novel. I read about five drafts of
this one, too. And I was talking to her editor, Ann Close, yesterday.
Questions like, "When are we going to publish this?" The question of
course this year is the election, which is not always the case. Ann is
sort of pushing for fall of '08, and everyone is sort of nervous about
it, but on the other hand, is the election really going to affect a
novel? Maybe it's a good time to publish them, Jayne Anne's included.
You have all these questions. Then you have the question of the cover.
We often have to go through many sketches before we get a cover. We
also have to send the books out for first serial, which is right at the
time when we get the manuscript in. And then we start thinking about
foreign rights, and we try to submit a manuscript to the U.K., because
the U.K. edition should come out simultaneously. So we hope that the
U.S. pub date isn't so close that we can't have our best shot at
getting a U.K. deal. And then in some cases there's a question of movie
rights. In most cases with literary fiction you want to wait until
there's some buzz.
So you spend your day deeply involved...
Yes. Deeply involved in all the minutiae—it's important minutiae—of the print runs, the jackets, the timing
of the pub date, first serial, foreign rights. And then, if you've
represented an author for a number of years, you have their backlist.
Someone wants to make a movie out of Ann Beattie's "The Burning House."
So you're dealing with that.
Say
you have a novel from a new writer. How do you typically go about
selling it? Do you pick up the phone and call one person, or five
people, or ten people?
If it's of
literary quality but I don't think it's going to be a megabuck sale, I
probably submit it to the key editors who I think would respond to it
at maybe a half-dozen houses.
How do you make those decisions—about which editors you send it to?
It's
part of my job to know editors, to know what they respond to and what
they like. I just intuitively know that from working over the years.
Are you ever consciously trying to match dispositions or personalities between a new author and an editor?
That wouldn't be my primary concern, but I think of that as a secondary problem. Will this person really mesh with so-and-so?
What's your style when you have several publishers interested in a project?
I
would want the author to meet the editors, and probably the publicists,
and maybe the marketing people. Then we would make a decision together,
or the author may have strong feelings about who he or she wants to be
with. I think you have to get a feel for it.
Do you know how many new clients you take on in, say, a year?
I
really don't, because sometimes I'll take on an odd project. I took on
Sherry Lansing's book. I mean that's a one-off. Or perhaps she'll do
another book. That can happen. Right now I have two new authors I'm
ready to go out with pretty soon. I don't know how many I take on.
How are new clients finding their way to you at this point?
They
come in recommended. A client of mine will recommend them to me. A lot
of my writers teach, like Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, Roxana
Robinson, André Aciman—a lot of them. So they'll recommend someone and
often I'll give them to some younger agent here. I mean, Vikram
[Chandra] came to me through Barthelme and I gave him to Eric. And
Edward P. Jones came to me and I gave him to Eric.
Tell me about some of that, about some of the mentoring you're done over the years.
I hired Binky [Urban] and Esther [Newberg] and trained them.
But what does that amount to?
They weren't agents. They were working in other jobs. Esther had been in politics, Binky had been working at New York
magazine. I hired them when I was at ICM, and they would tell you I
trained them. I hired Suzanne Glück and trained her. John Sterling
worked for me at one time at ICM as an agent.
What do you look for in an agent?
Enthusiasm,
energy, commitment, and taste. Eric and Tina are probably the two
stars. Do you know Tina? She was with my daughter in graduate school at
Yale. Tina was a few years older. Priscilla called me and said "Mom,
you've got to hire this woman." Mort and I looked at her resumé and
said, "This is amazing." And Eric should be an editor! He was at Norton.
Now
put yourself in an author's shoes, an author who finds herself in a
situation where she's lucky enough to have her choice between a few
different agents who want her. What are the factors you would use to
make the decision?
I think a lot of
it is chemistry between the two people. I would also want to know a lot
about how the office works, how much of a support system there is. I
don't want to just sing our own praises, but I think our agency offers
that more than any other agency because we are completely book
oriented. There is not another book agency in New York that has two
lawyers and a paralegal devoted to our authors and their contracts. We
have four people in foreign rights. I would want to know, "How does
this agency work?"
What other factors?
I
would obviously want to know the agent's reaction to my work. I think
it's important to feel out the level of commitment they have. Unlike
twenty or thirty years ago, the agents now—at least here—are not going
to take you on unless they're going to go gung ho. Because they know
how tough the market is. They're not going to speculate.
What about in the industry at large?
I
don't know. I can't speak to that. But I have a feeling that some of
these more independent agents who are just starting out will take more
people because they need it more.
page_5:
What can a writer starting out today do to put himself in a position to find an agent?
They can send stories to the Paris Review, Conjunctions…there
are so many places. If you're writing short fiction, once you have two
or three short stories in those magazines, and you're working on a
novel, then agents begin to wake up and say, "We'd like to see this."
So they have an entrée right there from the quarterly world. And I
think everyone is desperate to find a good novel. We are more desperate than ever.
Do you feel a sense of competition with other agents and agencies?
Well,
yes. I think all agents feel some sense of competition. As publishers
do. If we didn't, I think we'd be very lazy and lax in our jobs. I
think everyone feels they have to be on their mark today. You can't
ever get complacent. You can't ever say, "Well, I've got enough clients
and they're all wonderful and they love me." They could march off the
next day. One doesn't know. It's like a marriage. Friendships break up.
It's personalities. And they're professional and personal. The thing
about our business is it interweaves the professional and the personal
life. That's the way in which it is incredibly different than other
businesses.
What is the single biggest problem with the book world today?
Distribution.
Especially for smaller books. Because the bookstores won't take a
chance. And if a writer has a not-so-rosy track record, then they won't
order more and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, if the book
happens to get good reviews, you're caught out of print and have to
reprint and maybe the books don't get to the stores fast enough. And
distribution is a problem on the other end, too, with books that are
overprinted, books that may get on the best-seller list. It may look
good to the outside world, but the returns may negate the rosy picture.
One
of your agents here, Eric Simonoff, has sold a novel by James Frey to
HarperCollins. Tell me about that decision, the decision to represent
him. Is that something you sign off on?
I
don't know anything about it. I haven't read the book. Eric can do
anything he wants. He's codirector of the agency. Tina and Eric are
very important forces in this agency. I don't mind it anyway. Get over
it; it's fiction.
But tell me how you feel about him, about Frey?
I
have no feeling. I haven't read the novel. But Eric says it's
brilliant. And he wasn't going to take him on until he read the novel.
I didn't want to meet with him early on. It's very interesting because
Nan [Talese] backed him so much and Gay was so opposed to him. But Gay
is a consummate journalist, and this memoir thing is another thing.
Memoir involves such an unreliable narrator. And of course James Frey
got into problems because he kept defending himself. But do I think
everything in A Fan's Notes happened? No.
Nor A Moveable Feast. Actually one of your clients, Nancy Milford, wrote a piece about this in the Washington Post during the Frey thing, which I thought nailed it. But tell me how you feel about this move toward nonfiction and memoir.
I
think it's unfortunate. I think it's mirrored in every part of our
culture. Look at the reality programming on television—people want to
know the truth, they want to identify. This memoir craze has eaten away
at fiction. A lot of people will read memoirs but they won't read a
novel.
What do you read for pleasure?
I mix it up. I try to read books that are current that I don't represent. For example, I read Eat, Pray, Love. I read Larry Wright's book [The Looming Tower].
When I travel, I read books about where I'm going, or maybe a piece of
fiction. I read Joseph Roth's Berlin diaries when I went to Berlin. But
I have to read so many manuscripts that I have to squeeze them in.
Who
are some of your favorite editors to work with today? Who is doing
interesting things, who is effective in how they're publishing, who are
you admiring?
I like a lot of
people. They all bring different things to the table. I like Jonathan
Galassi [at Farrar, Straus and Giroux] as long as Jeff Seroy's there.
Jeff Seroy is an incredibly important part of the way they publish. Now
Jeff is much more than just head of publicity, he's vice president.
Jonathan is an old-fashioned editor, which is great, but when you run
into problems you need somebody like Jeff, who's dogged, who will take
them up. I do a lot of business with FSG. And I do have a lot of
authors with Knopf. I work with various editors there. I represent Gita
Mehta, Sonny's wife, and I know the Mehtas very well. Alice Mayhew is
who I do Carter with, and I've know her for years. She's an eccentric.
But she doesn't do fiction. I think Paul Slovak is a very committed
publisher and editor. I think Molly Stern's kind of great. I moved
Susan Choi to her. Molly's very energetic, she can really dig into the
publishing process as well as be an editor, too. Frances Coady is a
consummate editor. And Jonathan Galassi is a wonderful editor, there's
no two ways about that. But in this current era we have to talk about
people who also involve themselves in the publishing process, which is
what Jeff does. Sarah Crichton has been a very good addition for them.
Can you pinpoint any mistakes you've made in your career?
Sure. I turned down Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
And I read it in many drafts, which perhaps colored my opinion of it. I
mistakenly read it as a true crime book, and there wasn't really a
payoff for that. I didn't understand or respond enough to the
atmospheric quality of the book, and the fact that it was a roman noir in its way. So we all make mistakes.
Do
you have anything to share with younger editors and agents starting out
today, maybe to help them avoid mistakes in their own careers?
I
feel sorry for editors who want passionately to take on a project that
the house makes them turn down, and it goes on to be a big best-seller.
That happens all the time.
I know. So that's a mistake. Not a mistake, but it's a problem.
What about younger agents?
I
think they can take on too many clients. I think that can be a problem.
You have to be selective. If you're not selective, you have too many
people who perhaps you don't care enough about, and you don't give them
good enough service, and their books don't sell, so they blame you.
But you do have to rely on your gut.
You do. And if you really feel passionate, okay. But you can't just sort of throw a fishing line out.
How do you know when a book has you. Is it a visceral feeling?
Yes.
It's about the voice. You think, "Oh my God. This is an arresting
voice." To me, voice matters almost more than narrative. Because it
shows an originality. Many people can write good narrative—actually not
many people; it's hard to write good narrative. But to have a style?
Voice is what makes Joan Didion a great writer. Andy Greer and André
Aciman have it. Have you read him?
No.
Oh, you should. Call Me by Your Name is a brilliant novel. And Out of Egypt
is now considered a classic. It's wonderful. It's just so much fun to
read. Tina Brown e-mailed me this week and said, "I'm so glad you told
me to read André Aciman's book, it's brilliant." But it had a hard time
breaking through because of the subject. It's not a gay novel. He gave
this to me—he's under contract to FSG for a very long novel, it's about
New York life, it's very layered—but he brought this novel Call Me by Your Name
to me two summers ago. He said, "Look, I wrote this novel in a month,
two months. Read it and tell me if you think I should publish it." I
took it home that night. It was a hot summer night, I remember. And I
wasn't going out. I read the thing straight through. Oh my god. I
called him up the next day and said, "André, of course you have to
publish this. Are you joking?" He said, "Well, let me see what Susan
says." He hadn't told Susan, his wife, about it. He comes back and
tells me that Susan said yes. So then I gave it to Jonathan [Galassi]
and he said, "Of course we're going to publish it." It's unlike
anything you've read.
People have such romantic notions about the publishing world. To you, what are the things that ultimately make it special?
It's
given me a fantastic life. I have met so many interesting people. I
have gone to so many interesting places. It just continually opens
doors for me. I just came back from George Weidenfeld's eighty-eighth
birthday party in Berlin with Springer-Verlag. Angela Merkel gave one
of the toasts. It's a wonderful life because you're dealing in ideas,
with literature, with interesting people.
Is there anything you'd still like to accomplish?
I'd love to find and represent a couple of new extraordinary young writers. It's exciting; it's fun.
Anything else?
I just want the business to keep going. I want it to flourish. I just
hope people continue to read books and see them as a source of pleasure
and not as some daunting task.
Is there a memoir in your future?
Definitely
not. I don't think I would have the patience to sit down and write a
book. I admire people who can. And I promised my mother I would never
write a memoir. I'm joking, but I did promise my mother that.
Any final thoughts?
What
makes me happy is seeing these agents I've trained doing so well. It's
been great with Tina and Eric—seeing their careers flourish. I
certainly know with Tina and Eric that they care deeply about the
business, they're 100 percent committed to the writers, and that
they're thoughtful, intelligent people. So that makes me happy.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan
In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.
When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.
Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”
In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.
Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.
Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.
The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.
One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.
Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.
Did you like New York right away?
No.
It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.
Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.
Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.
What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.
Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.
[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.
At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.
Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.
Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.
It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.
Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.
I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.
And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.
Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.
When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.
That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.
Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.
That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.
Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.
How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.
Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.
You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.
I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.
You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.
Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.
You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.
Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.
This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.
In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.
Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.
What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.
Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.
Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.
I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.
Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.
Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.
How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.
What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.
Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.
I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.
Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s FuneralMusic for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.
Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.
How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.
Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.
The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.
So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.
Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.
Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.
If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.
On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.
Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.
But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.
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I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.
How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.
Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.
Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.
From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.
How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.
Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.
What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.
Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.
What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.
Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.
Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.
How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.
The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.
What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.
But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.
You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.
What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.
Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.
Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.
Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.
Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.
What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel
For the life of me, I can't remember when I met Nat Sobel for the first time. I know it must have been around September 2001, when I developed a crush on one of his assistants. (We married two years ago, and she left the job back in 2004.) Despite my hazy memory of that time—chalk it up to a disorienting mix of national trauma and new love—my first impression of Sobel couldn't be clearer: an old-school bookman, a throwback to the glory days of publishing, a guy who you half expected to have a copy of the Racing Form tucked inside his blazer. I've since found that impression to be accurate, but only to a point. When you spend any amount of time with Sobel, talking about books and publishing, which now have been his lifeblood for almost fifty years, you are confronted with an obvious contradiction: He is also one of the most forward-thinking agents in the industry.
Sobel grew up in New York City and has been immersed in the book business since his days at City College, when he clerked in a stationery shop and paperback bookstore. After college he went to France and spent a year reading all the world literature he hadn't gotten around to in school. The reading served him well: In 1960, after he'd done a brief stint at Dell Publishing, Barney Rosset offered him a job as the assistant sales manager at Grove Press. Over the next ten years, Sobel rose to become Grove's vice president and marketing director and played a central role in the company's well-chronicled success during that period. In 1970, he struck out on his own, founding an eponymous agency that began as a consulting firm for independent publishers and became a full-service literary agency when his wife, Judith Weber, joined it in 1977.
Today Sobel Weber Associates is one of the top boutique agencies in New York City. The firm's clients include heavyweights James Ellroy, Richard Russo, and the late F. X. Toole; rising stars Julianna Baggott, Courtney Eldridge, Tom Franklin, and Aaron Gwyn; genre writers Tim Dorsey, Harry Harrison, Elmer Kelton, Joseph Wambaugh, and the late Robert Jordan; and a raft of best-selling nonfiction and cookbook authors.
This interview took place in the couple's elegant Gramercy Park townhouse—it was once the home of the artist George Bellows—which doubles as the agency's offices. During
most of our conversation, one of Sobel's cats sprawled in my lap. Afterward,
Sobel led me up several flights of stairs, lined with framed drawings by his
friend and client Ralph Steadman, to show me his loft office at the top of the
house. It is an airy space that overlooks the living room and is adorned with
three huge paintings by Steadman, family photographs, bookcases full of
literary magazines, and a lucky photo of Gandhi that, Sobel notes with
satisfaction, "I've had in every office I ever worked in."
My
sense is that you grew up in New York City. Is that right?
That's right. I
was working on my own from the time I was eighteen years old. I went to City College
and had to support myself. I had a dream of going to Europe to write after I
graduated from college, and I did go to France and lived for a year on my
savings. But I didn't write. I read. I spent a whole year reading.
What were you
reading?
I had been a lit
major, and I went with a suitcase full of the books I had wanted to read but
hadn't had time to get to. I found an English-language bookshop in Paris that
was happy to buy all of the books I read and give me other books in exchange.
That was how I was able to extend my library into a year's worth of reading. I
read about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That's when I really learned
about world literature—from that year in Paris—but I didn't get much writing
done. Toward the end of the year, the guys from the bookstore where I'd worked
in college wrote and offered me an opportunity to come back and run most of the
store in the evening and become a kind of partner. I went back and worked there
until a job opened at Dell Publishing, where I worked for about a year as a
salesman. Then Barney Rosset offered me a job as the assistant sales manager of
Grove Press. I was all of twenty-four years old. Eventually I became the sales
manager and the marketing director, all in my twenties. But keep in mind that
at Grove at that time, Barney was only in his thirties. So you get an idea of
the age range. We were a pretty young bunch of guys—this included Richard
Seaver, Fred Jordan, a very talented group of guys—who didn't think anything
of working long hours, because we enjoyed it. Even at the time, I knew I'd
never get a job like that again.
Tell me how
you met Barney.
It's a funny
story. Barney came to the Dell sales conference. It was my first sales conference;
I was sharing a room with another guy. I had been playing poker through most of
my college years as a source of additional income. I heard there was a
hospitality suite and there would be poker playing. So I wound up in the
hospitality suite and there were five tables of salesmen all playing poker, and
Barney, thinking that Dell was going to distribute Grove Press books, was one
of them. Late in the evening there was only one table left—all of the winners.
I was at that table, and so was Barney. I had the best hand in five-card draw
I'd ever had. I can remember it all these many years later. It was the biggest
pot of the night. There was a lot of money in that pot. And Barney turned out
to have the best hand of all.
I stuck around, I'd been drinking, and as a result I passed out on the bed of the hospitality suite. The sales conference began promptly at eight o'clock the next morning. Barney was downstairs on the dais with Helen Meyer and the editor in chief of Dell. But I was asleep in the hospitality suite. When I finally woke up, with a very bad hangover, and went back to my room, showered, and went down to have some coffee and head into the sales conference, it was about ten o'clock in the morning. The hotel we were in was quite remote, and when I walked in, everybody wondered who the hell I was. They didn't know me. I hadn't been at Dell all that long. I could hear the people on the dais saying, "Who is he?" I thought I'd be fired. But I wasn't.
About two months later I got a phone call, and this guy on the other end of the line said, "Are you the guy who came two hours late to the Dell sales conference?" I said, "Yes, who's this?" Thinking it's a joke. He said, "My name's Barney Rosset, and I like your style, kid. How'd you like to come to work at Grove Press as the assistant sales manager?" I had the chutzpah to say, "How much are you paying?" He mentioned a price that was fifty dollars a week more than I was getting, and I was delighted to go. At that point I didn't like Dell anyway, and I knew enough about the Grove Press list to know that I wanted to go there. And I had a great time. Barney was a great pal, and I gave him a lot of arguments for many years, and then one night in a bar ten years later he fired me. But he said, "I'm going to keep you on the payroll for a year till you get yourself together." I decided then and there that I would never go to work for another publisher.
When you got
to Grove, was Barney already fighting his censorship battles all over the country?
Yes. Lady
Chatterley's Lover had been published. Tropic
of Cancer was being published and there
were some battles. The big battles came about a year after I got there, which
was when the paperback of Tropic of Cancer came out and was available in a lot of smaller towns. There were a
large number of lawsuits against the company that nearly put us out of business.
Were you
involved in that in any direct way?
No. I was on the
sales side of things. Among my duties was to go to the jobbers [distributors]
once a week to pick up some money that was due so we could pay the payroll.
That's how tight things were. But we did a lot of wonderful books and Barney,
because he was interested in the editorial side more than the marketing side,
gave me a lot of freedom. I hadn't worked in any big publishing house in a
capacity in which I could make decisions, so I did a lot of things quite
innovatively.
Like what?
I wanted to see
all the orders that came in to the house, which caused a delay in the printing
out of orders, but I wanted to have a hands-on approach to seeing the orders as
they came in and get a feel for what was moving. A few years into the job, we
had to fire everybody in the sales department and I had to travel the country.
I didn't realize until later what a wonderful experience that was going to be
for me. I had to travel to the West coast for three weeks twice a year. I had
to travel to the South, the Southeast, the Northeast. I even had to train a
couple of the editors to go out and sell our list. We were really just scraping
by. Then, when we started to do a little better financially, with one best-seller
after another, I was able to get on the phone and call a lot of these
booksellers who I now knew personally and get them to get behind a particular
book on the list that I thought had the most potential. We never had a large
sales force, even when we were successful. But we did a lot of phone work and a
lot of postcards and we got the independent booksellers behind us, and that
worked very well. There were also times when we would take a gamble. We didn't
do P&Ls [Profit and Loss projections] for acquisitions. We didn't have a
budget. A lot of it was instinctive publishing.
I can remember a particularly episode with a book that turned out to be one of the most successful Grove ever published, a book called Games People Play. I thought it was a terrible title for a book on transactional analysis. We had three colored discs on the cover with lines going from one to the other, and I said to Barney, "With a title like that, and a jacket like that, people are going to think it's a game book." He totally ignored me. Just when the book was being published, I went to the West coast for one of my three-week trips. When I got back, I called Barney and said, "Look, I want us to do a big ad in the Times for Games People Play." Barney said, "Why? We only printed thirty-five hundred copies. I think we've gone back for twenty-five hundred more, and you want a big ad in the Times? We published his first book and it didn't do all that well." I said, "Well, I have to tell you, Barney, I think God is telling me something." He laughed and said, "What is God telling you, Nat?" I said, "Well, I went to the West coast and in L.A., in a restaurant, I saw a woman reading a copy of Games People Play. Then I took the shuttle flight from L.A. to San Francisco and there was someone on the plane reading Games People Play. I said to myself, ‘If I see a third person reading this book, with the print order that we had, I'm going to come back....'" Of course I did see a third person in San Francisco reading Games People Play, which is why I came back and told him God was telling me we had to do a big ad. The American Psychiatric Association convention, at which we always exhibited our books, was coming up, and we decided to do an open letter to the shrinks who were attending the APA about Games People Play. Fred Jordan, who wrote a lot of our ad copy, did almost a full-page letter in the daily Times. We brought up hundreds of copies to sell to the shrinks at our little stand. We sold a lot of copies. And we were selling it to the right audience: young psychiatrists. Then the media got on to us and the book became a huge success, the biggest that Grove had ever had. I think we sold something like 600,000 copies in hardcover. Nobody wanted to buy the paperback rights because they thought for a hardcover of its kind we had pretty much covered the whole audience. So Grove had to publish the paperback itself, which then sold about two million copies. Grove was the kind of place where I could say to Barney, "God is telling me something." There was a wonderful level of collegiality in the company. Sometimes we would gang up on Barney because if one of us couldn't persuade him about something, then eventually all of us could.
Why were you
eventually fired?
The company was
getting involved in the film business. I didn't like most of the films we were
buying up and distributing. It was also taking a lot of our resources, tying up
Dick's attention as well as Fred Jordan's attention, and the book publishing
side was beginning to suffer. The list was not as large, it wasn't as focused,
and I was the big naysayer about it. I was calling Barney on it. I kept telling
him we had to get out of the film business. I became a strong voice of
opposition. Whereas he took my criticism on other matters for a long time, and
in very good form, I might add, on this point he was adamant.
When he began to discover that I wasn't the only one who felt this way, especially when he asked Dick Seaver to fire me—Dick and Fred were senior to me—and neither one of them wanted to fire me, he was convinced that I had gotten everybody on my side on this matter. When he fired me, he said, "I have to restore control of the company. This is mine. Not yours." Only two years later, Barney came to me with a project for which I sold the paperback rights for so much money that my commission was greater than my last year's salary working for him.
So obviously
there were no hard feelings.
Not at all. In
fact, Barney celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday at my home in East Hampton,
which made me very pleased. My best publishing experiences were the years
working for him. I realize now what a great experience it was.
When you get
down to it, what made him such a special publisher?
He was a rebel.
He was attracted to that which turned off other people. He loved a good battle.
He had wonderful taste, and he also had a wonderful outlook on publishing that
doesn't exist at all anymore.
Tell me what
you mean by that.
I'll tell you
about a moment in my life with Barney that had a major influence on the things
that attract me as an agent, especially these last few years. At some point I
noticed that on the upcoming list was a book of poetry, a fairly substantially
sized book of poetry by a Mexican poet I had never heard of, and it was going
to be in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. I went to Barney and said,
"You know, Barney, I don't think I can sell this book. I've never heard of this
guy." Barney said to me, "I didn't buy it because I thought you could sell it.
I bought it because I liked it and because I thought it was important." And the
book was the first publication in English of the poetry of Octavio Paz. It's
sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it's still in the Grove Press backlist,
and it was a book he wanted to publish because he loved it. You couldn't help
loving a guy who had that philosophy.
When you
left, why did you decide to become an agent rather than an editor?
I knew how to
sell books. And because Grove Press had a hardcover list, a trade paperback
list, its own mass market paperback list, and a magazine, I thought I would
make my services available as a consultant. Which is what I did in my first
year or two. Grove was a distributor for a couple of smaller publishers—Peter
Workman's first list was being distributed by Grove, for example—so I thought
I would approach small publishers and offer my services as a marketing
consultant. Because of the variety on the Grove Press list, and because I had
traveled the country, I think I was able to help some small publishers. One of
those publishers had a book that they wanted to get published instantly. I knew
some of the editors at Dell from my own days there, and I knew Dell did a
number of instant books, and I sold this book to Dell and got my first
commission. About six months later, this small publisher had another book. It
was by an NFL football player who had quit the game and talked about how he had
been supported financially while he was playing football in college by the
university, and some of the illegal things that were going on in football. I
sold the paperback rights for fifty thousand dollars and took a 10 percent
commission. I thought, "Wait a second. Maybe I should be doing this for small
presses instead of offering my consulting thing."
So I started to move from consulting work to handling the subsidiary rights—paperback rights and foreign rights—for small presses. Nobody had ever done that. I kind of backed into agenting by working for small presses. Eventually, some of those presses went out of business and the writers found me because I was the one who had generated the most money for them. At about that point, Judith [Weber] joined me. She came out of an editorial background and wanted to work more with authors. Eventually we phased out of the subrights business, partially because the mass-market publishers started to develop their own hardcover lists, so they weren't so anxious to buy reprint rights from other presses. But I was still doing a little consulting work. I wanted to do other things. As an example, I started the bookstore in East Hampton.
BookHampton?
Right. I started
it with two guys. One of them was the editor in chief of a company called Stein
& Day, which is no longer around. His partner lived in East Hampton. He
asked me about the idea of starting a bookstore, and I had bookstore
experience, so I found the location and we got BookHampton off the ground,
partially because I didn't know whether I was going to make it as an agent.
After two years, the store started to take off.
Were you
working full time at BookHampton?
No. I worked
four days a week at the agency. In the first months of BookHampton, I would go
to the jobbers and pick the books to take out to the bookstore. I would work
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the bookstore. So I was working seven days a week.
I was getting pressure on both sides. I couldn't put in any more time at the
store, and my two partners were pretty much beginning to know how to run the
business without me. We had a financial settlement and I was able to work full
time at my agency.
What were
some of the first books and authors you represented?
I still
represent one of the first authors I represented, a guy by the name of Dr.
Raymond Moody, and in fact I'm working on a new book of his. So he must be one
of the oldest clients I have. He wrote a book called Life After Life, the first book dealing with the near-death
experience. The publisher of that book was a small library press in Georgia.
The publisher came to me in New York because he was trying to sell the
paperback rights to this little book that was very odd for him. He gave me the
galleys and I read it and thought it was an amazing book. The author was a
thirty-two-year-old doctor who had just discovered these cases in several
hospitals in Atlanta. The book was a huge success. We sold it in something like
twenty-five countries, and it was the first big financial success the agency
had. When Raymond wrote his second book, he went to the same small publisher.
The publisher called me up and said, "Nat, this is not the kind of book I
publish. I published that first book because nobody else wanted to do it. But I
think you ought to be his agent." So he turned the manuscript and Raymond over
to me. There are a lot of other stories like that, people I came to know, like
best-selling Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley. He'd been published by a
small press that I was doing the rights for, and I wound up becoming his agent.
But I had no idea that trying to build a list of authors, to make it as an
authors' agent, was going to be such a long and difficult path.
When you were
starting out as an agent, were there any established agents that you looked up
to or went to for advice?
None. I didn't
join the agents' organization either.
You just sort
of figured it out?
I made a lot of
mistakes. I took on a lot of things I shouldn't have taken on, but when you're
getting started, if anybody comes to you, you think, "I'm going to do it. I can
sell it." It's only been in the last twenty years, or maybe the last ten years,
that I became aware, as did Judith, that we wanted the agency to reflect our
tastes, rather than just take on things that were saleable. Our list is our
taste. Which means that there are a lot of areas of publishing that we will not
go into because we aren't interested in them. So we've never done any romances,
for instance.
How
is being a writer different today than it was when you started out as an agent?
I think it's
easier for the writer. Today writers are a lot more aware that they need an
agent than they were then. The so-called slush pile at publishing houses is
almost nonexistent today—a lot of writers languished in those slush piles for
years. I think writers were often tempted by ads run in the writers magazines
by agents who charged exorbitant fees to have their manuscripts "evaluated,"
and much of that has disappeared. By and large, writers get responses from
agents much quicker today because of e-mail. I think the process has fewer
mines in the ground for writers to avoid. But on the other hand, it's much more
difficult to get published if you're a fiction writer. It's a bit of a
tradeoff.
Why
do you think it's more difficult to get published as a fiction writer?
I think you have to really look at the market today. If you look at the
Deals page of Publishers Weekly, nine out of the ten deals
described are nonfiction books. There certainly is a very strong feeling in the
publishing world that fiction is chancier—absolutely chancier—than
nonfiction. Today, you have to have all sorts of other reasons to publish a
first novel—other than that it happens to be very good.
What
do you mean by that?
We keep hearing this phrase, "What's the platform?"What's the fucking
platform? The first time I heard the word platform was
at a writers conference. I was on the dais with another agent and she was
talking about "the platform." I thought, "What the fuck is a platform? What is
she talking about?" Well, what it is is this: What does the author bring to the
table? Talent is not enough. The number of slots open to fiction on a publisher's
list is being reduced all the time.
But
that wasn't always the case. What do you see as the reason for that shift?
I think
there are a lot of reasons. It's not just the conglomeratization of publishing
and the slow disappearance of the independent booksellers. But maybe it's
easier for the sales rep to go and sell a nonfiction book that he hasn't read,
or she hasn't read, than it is for the rep to go in and sell a first novel that
he or she hasn't read. As the sales forces of the major publishing houses have
become decimated, there really is very little time for any of these reps to
read the first fiction on their list. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Almost more to the point, I think, is how agenting has changed in the last ten
years.
I
read something where you were talking about how many agents there are now, as
opposed to the old days when there weren't as many, and the importance to a
writer of picking a good one.
Yes. And how
do you know if you've got a good one?
Exactly.
I
try to impress my client list on new writers. There may be a writer on that
client list whose work you've read, whose work you really like. It should give
you some sort of comfort to think, "Well, if he was so-and-so's agent then he
can't be all that shabby." The client list is a wonderful tool for the would-be
writer to explore. Now that so many agents are putting their client lists on
their Web sites, I think that's a great way for writers to use that tool. Of
course you don't really know how good an agent is until you work with them.
It's like trying to determine if somebody is going to be a good sex partner
without getting into bed with them. At some point, you've got to get into bed.
But I think you would know fairly early on what sort of agent you have. It has
to do with the level of chemistry between you—how they respond to your work,
what they want you to do with it, and how they perform.
Do
you think editors do less editing than they used to?
I
think so. But I also think publishers do a lot less selling than they used to.
They do a lot less promotion than they used to. And this really gets to the
core of what I think about where agenting is going. There are a lot of editors
who are basically acquirers, and there are some who are really hands-on
editors. The editors in that second category are a much smaller number, and
those are the people who I generally go to first with my manuscripts. But I
think the whole question of editing also has to do with how much time the
editor can really give to a novel. That's another reason why I think fiction is
not as sought after by publishers as it used to be. You need a lot more editing
for a novel than you do for a work of nonfiction—although a lot of nonfiction
should be edited as well. But from the standpoint of how much time an editor
has to devote to the books on his or her list, fiction is on the time-consuming
end of it. So we see less time spent.
I think what is evolving today for agents is that they need to be the first line editors for their authors. Judith and I really love the editing process. We have spent years editing nearly every novel we've ever agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was going on in the publishing houses. But today agents need to be far more proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. We have to be very proactive in how we help direct the writer to help sell his or her book. Those are things you never thought about in agenting when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and that was it—the publisher took over.
Today the writer very much needs to be proactive. When I have writers who have the kind of personality that they enjoy going out and selling their books, and I've gotten them a big enough advance, they are smart enough, with my guidance, to put some of that advance aside and spend their own money to get the book off the ground. I think that being able to suggest things to writers, things they can do themselves to help sell the book, is getting to be as important a factor as helping them to edit the work. It's been amazing to me how much money a publisher will spend to acquire a book, and how little they will spend to make the book a success. The role of the agent today is a totally involving one—you have to be involved in the whole process. Which starts with helping the writer, as we do, through two or three drafts of the work to bring it up to the level where it is as good as we think it can be. That's not to preclude the possibility of some additional insights from a really savvy editor.
You're
talking about a fairly major shift from the responsibilities of the publisher,
in terms of the editing and the promotion, to the agent and the author. Tell me
why that happened.
I think that
nature abhors a vacuum. It's as simple as that. The vacuum that has been
created in the publishing houses by the reduction in their promotion and
publicity budgets, by the reductions in the size of the sales force, by the
dependence on a few key accounts buying most of the print order, has led to the
reduction in staffs of the publicity and promotion departments, and reductions in
staff throughout the publishing house. The result is that things aren't getting
done the way they used to be. It's not because the people in those houses
aren't willing to do it, they're just either overworked or underfunded. So
perfectly wonderful books get printed and disappear. And if you don't do
something, if something isn't done by somebody...I think the writer has his or
her own future in her hands in terms of what she is willing to do in order to
make the book succeed.
But when you
look at the landscape of the publishing industry, why did that vacuum come to
be?
I think it has
to do with the bottom line. If they can save money by reducing their sales
force, they're going to do that.
And that came
about due to the decline of independent booksellers, right? You needed less
salespeople.
Yes. You could
hire people in an office warehouse someplace to get on the phone and call some
of the smaller booksellers. You didn't have to have book reps. Recently, it
didn't get a lot of attention, but Random House fired some of its most
experienced sales reps. These were people who were better paid and had been
with the company for a long time. The guy who they reported to finally had to
quit himself because he couldn't face having to fire some of the best reps they
had, who were going to be replaced by new, young, and cheaper people. But
somebody forgot along the line that these reps had built up a rapport with
booksellers. They could get a bookseller to take a chance on a book that they
were enthusiastic about. [See Editor's Note.]
Another problem is how the level of enthusiasm has been watered down by the way the publishing houses are now structured. You used to have a situation where you'd have an enthusiastic agent selling a manuscript to an enthusiastic editor, and then that enthusiastic editor would go to the sales conference and communicate her enthusiasm to the sales reps, and then the sales reps would read the book and communicate their enthusiasm to the booksellers. But now the editors don't go to the sales conferences. The sales force doesn't have that direct contact with the person who bought the book. And the sales force itself keeps getting modified so that the enthusiasms don't percolate down to the booksellers who are going to take a chance on that first novel. The system is such that enthusiasm itself has been kind of cut off, at the most strategic place, which is the editor's ability to communicate her or his enthusiasm to the reps and to the rest of the people in the house. There are some editors who are very savvy and very enthusiastic about their books. I love dealing with those people. They don't let a book die. They are going to get out and get everybody's attention. But even they can't go to the sales conference, can't deal with the reps, can't communicate that enthusiasm to the people who have to go out and sell the books.
Tell me about
some of those editors who are especially good at that.
I'm not going to
name any names. I'll tell you why. Because I'll wake up tomorrow and think,
"Why didn't I tell him about A, B, and C? Why did I only tell him about D, E,
and F?" The editors who I really respect a great deal, they know I respect
them.
What
kinds of things are you encouraging your authors to do on their own behalf?
It depends
on how much money they get for their books. When I sold Tim Dorsey's first
novel—Tim is an offbeat crime writer who's written ten novels about a very
amiable serial killer, very wacky novels—we wound up selling it at auction. He
was the night editor for the Tampa Tribune. The money he got—it was a two-book
deal—was more than several years of his salary at the paper. I said, "Tim, I
don't want you to leave the Tampa Tribune until after your first novel is
published." He said, "Does that mean you think I won't ever sell my third or
fourth books?" I said, "No, it's because I have an idea. I want you to write to
the book review editor of every newspaper in Florida, on Tampa Tribune letterhead, and ask
them if they would review your book, as a colleague, so to speak." I said,
"Don't expect the publisher to spend much money promoting your book. I want you
to think about things you can do to help sell your book."
And he did that. He sent out letters on Tampa Tribune letterhead. It worked very well. He came to the [BookExpo America conference] on his own and brought cartons of T-shirts to give out with his first novel. Then he spent many months traveling to bookstores in Florida and Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama. And the fact that he's up to book ten should speak for itself. He has a very proactive Web site where he sells T-shirts and baseball caps and he has an interactive Web site for his serial killer, Serge. Tim is about to make his thousandth bookstore stop. He's made the books succeed and he's made his publisher a believer in him. He's a great student of what the proactive author should be. And the booksellers love Tim.
You also
represent James Ellroy. How did you meet him?
Years ago, my
lawyer was, and still is, the lawyer for Otto Penzler and the Mysterious
Bookshop. He thought Otto and I should get together. I've been Otto's agent for
many years. Anyway, I liked Otto a lot, and we couldn't figure out how a
bookseller and an agent could do anything together. I got the idea, or maybe it
was Otto, to form the Mysterious Literary Agency. This was really at the point
when I was just beginning to represent authors, and the idea was that Otto had
this wonderful bookshop where crime writers came in all the time, and he would
send writers to me who asked how to get an agent. So we started the Mysterious
Literary Agency. We did a whole thing where our letterhead had no address and
no phone number. If you wanted to find us, you had to solve the mystery. New
York magazine did a little thing about the
Mysterious Literary Agency. James saw that. James had had two paperback
originals published and his agent had given up on him. He walked into the
Mysterious Bookshop and said, "I am the demon dog of American crime
fiction." Otto said, "I've never
heard of you." James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the
first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy's third
novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to
start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy's novel for his
first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business. Of course
neither Otto nor I knew that James's previous agent had had seventeen
rejections on this novel. But we had done a lot of work on the book.
Tell me about
that. I remember seeing some documentary where you talked about the editing
work you did with Ellroy.
There are a lot
of Ellroy stories. I wrote Ellroy a rather lengthy editorial report about that
first novel I represented. I got back what looked like a very lengthy kidnap
letter. It was written in red pencil on yellow legal paper, and some of the
words on it were like an inch high: I AM NOT GOING TO DO THIS. I thought, "Oh,
I've got a loony here. Somebody who calls himself the demon dog? Maybe he is a
demon." But it was a very smart letter. He was very smart about what he would
do, why he wouldn't do certain things. And he did do a lot of work on the book.
I've edited him ever since. Nearly all of the editing is done here. He's been
wonderful to work with.
But isn't
there a story about you removing a lot of words from one of his books?
That's another
story about how Ellroy's style developed. It was for a book called L.A.
Confidential. It was a bigger book, in
length, than he had ever done before. Otto was still at Mysterious Press when
Warner Books bought it, but the editor in chief of Warner had heard that L.A.
Confidential was finished. I called her and
told her I had the manuscript. She asked me how long it was. I said it was
about 850 pages. She said, "No, we can't publish that." I said, "What do you
mean you can't publish it?" She said, "We publish all of Ellroy's books in mass
market, and a manuscript of that size"—maybe it was even longer—"you'll have
to cut 25 percent of the book."
L.A. Confidential follows three cops, and you couldn't take out one of the cops. James came to my house to talk about what we could do about it. I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a joke I said to James, "Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words." I meant it entirely as a joke. But I started going through a manuscript page and cut out about a dozen words on the page. James said, "Give me that." I gave him the page. And he just kept cutting. He was cutting and cutting and cutting. When he was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA. I said, "James, how would they be able to read this?" He said, "Let me read you the page." It was terrific. He said, "I know what I have to do." He took the whole manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book and developed the style. That editor never knew what we had to do, but she forced him into creating this special Ellroy style, which his reputation as a stylist is really based on. It came from her, sight unseen, saying "Cut 25 percent of the book." He wound up cutting enough without cutting a single scene from that book.
How
do you explain Ellroy's success with The Black Dahlia after six novels that
were basically commercial failures?
It was a much bigger book, a much more emotionally involving book for
James, and it dealt with a crime he'd been thinking about for a long time. So
the manuscript itself was a big leap forward for him. But that doesn't explain
how it succeeded after six novels didn't. James made a huge bet on himself. At
the time he wrote The Black Dahlia, James was working as a
caddie in Westchester. He was writing at night. He had no family and no other
interests except writing. Otto [Penzler] was continuing to publish him and had
bought The Black Dahlia for more money than he'd spent on
James's previous three novels because he thought it was a terrific book.
Word got out about this book, and we got an offer from Warner Brothers, who optioned the book for fifty thousand dollars. That was more money than James had gotten for all of his other books combined. When I called James to tell him, he said, "When the money comes in, call me." When I did call him, he said, "I don't want the money. I want you to call Otto Penzler and ask him what the advertising and promotion budget is for The Black Dahlia." Otto told me they were going to probably spend fifteen thousand dollars because none of the books had succeeded up till then. I told James. He said, "Ask him to double it. Tell him that if they'll double the budget to thirty thousand, you'll be giving him my check for forty-five thousand dollars and we'll have an entire budget of seventy-five thousand dollars to launch my book." And when I did that, Otto agreed to increase the budget to thirty thousand dollars. He was just floored by the fact that James was going to kick in forty-five thousand dollars of his own money—all of what he was getting, after my commission, from the movie sale. James wanted the money to be spent on the front cover of Publishers Weekly, a full-page ad in the Times Book Review, and the rest of it to be spent on sending him around the country for three months. Three months. And he went. Because James has nearly a photographic memory, he remembered every single person he met, and he single-handedly made his book successful. That was more than twenty years ago.
Where did he
get the idea? That's so farsighted for somebody in his situation.
He didn't get
the idea from me. He was smart enough to say, "This is my chance. This is my
book to get out and do it." He made it happen. Whatever success James has is
entirely of his own making. He's a very thoughtful guy. He never went to
college. But he's intelligent, he loves people, and he loves to go out and
promote. Not every writer can do that. Not every writer's as good at it as he
is. Tim Dorsey's as good as that. Others I've represented are. When you've got
a talented writer and they have that charisma, it's my job to advise them about
how to use those tools to make their book successful. So in effect, I am still
the sales manager that I was when I was at Grove Press.
Tell me about how you find clients.
My great
love, and where we've found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary
journals. I don't know how many other agents read the journals. I know it's a
lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than
anybody else.
How
many do you subscribe to?
I don't know
the exact count, but it's somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are
the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or
volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with
relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I've developed a
number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they
are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo,
who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a
circulation of something like three hundred copies.
Walk me
through what happened after you got in touch with Richard Russo.
He called me. He
said he'd just finished a novel and asked if I could give him one good reason
why he should send it to me. At that point in my career, I probably had a list
of unknown writers, none of whom he would have recognized. This was the
mid-eighties. I said, "If you send it to me Federal Express"—we didn't have
electronic mail then—"I'll read it quickly and tell you what edits I think it
needs." And Mr. Russo said to me, "How do you know it'll need any edits?" I
said, "I've never read a first novel that I didn't think could be improved." So
he sent it to me, and I gave him my edits.
Were they
extensive?
No. I've
actually given him many more notes as I've gone along with him from book to
book than I gave him on the first novel. I think I was a little intimidated by
the way he responded on the telephone, saying, "How do you know it needs any
edits?" But he responded very well.
And what
happened from there?
I sent out the
novel and had it turned down by twelve major houses before I finally sent it to
Gary Fisketjon, who was then doing Vintage Contemporaries, his list of original
paperback fiction that was getting a lot of attention. While he couldn't give
me very much money, he said he would make it the lead title on their fall list.
He did a great job with the book. What I sometimes quote as a "high four-figure
advance" turned out to be the beginning of a success story for Rick.
When you look
back at the way he built a career—the sort of slow build, book after book after
book—do you think that's still possible today?
In Rick's case,
he's earned out every book he's published, and rather quickly, which has always
led to him getting more money for the next book. But I think it's much harder
today. I think Rick himself would say that he was lucky he got to the right
editor at the right time in that editor's career. In fact, the more I think
about it, the more I realize that with almost every successful book I've had,
it's been the right editor at the right time at the right house. That's the key
to all of the successful books I've ever had—the right editor.
And there's
an element of luck?
Sometimes it's
luck. I think that if I were to look back on my career, I would say I've been
very lucky. I'm going to be the last guy to dismiss the idea of luck.
People in the
business talk about how eight out of ten readers, or whatever the number
actually is, are women. I think it's very difficult for young male writers to
get published, especially today. I wonder what you think about that and how
you've dealt with that in your career.
I certainly
think it's very difficult for male writers who are not writing thrillers. They
have a much tougher road. We've read a number of pretty good novels by male
writers that we know just won't go. Male coming-of-age novels are impossible to
sell. We've already talked about how it's getting more and more difficult to
sell fiction. Let me give you a better picture of it by looking back on last
year. Five of us in the agency read submissions—everyone downstairs and Judith
and myself. Five of us. We have an editorial meeting on Thursdays. I never talk
to Judith about what I've read except at this meeting so it's all fresh for all
of us. We generally read partial manuscripts, or complete manuscripts. Everyone
averages about two of those per week. So, in an average year, that's more than
five hundred manuscripts. Last year, from those five hundred books, we took on
three new writers. And we were only able to sell one of them. Remember that
much of what we get is from writers I've written to after reading their stories
in the literary journals—we get very little over the transom. So look at those
odds.
They're very
tough.
Damn right.
We've spent a lot of time editing through second and third drafts and finally
abandoning books because we don't think we can get the writer up to the level
we want. We have to give up on them. Occasionally those books will get
published too. But the odds are really difficult, and for the male writers it's
even harder.
Is there
anything they can do to make their odds better?
I'm always
looking for the unusual. I think it may require writing something of a
historical nature, with a historical setting. They have to be able to get an
idea of what's on the best-seller list today and see that, outside the thriller
genre, there aren't too many male fiction writers who are succeeding. And I
don't think that's going to change for a while.
But isn't
that troubling?
Sure it's
troubling. I think it's troubling for all literary fiction writers today. But
particularly for the male writers, who are only gradually becoming aware of how
limiting that audience is. But I think you can find good male writers who can
write from the woman's point of view, too. I remember a first novel I sold
years ago. The writer himself was in his early thirties, but the novel was a
first-person novel from the point of view of a sixty-two-year-old woman. It was
entirely in first person, and it was a terrific story. It began his career. So
if a male writer can write from the female point of view, or has a story that
will interest a woman's audience, I think he has a better chance than somebody
who's writing the kind of Hemingway-esque stuff we read in school.
You talked a
little about the decline of independent booksellers. Tell me a little more
about how you think that's affected the publishing industry.
It's
particularly with first fiction. I think Book Sense has done a lot to try to
pick up the slack there. But for first fiction, which is really the future
generations of writers, it has become a real problem for publishers because
they don't have the large list of independent booksellers that they can appeal
to. I forget what the percentage of sales is today from the independents, but
it goes down every year. I think that's affecting first fiction, particularly
short story collections. I love the short story. I love the form. But who's
going to take on a short story collection today? Damn few. I think that's
influencing the market—the market is feeding on itself.
With all the short stories and novels you read, what
is it about something that grabs your attention?
I can't say
what it is that captures my attention. I just know it. I think since I've been
reading all my life, I know on the first page, the first paragraph, if I'm in
the hands of somebody really capable. I wrote an essay that I put on my Web
site about reading the stories in the journals. I pointed out the first
paragraphs of a number of writers whose novels I subsequently took on. And it
was always right at the beginning that I was grabbed.
I remember reading a first novel and turning to Judith and giving her the first page and saying, "I'll bet you can't stop reading." She read it and asked, "Where's the rest of it?" I said, "Aha!" So can I describe what it is? It is entirely a visceral reaction, and it is also very personal and subjective and not easily categorized. It could be, for me, a western (I represent Elmer Kelton, who is recognized as the greatest living American writer of the western); it could be a crime novel; it could be a literary novel. It doesn't matter what the category is—but it gets me. I think that's what keeps us all going. It's the discovery. One of the best things about my job is that when I finish reading the manuscript of a first novel that I really like, whatever the time of day is, I can get on the phone and call the author, even if it's eleven o'clock at night, and know that they'll be very happy to get my call. And how often have you read a wonderful book where you'd love to call up the author and talk about it? That's what I do for a living.
How do you
feel about the decline of independent publishing and independent publishers?
I like to hope
that Morgan Entrekin is not alone in this field. There are some interesting
small presses coming along. I'm really impressed by what they've been doing.
It's interesting how many submissions they're getting from agents these days—agents
who were not able to sell that really good novel to a major house because the
author didn't have a platform but had a terrific book. I think we'll see more
of that. Because, again, as nature abhors a vacuum, I think there's a need in
this country for good writing. And while it may not be commercial, there will
be an audience to read it.
Do you have
any thoughts about the future of books. Have you played with this Kindle thing
that Amazon has made, or the Sony Reader?
No. Listen, I
was probably the last guy to get a computer at his desk. I am a Luddite. I'd
rather read the finished book. I love the feel of a printed book, and I suspect
many people of my age group in publishing feel the same. When you open a carton
of new books that have just come from the printer, take a breath of that air
and the new fresh print. It's intoxicating. The smell, when the box is opened,
is intoxicating.
Do you think
book reviews are as important as they used to be?
I don't think
so. I don't think anybody will tell you they are. A front-page New YorkTimes Book Review can either sell a book or not sell a book. Sometimes
it's because you finish reading the review and you can't tell whether or not
the reviewer liked the book. There was a time when book sales fell off
dramatically when the New York Times
was on strike and there was no Times Book Review. I don't think that happens anymore, unfortunately.
You can see the newspapers are cutting back on their book sections. They're not
making any money. The publishers aren't spending the money they used to on
advertising in the book review section. Look at today's Times Book
Review—the number of ads is very small.
Once a book review section doesn't make money, and starts losing money, it's
going to be cut back. So between the number of reviews now available, and the
effectiveness of the reviews, and where they're placed in the paper, I think
we're seeing the real value disappear.
Tell
me what you think about MFA programs.
A number of
the writers I represent are graduates of MFA programs. But in much of the
material I've seen from MFA
writers, they're writing about the standard stories of family trauma, divorce,
the death of a parent. They're very capably written. But we've seen too much of
that.
You
wrote a piece in maybe the early '90s about the sameness of what you were
reading.
Yes, and I
think if you talk to the editors of a lot of the journals, they'll tell you
that they're used to the same thing—that they see an awful lot of capable
stuff that is not very engaging. I was asked this question once at a
university. I was talking to seniors, and some of the writers were considering
going into MFA
programs. They asked me about the MFA programs. I said I thought it was great for
discipline: You have to write. I mean, you should want to write, but if you
find that difficult and need the discipline of going to class, then you should
go do it. If you want to go ahead with a career in the university, if you want
to teach creative writing, you're going to need an MFA. I think the programs do some good
for people who either need the degree in order to continue in the university
setting or need the discipline. But I think the originality factor is something
that's suffering as a result. We're getting too much of the same old, same old.
But I'm working right now with a writer who's going for his MFA, and he's
writing a novel in first person that is very unusual, and I'm encouraging him
to keep working on it. It's difficult to give you a blank statement about MFAs. There are
good things and there are some quite negative things.
page_5:
What do you think the students in them could do to
avoid that sameness?
They have to
get out and live.
What
do writers who are starting out today need to look for in an editor?
First of
all, I think writers today are thrilled if they've got an editor who wants to
buy their first novel. They're already thrilled with that editor. But I think
they want to be convinced that the editor is really enthusiastic and will help
to get the whole house behind the book—beyond anything that was spent to buy
the book.
Are
you saying an author should be more concerned about having a great advocate
than having a great editor?
Well, since a lot of the editing is being done before the manuscript is
delivered, I think the most important thing is having an advocate. In fact, I
think the best thing an editor can do for a book is to be the great in-house
advocate. That counts far more than the editing process, especially if you're a
writer who feels you've gotten enough editing from your agent. And I think more
and more agents are editing books.
And
that's a good thing?
Absolutely.
I think you have to. The editors themselves know which agents edit their books.
When an editor calls me and says, "I like this book and want to buy it, but I
have some problems with the ending. How willing is the writer to do some more
work?" I have to be in a position where I can say to the editor, "Listen, I've
worked with this writer through three drafts of this book. I know he or she is
willing to do the work and is capable of doing the work." I have to be able to
tell that to the editor. I think, too often, the editor discovers that the
writer didn't get edited by the agent and that the writer doesn't want editing.
Strange as that may seem, it happens.
All agents
have different philosophies about what kind of deal they want in terms of
advance money. Some agents are just concerned with the money. Others look at
other factors. What has your experience taught you about this issue?
My
particular philosophy about this has to be influenced by the years I worked
inside a publishing house. I have a tendency to see things from the publisher's
side of it as well as the author's. While I want to get the best money I can
for a writer, especially when we're talking about novelists who are going from
Book A to Book B, I don't want to price the author out of the market. I have a
pretty good idea, based on sales, what I think the publisher can afford, or
should be able to afford, to pay for the author's next work. I've done my own
mathematics; the number is not taken out of a hat. It's one that I know the
editor can go back to his boss, or her boss, and get, as a not crazy amount of
money. So having a little bit of knowledge about the mathematics has been very
helpful in being able to determine a fair price for an author's next work.
Sometimes I've had a difference of opinion with a writer who thinks he should
be getting a lot more money for his next book. In that case, if I'm not on the
same page with the writer, then the writer is perfectly able to go on their
own, find another agent, and see if they can get the money. But I'd rather see
an author brought along from book to book, with a track record that develops
and enhances his or her value to the publisher, and at the same time gets them
more money. But it's commensurate with how the previous work has sold. I don't
believe in putting a gun to the publisher's head. In the long run, I think the
best deal is where both sides feel they've gotten a good deal.
What
do you love most about your job? Is it that phone call at eleven o'clock at
night, or is it something else?
There are
lots of things I like about the job. The discovery of new talent, of course.
The success of a book that you've worked on and helped nurture. I mean, I spent
a lot of time working with James Ellroy on The Black Dahlia, more than on his
previous books, and I felt I'd made a real contribution to the success of that
book. I like a lot of the people I deal with in publishing. I came into publishing
about the same time as Sonny Mehta did, and Peter Mayer, both of whom I
consider old friends. So I have a sense of community. I love hanging out with
these guys. We have a history together. We've all seen publishing change, but
we're still in the business. We love what we do. There is a kind of a family
feeling to the business, among, let's say, forty or fifty agents and forty or
fifty editors. So you feel a sense of community.
I love to see a first novel get on the best-seller list. I always want to read those books, especially if it's a first novel. I mean, look at how [Nancy Horan's] Loving Frank, for instance, succeeded as a best-seller last year. I wanted to read that book. I wanted to see what it was. But I do know there was great in-house enthusiasm for the book. And I know what a splendid job Algonquin did with [Sara Gruen's] Water for Elephants. And what a great job Morgan did with [Charles Frazier's] Cold Mountain. I mean, they don't happen very often. But every one of those successes keeps us all in the game.
What are the
disappointing aspects of working as an agent?
The novel that
you worked on for months, through two or three drafts, and then you can't sell.
Terrible. You can't help but take it personally. The writer who leaves you
after several books, either because the books didn't go anywhere or because he
feels he's ready to move up to a big-time agent. But I think a lot of these
things happen to people like Peter Mayer and Sonny Mehta, too. So it's part of
the game.
What do
editors do that drives you crazy?
When they don't
answer my mail.
Why is that?
Well, we could
get into a whole discussion about common courtesy, and how it seems to have disappeared.
But especially
in this business, right?
More among
younger editors, who aren't aware that if you've asked for a book, and there's
a closing—and I never send a manuscript to an editor unless they've asked for
it—then they have to call and let you know. Sometimes you wait all day to hear
from them, or you have to chase them again. That pisses me off. I don't get too
many form rejection letters anymore. I usually respond by sending my own form
rejection letter to the editor. I tell the editor, "Our agency no longer accepts
form rejection letters and we have decided to remove you from our submission
list."
What makes
you love an editor?
A quick
response. An intelligent response that shows me they've read the book. Maybe
they pinpoint a problem in the book. If I have a difference of opinion with a
writer about some aspect of their novel, I may say, "Well, why don't we try
three editors and see what their responses are." I'm hoping to hear from the
editors that they have the same problem with the manuscript. If I get that kind
of response, I can go back to the writer and make him make the change before I
go elsewhere with the book. But I don't get that kind of response very often.
The editors I like are the ones who instinctively know that there's a good book
here but it needs this, that, or the other thing—and they are willing to tell
me. A lot of editors aren't willing to tell you what the real problem is with a
book. The stock phrase will be "I couldn't summon up enough enthusiasm" or "I
didn't feel passionately," none of which tells you anything. But the editors
who tell you specifically what it is that they didn't like about the book are
valuable. And you don't get too much of that. You talk about editing in the
publishing world? Getting intelligent responses to our manuscripts is almost as
important for us as getting an offer is, these days. You don't get too much of
that.
Tell me about
some high points and low points in your career.
For low points,
I told you about the writer whose work you really love, or you really like them
a great deal, and for one reason or another they leave you. That's always a low
point. Maybe they feel their careers aren't going anywhere. The publisher isn't
offering as much money for their new book as they did for their last book, and
they think that some of that is your responsibility. As one writer who I liked
a great deal once wrote to me, "I can't fire me, Nat. You're the only one I can fire." And he fired me. That was the whole letter!
His career didn't go anywhere, but that was one of the nicer rejection letters.
The real high points are the writer who you've worked with for several years, and their career's gone nowhere, and you've been working on their new book and it's really terrific—it's different from anything else they've written—and you've gone out with that book and sold it in the face of the fact that any check of BookScan will reveal that they sold hardly anything of their last book. But you found an enthusiastic editor who's willing to take the book on despite that and really run with it. That's a great moment, and that's happened to me a few times. I say that to writers who have had poor results with their first few books and feel that publishing doors have closed to them. Because the sales track is clearly one of the things an editor looks at. Sometimes they can't see how incredible a new book is—they can only look at the author's track record at another house. So when you can overcome that, as an agent, and convince an editor that they have something special, you've really made a breakthrough, especially in this market.
Do you worry
about the future of books and reading?
I don't think
you can be in this business without worrying about that subject. But, you know,
when I got started in publishing, I can remember an old salesman telling me,
"You should have been here in the forties and the fifties, Nat. That was the
great period! Now it's all gone to hell." I think every generation probably
feels like, Geez, you should've been here twenty years ago, kid. Where were
you twenty years ago when it was really great?
I think there's always going to be that element—that it's not as good as it
used to be. But it is tougher today.
What do you
still want to accomplish?
I just love
doing what I'm doing, and I hope I'll be able to do it for many more years to
come.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
[Editor’s Note: Following the publication of Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s extended interview with Nat Sobel, we received a letter from Stuart Applebaum, executive vice president of communications for Random House, who takes issue with Sobel’s views of the firing of the publisher’s sales reps. We reprint his letter below in its entirety.]
While Mr. Sobel is well entitled to express his opinions about book publishers, his observations about the Random House, Inc., sales force demand clarification, in particular, two points in his quote.
First, the Random House Sales reorganization he cites took place some eighteen months ago—not so “recently,” as he misleadingly pegs it.
Second, his suggestion that the Random House field reps who left were “replaced by new, young, and cheaper people” is simply untrue. In virtually every instance the accounts affected at the time of the change were and continue being sold by longstanding, highly knowledgeable Random House veteran sales representatives with great rapport and effectiveness with their customers.
As a point of reference, about one-quarter of our field reps have more than twenty years of service. All but nine of them have at least five years of field-sales service. And speaking of tenure, at our national Sales Conference in March 2008 we celebrated three RH Sales Group members with thirty-five years of service; six celebrating thirty years; three with twenty-five years; and five commemorating twenty years.
Stuart Applebaum
Executive Vice President, Communications
Random House, Inc.
The author responds:
In his essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell warns us about words that are "used in a consciously dishonest way." I was reminded of that warning when I read Stuart Applebaum's letter about the Random House sales force's "reorganization" (Orwell again: "Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them").
Mr. Applebaum's first complaint is almost too minor to be taken seriously, but, for the record, this interview was conducted on January 6, 2008, and the cuts to the Random House sales force were reported in Publishers Lunch on November 10, 2006, which places the actual time-span at less than fourteen months. Readers can decide for themselves if fourteen months can be reasonably considered "recent" for an agent with Sobel's decades of experience in the business.
Mr. Applebaum's second complaint is not minor at all. It could have been pulled straight out of "Politics and the English Language," and therefore it is troubling. Just after Mr. Applebaum assures us that Sobel's comment is "simply untrue," he qualifies that phrase and everything that follows it by inserting the word "virtually." Again, readers of this magazine know enough about language to look at the letter and decide for themselves what the word's presence tells them.
Obviously Mr. Applebaum is just doing his job, and I have a hard time faulting anyone for that. It should also be noted that it is impossible to prove or disprove Sobel's supposition without having access to information that is personal and proprietary, namely the salaries of the sales reps who were fired and the salaries of any reps who may have been hired to do the same work in the interim. But I am disheartened by Mr. Applebaum's attempt to distract readers from the larger truth of Sobel's observations—that reps are overburdened, and that publishing veterans are routinely replaced by cheaper help in order to save money, both of which hurts writers as well as readers—by issuing a statement that, when you really look at it, says virtually nothing.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Considering that it took Janet Silver only a few weeks to land a plum new job as editor-at-large for Nan A. Talese's imprint at Doubleday, perhaps it isn't worth going into the whole convoluted chain of events that resulted in her ouster, back in January, from her position as vice president and publisher of Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston-based house she'd headed since 2001. No doubt it would be cleaner to avoid the subject altogether and talk instead about her background (she was raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and educated at Brown and the University of Chicago); the staggering list of authors she has edited, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Natasha Trethewey, and John Edgar Wideman; or her charming house in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, where our conversation took place.
After all, maybe Silver was sacked after twenty-four years at Houghton for reasons having nothing to do with the ambitions of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish businessman named Barry O'Callaghan. But that seems unlikely. The facts are as follows: O'Callaghan is one of the richest men in Ireland. Although his background is in law, investment banking, and venture capitalism, in December 2006 his Dublin-based educational software company, Riverdeep, pulled off an audacious, highly leveraged reverse takeover of Houghton Mifflin. After the merger, he moved the new company's official headquarters to the Cayman Islands (always a promising sign). Then, seven months ago, O'Callaghan acquired another piece of low-hanging publishing fruit, Harcourt, taking the next step in an apparent attempt to build a publishing empire. In the fallout surrounding that merger, Silver was one of several well-regarded veteran editors to be shown the door.
Admittedly, it's hard to summon up much outrage about the conglomeration of American book publishers these days. Huge corporations have been buying and selling them with abandon for the past five decades. O'Callaghan is just the latest member of an elite fraternity whose top dog has to be Rupert Murdoch (his News Corporation owns the numerous HarperCollins imprints). Still, just as one can't help feeling a chill to realize that revenues generated by books like Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A People's History of the United States are paying the lighting bills over at Fox News, O'Callaghan's recent actions, and their consequences, are poignant reminders that the media moguls who hold sway over today's publishing houses tend to look—and, more to the point, behave—less like Alfred Knopf or Bennett Cerf and more like Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. The problem is not so much that men like O'Callaghan continue to buy publishing houses, but rather that they rarely care enough about the work publishers do to hang on to them when it stops suiting their bottom line. Which is about the time when people like Janet Silver and her colleagues start losing their jobs—and their authors lose their most passionate advocates.
If any of this keeps Silver up at night, she didn't let on during our conversation, in which she spoke candidly about what she looks for in first novels and dispensed some useful advice for writers about agents. We talked in her living room while her dog, Roxy, and her cat, Phoebe, lounged on the floor beside the fireplace.
Tell me a
little about your background.
I grew up in
South Orange, New Jersey, which today has become a little like Brooklyn in that
a lot of people from publishing seem to live there and commute. When I was
growing up it was not like that at all. I went to college at Brown and graduate
school at the University of Chicago. It was when I was a graduate student at
Chicago that I began to realize I was more temperamentally inclined toward
editorial work than scholarship.
You were
studying English?
Yes. I was
actually on a track for a doctorate. But while I was in school I needed to
support myself. I got a job as the managing editor of this quarterly, Critical
Inquiry, which was one of the journals
published by the University of Chicago Press. This was in the mid-seventies,
late seventies. It was kind of wild. The journal did criticism in the arts, in
all of the arts, but primarily in literature. This was in the heyday of the
great deconstruction rage, so we were publishing the first translations of
essays by Derrida, for instance, and Lacan, and some essays by Jacques Barzun.
It was very, very intellectual. It was very abstract. But we were also
publishing the early essays by people like Skip Gates. I got to work with some
amazing writers, and we really did edit the pieces, because when you work for a
journal things have to be a particular length and they have to make a
particular point. A lot of the academic writers we worked with really welcomed
some input.
The other nice thing about working for a journal—unlike working on a dissertation, which is endless—is that there was an end product four times a year. It was this thing that other people read. It was a way to be engaged in a cultural conversation that seemed important—at the time, anyway. I loved the interaction with the writers. I loved the opportunity to learn about the production of a journal. We were a very small office. We did all of the editing, all the copyediting, all the proofreading. It was this little mini-education in a certain kind of publishing.
How did you
get from there to Houghton?
I was there for
five years, doing my course work and working full time. But before I finished,
my husband and I got married. He had finished his doctorate in philosophy and
was teaching and on the job market. This was a time when there were pretty much
no jobs unless you were willing to go from North Dakota to South Texas to
wherever. That wasn't what he wanted to do. So, like many people with
doctorates in that era, he went to law school. As much as we both loved
Chicago, we also wanted to come back east. So we came back and he went to
Harvard Law School and I needed to work. The only skill I had was editing. I
started doing freelance work, some of it for the Museum of Fine Arts—I also
have a background in art history—and some of it for Houghton Mifflin. It just
sort of evolved and I began to work there full time.
What
was your position when you started at Houghton Mifflin?
Manuscript
editor. Some publishers used freelance copyeditors—this was 1984—but Houghton
always had an in-house group of people, whom they called manuscript editors,
who did copyediting and a lot of developmental work. It was a chance to get in
the door and begin to learn trade publishing from the ground up. I never did
the standard editorial assistant thing where you go up through the ranks that
way. When I was a manuscript editor, one of the earlier books I worked on was
[Margaret Atwood's] The Handmaid's Tale. Nan Talese was at
Houghton Mifflin at the time—so it feels like a nice symmetry that it's come
full circle now.
Was there
somebody who taught you how to edit?
I pretty much
learned by doing it. To some degree I feel as though the opportunity to edit
articles first was a great way to start. It's much smaller. It's more
contained. You learn to focus on every line, every paragraph, and get that fine
detail down. I never thought of myself as a detail person, but when you start
working that way, you kind of become one. You are forced to slow down and not
only think about the larger argument and whether it's flowing naturally, but
also to concentrate on a more micro level. To some degree, the authors teach
you. You make your mistakes, and boy, do they let you know it. But the other
thing is that, having spent a lot of time reading, you just naturally know if a
narrative is flowing well or if you're stumbling over things and things don't
seem entirely clear. When I was in graduate school, my concentration was in
fiction, so I naturally gravitated toward editing fiction more than other kinds
of narratives.
Were
there older people at Houghton who helped you make the transition to being an
acquisitions editor?
I was there so long I
kind of think of it in terms of eras. There was the Austin Olney-Nan
Talese era, which is what I came into when I joined. And that was kind of old
school. The nice thing was that there were editors who had too many books to
edit and really wanted additional help. So I was able to pick up some work that
I might not have had the chance to do otherwise. The next era was the Joe
Kanon-John Sterling era. That was when I really began to take on books of
my own, with John's encouragement, probably four or five years into the job. I
was very fortunate because I did get the support of people who encouraged me to
go out on my own and acquire, and that doesn't happen for everybody.
I never thought of myself as particularly ambitious for myself, but more for my writers. At a certain point I found that I became so invested in the books I was editing that it felt like a loss to turn them over to other people. The longer I'd been at the company and had a chance to see the way books were published, the more opinionated I became about what to publish, especially what kinds of books to publish. Houghton went through a lot of changes—grew and contracted, grew and contracted—but the one thing that I always felt about the list was that it had a certain kind of profile as being fairly conservative, especially in fiction—a little sleepy. Some of Nan's authors helped to change that profile: writers like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Valerie Martin. The authors she was publishing at Houghton are still the people she's publishing today, which is much to her credit. But it was a moment when the publishing world and the readership were changing and evolving, and it seemed like there was room on the Houghton list for different kinds of voices.
Likewhat?
More books by women.
More books by ethnic writers. One of the first novels I acquired was by a young
woman named Connie Porter, a young black woman who had graduated from the
[Louisiana State University] graduate writing program. She had written a first
novel called All-Bright Court, which was about a community of African
Americans who had migrated up from the South after World War II when there
seemed to be a lot of opportunity. The book was about this aspiring community
of black workers who came to find that the promises they were given really
didn't come through. And that book is still in print. The wonderful thing about
it was that here was a young writer talking about a certain kind of community
and experience that wasn't very well represented in the market.
Another example is a collection of stories by a young woman named Carolyn Ferrell called Don't Erase Me. Carolyn comes from a mixed background. Her mother is white and her father is black. The stories she wrote were very literary and ambitious and challenging in a particular way. Edward P. Jones is a writer whom I might compare her to. That book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. I just felt there was a need to hear from those kinds of voices—and that Houghton should be supporting writers like that.
Where
does that interest come from for you?
I don't know. Maybe it's
just the idea that in every era there are the voices you haven't heard from
before. In the 1940s and 1950s it was Jewish American writers. The thing that
makes reading interesting is hearing from different voices and different
perspectives, especially in fiction. And the book that probably typifies that—the
most symbolically important of the books I acquired with that mission—was
Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.
How
did she come to your attention?
It
was a combination of things. She had just graduated from the Boston University
writing program. She had a couple of small publications, and she did have an
agent—who's no longer an agent, Cindy Klein—who was with Borchardt. I think
Cindy sent me four or five stories. I pretty much knew right away that she was
a writer I really wanted to publish. But I also knew about her through Peter Ho
Davies, who called to tell me I was going to be seeing this collection and this
was somebody I should really pay attention to. And she was also one of the
writers who was on Katrina Kenison's radar for the Best American Short Stories,
of which I was the in-house editor for many years starting in the eighties. I
met with Jhumpa and talked with her about her writing and her ideas for the
stories and the collection. We were very much on the same wavelength in terms
of my editorial suggestions. And one of the great benefits Houghton could offer
at the time was the opportunity to publish in paperback original.
Let's
talk about that.
Mariner had just
started, and the fact was that it was really hard to sell short story
collections in hardcover. A lot of publishers were shying away from them unless
they came with a novel that you could publish first and then have the stories
trail along afterward. I think the opportunity to publish in paperback original
really made a lot of sense at the time, although when Mariner started it sort
of defied conventional wisdom. A number of publishers had tried that format,
and the books being published in that format got a reputation for having a
particular persona. You know—edgy, downtown.
Like
the books published by Gary Fisketjon's Vintage
Contemporaries.
Exactly. But in its
first year Mariner published a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her seventies
at the time, called The Blue Flower, which became a phenomenon. I think the fact
that it was published in paperback original made a huge difference because it
enabled people to take a chance. That's the beauty of it. A lot of publishers
had published Fitzgerald's work in hardcover in the States with very little
success. But here was a way to say to readers and bookstores, "You're going to
read these fabulous reviews, and it's twelve dollars, so take a chance." And
the publicity department waged a really aggressive campaign with reviewers,
which I think was important. Because that was the other thing about publishing
in paperback original—they were seen as second-class citizens and not
necessarily to be taken as seriously by reviewers. We made a point of saying,
"No, this is really just a way to reach readers by making the price point more
accessible."
This was also the moment at which booksellers were switching over to computerized inventory so that ordering was happening based on the sales of the writer's previous book. Well, if you can increase sales simply by lowering the price—if you can double or triple or quadruple the sales you would anticipate in hardcover—then you can establish a base from which a writer can grow.
And now when
we're talking to writers and agents, making the argument for paperback
original, one of the books we always point to is Interpreter of Maladies.
Right.
But there
wasn't any resistance at the time?
It was a short
story collection by an unknown writer.
And nobody
knew it would win the Pulitzer Prize.
Right, but it
really began to sell well before it won the prize. You have to remember that
when I bought the book she hadn't published in the New Yorker yet. They bought two stories shortly after I
acquired it, and she won the New Yorker's first fiction prize at the end of that year. When the book came out
it got great reviews—that always helps—and it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. So
by the time she won the Pulitzer there were already something like forty-five
thousand copies in print. Then there were a lot of copies in print. Of course
it's hugely gratifying to find an author like her. I wasn't by any means the
only one to discover her, but I was first.
So the decision about paperback original just made a lot of sense. It made sense to her. Her agent was probably hearing from every publisher, "Well, short story collections are really hard." And we were saying, "No, we know how to do it, and the first printing will not be twenty-five-hundred copies. It's going to be at least fifteen or it doesn't make any sense." So that argument made a lot of sense to her and to her agent. But it was a two-book contract. We had the novel under contract too.
But even
after all the successes, authors and agents still resist paperback original. Do
you think it will ever take over like it has in Europe?
Well, Europe is
certainly way ahead of us. I like to think that Mariner set a precedent that
other publishers followed so that the whole idea of paperback original became much
more appealing. I guess the problem now is that the economics are even more
challenging. The big economic problem with paperback original is that it costs
just as much to publish and promote the book, but the revenues are half—for
everybody. So you have to make sure it's the right book, that you're not
flooding the market. I think it's important for publicity departments to
continue to wage that campaign with reviewers. But I don't think it matters as
much for reviewers anymore. I think there was something about the uniqueness of
the Mariner list when it started—with writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and
James Carroll, who had just won the National Book Award—that gave it a certain
kind of profile. So while the world at large may not have known what a Mariner
book was, booksellers and reviewers did. Now that it's more common, it doesn't
have any particular cachet or imply a particular kind of publishing.
Unfortunately, that means it's just like every other book. So it's complicated.
I don't know where it's going. I think Morgan [Entrekin] did something very
interesting with Man Gone Down, by
upping the production values, with the French flaps and the rough front, to
make the book itself a kind of object. Today the trick is to distinguish these
books. Once the distinction disappears, it's going to become harder for
everybody.
When you
became publisher of the company in 2001, you became Philip Roth's editor.
Philip started
at Houghton with Goodbye, Columbus in
1959, and after being with many other publishers over a long career he came
back to Houghton with Sabbath's Theater, when Joe Kanon was the publisher. Roth always worked with the
publisher. After Joe left, his editor became Wendy Strothman. When Wendy left,
I became his editor. That was when we had just published The Human
Stain. He was definitely at a high point.
And what a privilege to be able to work with him. It was fun because my parents
grew up in Newark and I grew up with Philip Roth in many ways. He was of my
parents' generation, grew up in the same town, went to the same high schools,
and also sort of made that same migration out of Newark and into the suburbs,
to the South Orange and Maplewood area. So it was a world that I had not only
been reading about in Roth's novels for all these years, but also kind of knew
intimately.
I imagine it
must have been incredibly intimidating to suddenly be Roth's editor.
Well, nobody
"edits" Philip Roth. It was a real privilege, I would say, but also a
responsibility. The biggest responsibility was to make sure that he was
published as well as possible—and to be published without a hitch. Philip Roth
is extremely knowledgeable about publishing, and very deliberate, and very
attentive to detail. My job was to make sure all those details fell into place.
The first time you get a Roth novel in manuscript it's very, very exciting. The thing comes to you. It's complete. And you're one of the first people to have a chance to read it. So there are no preconceived ideas about the book, no reviews to sway you one way or another. The first book I read in manuscript was The Plot Against America. And when I read that manuscript, I just knew it was going to be his best-selling book. I just knew it.
Because of
the hook?
Because of the
hook and because I think he just hit a nerve. He hit a nerve and an anxiety in
the American psyche at the right moment. He is so attuned to the American
psyche. And the fact is that he didn't, as he said, write the book to make any
particular political statement about current politics. He really did want to
write about that era. But what he discovered in that alternative history was a
way to touch a nerve that's very raw in our generation.
He is a very private person, and he didn't really talk much about some of his previous books, but we were able to convince him to do some publicity for that book, and to his credit, I think he actually enjoyed doing it. So Katie Couric interviewed him and he was on Terry Gross, who had interviewed him before. That was an opportunity for us. His willingness to talk about those books—he did a little bit for The Human Stain—really made all the difference. People want to hear from him, and his generosity in doing that was tremendous. Somebody said to him, "How come you decided to give interviews about Plot?" He said, "Well, my publisher asked me to do interviews and I said okay." It's much more complicated than that, but I think he was able to talk about the book on his own terms, and what more could any reader want than to hear him talk about a book on his own terms?
When we published American Pastoral, we had Roth come to sales conference. I'm not sure it was that book, but I think so. And this was amazing for the reps. I mean, to have Philip Roth at the sales conference? Edna O'Brien had come in the day before, and if you've ever encountered Edna O'Brien, she's very dramatic and theatrical and just has this regal quality to her, and she swept in and gave a marvelous speech and left. The next day Roth came in. Everyone was so nervous about meeting him. But he strolled into the room, and rather than standing up and giving a speech, he sat down at the table—this open square, the way a sales conference goes—and he talked a little about the book and then asked if people had questions for him. Nobody was going to ask him a personal question about something he didn't want to talk about—he knew he could trust us that way. The [Barnes & Noble] rep raised his hand and said, "I just want to thank you for putting New Jersey on the map." And we all laughed and from there he answered every single question he got about the book, about his writing career.... Someone asked him if he had other people read his manuscripts, and he said there were six people in American who he really trusted to read his work—he doesn't read reviews, that's not important to him—and the opinions of those six people were the only opinions that mattered to him. I just thought he was so thoughtful and gracious and generous in the way he answered and responded to every single question. I think it made such a difference.
Do you have
any insight into this amazing productivity—both in quantity and in quality—late
in life? It's kind of unusual.
I think that a
lot has come together in his writing. There's a particular fury that's always
been a part of his work, but at this time in his life he's been able to focus
it on a large canvas. When he accepted the National Book Foundation's
distinguished medal, he talked about having the great American writers as his
models. By that he meant he didn't necessarily think of himself as a Jewish
writer—that he's not necessarily Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud or the other
writers he's usually grouped with. This is speculation, but at this point in
his life maybe he sees his own writing in an even larger way—more in the
context of the history of American writing—and that's partly where some of
these more recent novels come from.
You also work
with Cynthia Ozick. Tell me about your experience with her.
She's a delight
in every way. Cynthia was at Knopf for many years. She got a new agent, Melanie
Jackson, and I think that she was ready for a change—some writers just need a
boost. She's a writer who I'd been reading for years and who I adore and who I
think both in fiction and nonfiction—especially as an essayist—is without
peer. She writes a better essay than any American writer. She is a public
intellectual, in a way. I don't always agree with her. But she's so deeply
engaged in this cultural conversation—like it or not, in terms of her opinions—and
she cares so deeply about American culture and what's happened to it and where
it's going, and she's so eloquent, that you must read her.
But she's also a great fiction writer in the tradition of Henry James and my favorite nineteenth-century Victorians. When I found out that she was looking to move—I had already brought over Anita Desai, who is also represented by Melanie Jackson—I immediately expressed my interest. Melanie sent me the novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, which was untitled at the time. Actually, it was called The Bear Boy because one of the characters is based on the real life model for Christopher Robin in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I started reading this novel and I was just blown away. I said to myself, "It's her Middlemarch." And, in fact, the main character is named Dorothea, and there's this whole family drama that takes place in the Bronx. It's George Eliot in the Bronx! When I had my first conversation with Cynthia, I said to her, "It's your Middlemarch," and she knew that I understood where she was coming from. We had the best meeting. It was a love-fest all around.
I just felt that she was so important that she had to be published at the top of the list. She just had to be. Sometimes when you love a writer, and an agent brings you a book, it's just not the right book to move. You really want to be able to make a difference. Boy did I think this was the book where we could publish it in a different way and make a difference. All of her books had a similar look, a kind of "Cynthia Ozick look," and instead of doing that we gave it this bright cover with foil fireflies on the front and a title that was unlike any Cynthia Ozick title you've ever heard before. We got her to meet booksellers, which she had never done. She had never had a chance to go out and meet booksellers. Lots of people had seen her on panels and in that context, but they had not been able to sit down at dinner with her and just talk. She is just the most delightful dinner companion you can imagine. She truly is so generous and so deeply interested in what people have to say.
You also edit Tim O'Brien. Was he
always a Houghton author?
Tim is one of a number of authors
who left Houghton and came back. I can't take credit for all of them by any
means, but a lot of them stayed under my direction. Roth came back, obviously.
Bob Stone came back. Tim O'Brien came back. He had been brought to Houghton by
Sam Lawrence, the legendary Sam Lawrence. After Sam died, John Sterling became
his editor. About the time that Houghton published In the Lake of the Woods, John went off to start up Broadway Books. Tim went
with John. As sad as it was, I love to see that. I love to see an author be
really loyal to an editor. But he just never felt the same about the house. And
at a certain point he came back and talked to our CEO, Nader Darehshori at the
time, and said he wanted to come back to Houghton Mifflin. I met with him and
Wendy Strothman, who was the publisher at the time. We had this great lunch,
and he said to me, "I want to come back and I want you to be my editor." How
gratifying is that? That's pretty great.
We just have a truly wonderful relationship. I think writing this last novel, July, July, was very hard for him. He's gone through so many changes in his life—he moved to Texas and got married and has two children. But all this time, and especially when we were working on this last novel, which evolved from a collection of short stories into a novel, we've just had such a wonderful back and forth, and I've also been able to get a sense of his own ambition and his own frustration with being boxed in as a writer who's expected to produce a certain work, always about Vietnam. The Things They Carried will always be the book he's known for. It just will. But, much to his credit, he really wanted to do more than that, and always has. He has always sort of tested that, and I admire that tremendously. His writing is so complex and so edgy, in a way, that I think people could relate to it in war stories but it's more unexpected when it comes to other kinds of stories. That's been a real tension in his work for a long time. But he's working on a new book now, I'm happy to say.
I'm curious
about your transition from editor in chief to publisher. First of all, what is
the job of the editor in chief in your mind?
I can only talk about
myself—I think it's different at different houses—but in my mind it's really
to guide the editorial group and to encourage editors to grow in their own
ways. I became editor in chief at a time when the editorial ranks were really
depleted. There had been a lot of change at Houghton, after having stability
for literally generations. We were bought by this French water processing
company, Vivendi, which had aspirations to take over the world. They bought us
and sold us very quickly, so there was a lot of turmoil.
When Wendy Strothman became publisher, her background had been at a university press and then at Beacon Press. She had a strong affinity for books on social change and felt that Houghton could be doing more of that, which we did, with some success, but not with the kind of breadth that I felt the list really needed. But she was able to help me focus the list in a way to return it to its real strengths—rather than trying to be all publishers to all people and trying to compete with much larger houses with much bigger resources in all of the same categories. My feeling, and I had her support, was to really focus the list on areas that would sell over time, and to focus on narrative nonfiction in areas like science and history and biography that Houghton had a strong background in. Actually, Houghton was less known for science—we had been known for natural history—but I felt that you had to grow organically, and the natural way to grow out from natural history was to publish more science. So I wanted to hire a science editor. I wanted to find a history editor. My role was to find specialists who could really speak to authors in their own language. That's one way of being convincing when you have more limited resources: to find the most brilliant editors, with a deep knowledge of a subject area and experience editing those kinds of books, and to say to an agent and an author, "Let's get these two together. Let's have a conversation."
Eamon Dolan is a great example. There's someone who now, at a young age, has become a very legendary editor. Eamon was known for a certain kind of narrative book. But Houghton published sports books, and what did Eamon bring us? He brought us the best of sports. He brought Buzz Bissinger and Three Nights in August. I remember when he brought that book to the acquisitions committee, which includes sales, marketing, and all of that. The sales people sort of shook their heads. "Oh, it's regional." This was before Friday Night Lights became a movie and a TV show and popular in that way. Eamon said he didn't think it was regional. I didn't think so either. So sometimes you defy the internal wisdom. Eamon also found Eric Schlosser and Fast Food Nation. Again, there were some in-house doubters who said, "It's a magazine article. Is this a book that's going to sell over time? Isn't it all about the current moment?" But Eamon was convinced, and he convinced others, and he was right. So that's what you do as a publisher. You find the best talent and you let them shine.
Talk
me through how you decide how much to pay for a first novel.
It's partly enthusiasm
in the house. It's the uniqueness of the voice. It's passion. But unfortunately
it's also "Who does this remind you of who has sold really well?" It's all of
those things, and there's no one way to decide. When Jonathan Safran Foer's
novel came to us, Eric Chinski was the editor at the time. He got that
manuscript around to people so quickly, and so many readers in-house instantly
knew that this was something very special. That was an investment unlike any we
had made in a first novel before. I can tell you—I was the editor in chief at
the time and Wendy Strothman was the publisher—that she was nervous about it.
But she also saw what was going on in-house. She saw how many different readers
were responding to it, and not just in editorial, but in sub-rights, in
publicity, in marketing, in sales. And not everybody agreed. There were
definitely naysayers, which is the best way to go about it. You want people to
love it or hate it—mediocrity is the thing that you should pass up. But the
people who adored it were so passionate that she was willing to take a very big
flyer, and it was certainly worth it. It was a great bet in the end. It was
also something that allowed us to push a little bit on the kinds of fiction
that Houghton did, not to have a reputation for doing only one kind of thing in
fiction.
One of the nice things about the era in which we were publishing writers like Jonathan, and building writers like Richard Dawkins, is that it was very much a group effort. As a publisher, you want to encourage your editors to work really closely with marketing and publicity, and to bring the author in as well. One of the things that we've all learned in publishing is that the authors know their audiences very well. We want to have them participate as part of the conversation.
That seems to
have become increasingly important over the last decades. How did that evolve,
from your perspective?
It's happened in
different ways. First, it happened with the book tour. Today the book tour has
become less and less productive for some authors—so now we have the book tour plus media. But I think publishers also have found that
there are special interest groups for particular books that their authors are
aware of, and that that kind of micro-marketing—whether it's regional
marketing or a medical group or something else—can be really effective. I'm
thinking about Jacki Lyden's memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, which was a great success for us. This was a very
compelling memoir about her mother's manic-depression. Since it was published,
Jacki has really been on the circuit. She talks to support groups,
psychological associations, groups that work with families who have
manic-depression in their families. She was aware of some of that in advance,
so we were able to think of different ways to approach the promotion of the
same book.
More and more, publishers are looking for nonfiction ways of talking about fiction. You have to find new ways to interest people. You have to get them to pick up the book. If one of the ways to do that is to find an extra-literary element to talk about, and if the author can do some of that talking and not just the publisher, it makes a big difference.
You've never
worked in New York. Was that a conscious decision?
No. I made my
home here, and I was very lucky because I started building a list at a moment
when it was still not difficult to do that—there was still enough publishing
in Boston that it wasn't an outpost. Little, Brown was still here in addition
to Beacon and all the university presses. There was a real publishing community
that doesn't exist as much anymore.
Still, I
would imagine there are advantages to being in Boston now.
Well, that's
what we all say. Everybody has always said that the great advantage of being in
Boston is that you're not so much in the center of the hype. It's a little bit
easier to have some perspective. And to some extent it's true. If you're not
always talking to the same people in the same small publishing community, I
think you don't get quite as caught up in the machinery. Houghton really had to
think about distinguishing itself from the rest of the publishing community in
order to attract the best authors. So, one way you do that is to say that it
has this long, distinguished tradition with a vision that's outside the New
York publishing community. But I think the main advantage is that it's a very
sane life. It's a wonderful place to live. And there's a kind of intellectual
energy because of all the universities, a kind of cultural energy around you
that's really fabulous.
Which is a
nice segue to talking about poetry.
My great love.
Yeah?
Yes, it is.
Were you
always editing poetry?
I started
editing poetry pretty early on at Houghton. We used to have a fellowship, a
poetry contest, and as soon as I came on I knew I wanted to be one of the
judges for that. Peter Davison was the poetry editor at the time. Houghton had
this long history of publishing poetry, but one way of bringing on new writers
in addition to Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall and the Houghton stable of
writers was to find new talent through this annual contest. I became involved
in judging it, and one of the early winners—maybe even the first year I was at
Houghton—was Andrew Hudgins for a collection called After the Lost War, which is about the Civil War. I just loved having a
chance to be engaged with those writers, so I copyedited that book. I
copyedited Tom Lux and Rodney Jones and some of the other writers who were there
at the time.
Peter was a great supporter of poetry and a poet himself, which maintained a certain profile for the list. But from where I sat we were really just publishing one poet at a time rather than having an actual poetry program. So at the point when I could make a difference, when I became the editorial director and then the editor in chief and the publisher, I wanted to expand the list, to bring on some different kinds of poets, and also to try to engage the rest of the house more. It's so hard for a trade house to publish poetry if it's just one book at a time. But if you can go to a reviewer with a whole campaign for the house's poets, three or four on a list, and you can advertise them together, you can get more attention and spread the costs over several books. I think they just needing some nurturing and attention and a sense that marketing and publicity were behind them.
What other
things did you do?
I hired Michael
Collier, who is the head of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. First I brought
Michael to Houghton as a poet, and then the busier I got and the more I had
need for somebody else to manage the program as it evolved and developed, I
felt that Michael would be just the right person for that. Poetry is such a
small world and there are so many egos involved that you need someone to manage
it who is just so open-minded and generous. As the head of Bread Loaf, he's
used to dealing with a wide array of writers and personalities. He also has
impeccable taste. Another nice thing about having Michael come on is that he
was able to really edit the manuscripts—I didn't have time to do that anymore—and
to keep the poets in the loop about other book that were coming out and to
foster a sense of community among the Houghton poets.
One of the other ways in which I worked with Michael was to take on the publication of the winners of the Bakeless Prize, which is awarded by Bread Loaf annually. Houghton would publish the winners in paperback original in Mariner. One of the earliest winners was Spencer Reece for his collection The Clerk's Tale—the judge was Louise Glück—and this was just a fabulous collection. This is another example of a way in which you can talk about poetry in the same way you can talk about fiction, with a nonfiction hook. The Clerk's Tale was an obvious allusion to Chaucer, but Spencer himself had a wonderful story. He was a clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida. That's what he did for a living. After he won the prize, Michael was able to send the poems to Alice Quinn, and she loved them and published the entire title poem on the back page of the New Yorker. I think that was unprecedented. So here was a way to launch a poet with a prize-winning collection and to talk about his work in ways that could attract popular attention. It was always about quality, but it was also about good publishing—finding ways to grow the poetry list and bring attention to it.
As
you've read first novels and story collections over the years, have you noticed
any common mistakes that beginning authors tend to make? I'd like to get a
sense of how you evaluate first fiction.
The one thing that every
aspiring novelist and story writer should know is that it's really about personal
taste. So much depends on taste. People always talk about the pros and cons of
creative writing programs. It's a little clichéd now to say that there's an
identifiable "writing program style," but there kind of is. It can be
solipsistic, it can be dialogue based. I do think that some of the work coming
out of those programs is being published too early. I find that the best
writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of
contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.
There are a couple of things I see in first fiction that always tell me something is not for me. The first is usually in fiction by young women. There will be a young female protagonist with a vaguely artistic temperament who goes to New York to do something. At some point, usually about page ten, she looks in the mirror and describes herself. And you see this device in many wonderful novels—this is the way the author's going to let the reader know what the narrator or main character looks like—but now you just see it too much. So I usually get to that on page ten and say, "Not interested."
The other is that you're only allowed one dream per novel. Because it's too easy. It's sort of like looking in the mirror—you get to know something about the main character's fears and inhibitions or whatever because it all came out in a dream. If there's more than one dream, I think, "Oh, wow, that's just too easy."
What
about the opposite? What are you always looking for in a new writer?
I tend to like
character-driven fiction by writers who are sort of pushing their own ambition
and their own vision. Someone like Peter Ho Davies, who has this marvelous
background. He can write about his Welsh heritage or his Malaysian heritage—and
sometimes the two meet—but there's always a strong sense of history. In his
story collection The Ugliest House in the World, there's a central
story called "A Union," which is about the Welsh mining strikes. But it was
also about a marriage. And I just loved the way these characters were set in
time—which is not to say that I like historical fiction, because I don't
especially—but I really do like to know that the author has a sense of
history, so there's a context and a richness, a textural kind of context.
Peter's stories take you all over the world, but they also are very grounded in
his sensibility.
I also like when a writer can write all different kinds of characters. Back in the nineties we published a story collection called The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byers. He was a Seattle-based writer who now lives in Michigan. And he could write from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old immigrant living in Seattle as easily as a twelve-year-old girl or a forty-five-year-old man or an elderly woman. That flexibility, the ability to inhabit a character so fully, to make them totally believable on the page, is something I really look for.
Tell me about
a particularly memorable editing experience.
Peter Ho Davies
comes to mind. The greatest thing for an editor is when you read a manuscript,
you give some comments, and then the author goes off and does something
completely different from what you expected, but it's brilliant and wonderful.
With some of Peter's stories, especially that one I was just describing, I gave
him some comments, and the story came back about three times as long. So there
was this kind of ebullient response from him—a kind of magnanimous sense of possibility. You could see him sort of stretching toward a novel
in that experience.
How many
times do you read a manuscript you're editing?
Quite a few.
When I first read a manuscript, I feel like I have to read it all the way
through without putting my pencil down, and then you make notes and go back
through and make more specific comments. Then you get a revision and you have
to do the same thing all over again. So I probably read every manuscript two or
three times. Sometimes, if you've been through enough drafts of a book, you get
confused. You forget if something was in this draft or a previous draft, you
lose track of what's been dropped. When I was editing Jonathan's second book, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close, there was this
line in the beginning where Oskar was talking about his grandmother—they
needed to get somewhere—and she says, in this perfect Jewish grandmother kind
of way, something about how she believes in God but she does not believe in taxis.
In a subsequent version of the manuscript that line got dropped, and it stuck
in my mind, and when I realized it wasn't there, I thought, "I loved that line.
Put it back in!" So he did, just for me, I think.
I find that the best writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.
page_5:
The last
person I interviewed was lamenting that editors aren't allowed to go to sales
conference anymore to communicate their enthusiasm in person. As a publisher,
what do you think of that?
Well, there are
economic factors, and I know that every house does things differently. But I
think it's so important that every editor, no matter how much access you have
physically to the sales reps or to anybody else, thinks like a publisher. By
that I mean that every single book needs support, whether it's getting the
right blurbs or getting in touch with a particular rep and saying, "Take a look
at this one."
One of the things that I did throughout my career was to make a point of visiting every territory, getting out of the house and going around with the reps to meet with booksellers, to the degree that they were able to give me some time. Not so much to sell, more to just make personal contact and talk about publishing in general, to talk about the obstacles, to say, "Well, if you loved this, you're going to love that." I had a wonderful experience at Tattered Cover one time. It was in the morning, before the store opened, and it was just me and Margaret Maupin and the staff. I brought a bunch of books, and I said, "Here are the stories behind these books." Here's why an editor acquired something, how it came about. Getting to tell those behind-the-books stories, and having that personal contact, not only with the buyer but with the clerks on the floor, the people who talk to each other all day, was just something I enjoyed. I learned so much from talking to booksellers. It was a complete education. Every editor should spend time talking to booksellers.
Yet that
doesn't happen much.
No, and it's too
bad.I think people get stuck in their
offices. I really do. I think it's so great to get out of the office.
Why don't
publishers make them get out of the office?
People have time
constraints. Booksellers have time constraints. I also think that so much is
just too managed, that publishers may be a little bit too cautious about
sending people out. I don't know. That's my sense of it, that, "Oh, who knows
what's going to happen in that exchange." And the sales force has to be on
board for it too. The sales rep doesn't want the editor walking in and stepping
all over his territory, literally. It's a delicate thing to do, but I think it
really helps everybody if it can happen, if there's more of that contact.
Speaking of
bookselling, I'm sure you've spent a lot of time thinking about returns. Could
the system ever change, without destroying booksellers and their ability to
take a chance on something?
I think it's
changing itself. Both the wholesalers and the retailers are taking fewer books
up front. They just are. That's a reality of the business: It's becoming more
of a wait-and-see business and fewer risks are being taken. That's just
something that publishers are going to have to figure out how to manage. It's
managing inventory. It's making sure that you can ride a wave when it starts to
build—when a book is taking off—but before it crests. There needs to be
really good communication between the booksellers and the reps. Part of the
problem is that people are overstretched. There are just not enough people in
marketing and publicity to go around, and the reps have so many books in their
bags. What I hate to see is for the small books not to get a chance, because
every publisher has had the experience of the book they least expected—maybe somebody did, but not the whole house—just selling and
selling and making the year. Those little surprises are so important, and you
want to make room for them. You want to allow them to happen. Maybe they take
more work than they used to. A lot of it is just luck and...you know, Oprah.
The
computerized systems that bookstores use to track sales is also something
you've seen evolve.
Yes, exactly.
This whole conversation is really about that. It's about how few risks
booksellers can take, are willing to take, and how much they're ordering up
front. But I'm probably naively optimistic about this. People go into
bookselling because they love books, and they still love finding new things.
They love making discoveries. And the sales reps can be really wonderful in
helping to do that. I think it's fabulous that they have the reps' picks at BEA—again,
as long as it's not entirely orchestrated. I don't like to see everything sort
of programmed in advance, where what the reps get to say is only what has been
agreed upon in-house because these are the books that must sell. I think every rep should have the opportunity to
say, "Here's this little one that I'm hunchy about."
Of the
changes that you've seen in the last thirty years, what would you say is the
single most significant?
It's hard to
say. It's really the confluence of so many different things. I mean, it's the
rise of the chains and Internet selling.... It's got to be the computer in every
way that you can imagine. The way it now manages inventory and selling. But I
also think there are some things that have been consistently wonderful, that
some things have not changed.
Like what?
Editors still
have the opportunity to be creative, to test their own talent, to try to find
new things and not always to do the same thing. That's been true all along. The
other thing that hasn't changed is that in every era you can imagine, in my
thirty years, someone has always been saying that publishing is in crisis. When
I was cleaning out my files, I came across this article by Fran Kiernan, who
was an editor at Ticknor and Fields—an imprint that was relaunched and folded
in my time at Houghton Mifflin. The article was called "The Great Publishing
Crash of 1989." I looked at that and said to myself, "This industry loves a crisis. What would we do without a crisis? We must
have one to thrive."
Maybe it's worse now than it ever was, but everybody thinks their own time is worse than it ever was. I really believe that. Publishing is in trouble as much as every industry is in trouble. The economy may be worse than it was in 1989, but I'm not so certain. And for all of the change, there will always be blockbusters, there will always be bodice-rippers, there will always be literary fiction. There just will.
If
you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the publishing industry,
what would it be?
I would say the emphasis
on high advances. There's so much risk—huge risk—that comes with huge
advances, and so much distortion of the value of a particular work based on how
much is paid. I think that if there were more opportunity for editors to take
some risks at a lower level, that there would be more opportunity to continue
to publish smaller books because you wouldn't see disappointment based on how
high the advance was. I think that drives so many other things. When a book
doesn't do as well as expected, it sometimes makes the relationship between the
author and the editor complicated. Of course everybody wants a million dollars,
but I don't necessarily think that's always the best thing.
How did we get to the current situation? Was it the crazy
paperback auctions in the old days?
Beats me. I really don't know. I don't think that agents are
evil, but I do think that that's certainly been a very big factor—having
agents with reputations for selling books for a lot of money. You know,
whenever you get a Brockman project, for example, it's going to be expensive.
Tell
writers one thing about agents that they don't know but should.
That they can ask a lot
of questions; that they should ask a lot of questions. I think that writers, especially
first-time writers, sometimes feel as though, "Well, whatever the agent says.
Of course the agent knows best." But in the same way that I think authors
should be having conversations and asking a lot of questions of editors, they
should ask potential agents, "Okay, whom do you represent? Which houses do you
work with? Which editors do you like? How do you go about deciding where you're
going to send something?" I'm just astonished again and again when I talk to
writers at writing programs that they don't know they can ask those questions.
So
you think it's healthy for aspiring writers to take an active interest in
understanding the publishing industry?
I do. Well, it can be.
What you want, all around, is for expectations to match, and I guess it can be
kind of depressing for an aspiring writer to find out too much about the
industry, because it's a tough business. But I think being more educated is
always better than being less educated. It shouldn't mean that an author thinks
they know better than their editor or agent, but just to know something about
the way things work. I think it's important.
How
are you feeling about what you've just been through at Houghton?
I'm very much looking
forward to starting my new job. It's a huge change, of course,
because I was at the same place for all those years. But that's so unusual in
this industry. I was very fortunate to be able to build a personal list and to
create an editorial group that could publish so many exciting books, and that
is a wonderful legacy to leave behind. Now I can turn some of that energy back
toward my own list, which I had not been able to do for quite a while. When
you're a publisher, you just can't. I acquired fewer and fewer books the bigger
and bigger my job got. I'm not expecting to start acquiring like crazy, but I
am excited to be able to focus my energies on individual writers and how best
to support them over time. Just to publish any one book particularly well is an
exciting challenge. Having known Nan all these years makes it very comfortable.
I think her reputation for excellence and quality and sticking with writers
over the long term makes it a really nice fit. I was very deliberate in making
a decision to go to a place where I felt that my authors would be comfortable
and I wouldn't need to do any convincing. It just made perfect sense—for my
writers, for the agents. And it's a lot less stressful not to have to worry
about all of the finances and the hiring and the firing, and especially not to
be at a place that's in turmoil.
Are
there any books—not books you've published—that you find yourself going back
to and reading again and again?
Middlemarch. Moby-Dick.
Really?
How many times have you read Moby-Dick?
Oh, many times—four,
five, maybe six times. I spent a lot of time on it when I was in graduate
school. And, yes, I do read the whaling chapters. I love nineteenth-century
fiction, and that's what I go back to.
But recently I've been rereading a lot of Faulkner and Salinger.
It's interesting how your perspective changes on a lot of this reading when
you're not studying it like you were in school. Reading Salinger as an adult,
especially as an adult with children, is a very different experience. What I
found was that there was a certain way in which he got those voices, in Catcher
in the Rye for example, he got that voice
so perfectly. I heard my own son's voice. At the beginning of the book, when
Holden is talking about his older brother, the first thing he says about his
brother, if I'm remembering right, is something about how his brother has this
incredibly cool car. The first thing he says about his brother is about his
car! I thought, "Yeah, that's what my kid would say too, and in just that tone
of voice." There was something completely timeless about that. So no matter how
dated some of the other stuff gets, especially the sort of pop psychology that
Salinger fell victim to, he got those voices really right.
What keeps driving you?
I've always felt that I needed to have a goal
and a mission, and at Houghton it was helping to change the shape of the list—diversify
the fiction, support poetry—and then as a publisher to bring in editors who
could really find the best stuff and be creative about publishing it. I still
feel really ambitious for particular writers. I would love to have the opportunity
to publish the fourth, fifth, sixth book of a writer like Peter Ho Davies, for
instance, or Michael Byers, or Monique Truong, and to continue to work with
writers like Cynthia Ozick and Anita Desai. I think it's important to publish
them well.
I also think—this will sound incredibly snobby—that this culture is sort of deeply debased. I don't think of myself as the one and only guardian of intelligent conversation in this country, but you do want to keep it going on some level. Which is not to say that everything I do is high-minded, not by any means, but there's got to be a place for it. There just does. So it would be great if I can contribute to that.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan
In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.
When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.
Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”
In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.
Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.
Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.
The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.
One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.
Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.
Did you like New York right away?
No.
It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.
Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.
Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.
What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.
Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.
[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.
At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.
Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.
Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.
It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.
Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.
I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.
And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.
Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.
When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.
That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.
Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.
That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.
Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.
How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.
Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.
You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.
I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.
You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.
Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.
You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.
Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.
This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.
In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.
Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.
What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.
Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.
Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.
I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.
Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.
Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.
How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.
What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.
Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.
I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.
Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s FuneralMusic for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.
Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.
How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.
Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.
The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.
So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.
Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.
Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.
If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.
On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.
Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.
But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.
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I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.
How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.
Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.
Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.
From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.
How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.
Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.
What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.
Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.
What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.
Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.
Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.
How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.
The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.
What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.
But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.
You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.
What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.
Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.
Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.
Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.
Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.
What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Nat Sobel
For the life of me, I can't remember when I met Nat Sobel for the first time. I know it must have been around September 2001, when I developed a crush on one of his assistants. (We married two years ago, and she left the job back in 2004.) Despite my hazy memory of that time—chalk it up to a disorienting mix of national trauma and new love—my first impression of Sobel couldn't be clearer: an old-school bookman, a throwback to the glory days of publishing, a guy who you half expected to have a copy of the Racing Form tucked inside his blazer. I've since found that impression to be accurate, but only to a point. When you spend any amount of time with Sobel, talking about books and publishing, which now have been his lifeblood for almost fifty years, you are confronted with an obvious contradiction: He is also one of the most forward-thinking agents in the industry.
Sobel grew up in New York City and has been immersed in the book business since his days at City College, when he clerked in a stationery shop and paperback bookstore. After college he went to France and spent a year reading all the world literature he hadn't gotten around to in school. The reading served him well: In 1960, after he'd done a brief stint at Dell Publishing, Barney Rosset offered him a job as the assistant sales manager at Grove Press. Over the next ten years, Sobel rose to become Grove's vice president and marketing director and played a central role in the company's well-chronicled success during that period. In 1970, he struck out on his own, founding an eponymous agency that began as a consulting firm for independent publishers and became a full-service literary agency when his wife, Judith Weber, joined it in 1977.
Today Sobel Weber Associates is one of the top boutique agencies in New York City. The firm's clients include heavyweights James Ellroy, Richard Russo, and the late F. X. Toole; rising stars Julianna Baggott, Courtney Eldridge, Tom Franklin, and Aaron Gwyn; genre writers Tim Dorsey, Harry Harrison, Elmer Kelton, Joseph Wambaugh, and the late Robert Jordan; and a raft of best-selling nonfiction and cookbook authors.
This interview took place in the couple's elegant Gramercy Park townhouse—it was once the home of the artist George Bellows—which doubles as the agency's offices. During
most of our conversation, one of Sobel's cats sprawled in my lap. Afterward,
Sobel led me up several flights of stairs, lined with framed drawings by his
friend and client Ralph Steadman, to show me his loft office at the top of the
house. It is an airy space that overlooks the living room and is adorned with
three huge paintings by Steadman, family photographs, bookcases full of
literary magazines, and a lucky photo of Gandhi that, Sobel notes with
satisfaction, "I've had in every office I ever worked in."
My
sense is that you grew up in New York City. Is that right?
That's right. I
was working on my own from the time I was eighteen years old. I went to City College
and had to support myself. I had a dream of going to Europe to write after I
graduated from college, and I did go to France and lived for a year on my
savings. But I didn't write. I read. I spent a whole year reading.
What were you
reading?
I had been a lit
major, and I went with a suitcase full of the books I had wanted to read but
hadn't had time to get to. I found an English-language bookshop in Paris that
was happy to buy all of the books I read and give me other books in exchange.
That was how I was able to extend my library into a year's worth of reading. I
read about sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. That's when I really learned
about world literature—from that year in Paris—but I didn't get much writing
done. Toward the end of the year, the guys from the bookstore where I'd worked
in college wrote and offered me an opportunity to come back and run most of the
store in the evening and become a kind of partner. I went back and worked there
until a job opened at Dell Publishing, where I worked for about a year as a
salesman. Then Barney Rosset offered me a job as the assistant sales manager of
Grove Press. I was all of twenty-four years old. Eventually I became the sales
manager and the marketing director, all in my twenties. But keep in mind that
at Grove at that time, Barney was only in his thirties. So you get an idea of
the age range. We were a pretty young bunch of guys—this included Richard
Seaver, Fred Jordan, a very talented group of guys—who didn't think anything
of working long hours, because we enjoyed it. Even at the time, I knew I'd
never get a job like that again.
Tell me how
you met Barney.
It's a funny
story. Barney came to the Dell sales conference. It was my first sales conference;
I was sharing a room with another guy. I had been playing poker through most of
my college years as a source of additional income. I heard there was a
hospitality suite and there would be poker playing. So I wound up in the
hospitality suite and there were five tables of salesmen all playing poker, and
Barney, thinking that Dell was going to distribute Grove Press books, was one
of them. Late in the evening there was only one table left—all of the winners.
I was at that table, and so was Barney. I had the best hand in five-card draw
I'd ever had. I can remember it all these many years later. It was the biggest
pot of the night. There was a lot of money in that pot. And Barney turned out
to have the best hand of all.
I stuck around, I'd been drinking, and as a result I passed out on the bed of the hospitality suite. The sales conference began promptly at eight o'clock the next morning. Barney was downstairs on the dais with Helen Meyer and the editor in chief of Dell. But I was asleep in the hospitality suite. When I finally woke up, with a very bad hangover, and went back to my room, showered, and went down to have some coffee and head into the sales conference, it was about ten o'clock in the morning. The hotel we were in was quite remote, and when I walked in, everybody wondered who the hell I was. They didn't know me. I hadn't been at Dell all that long. I could hear the people on the dais saying, "Who is he?" I thought I'd be fired. But I wasn't.
About two months later I got a phone call, and this guy on the other end of the line said, "Are you the guy who came two hours late to the Dell sales conference?" I said, "Yes, who's this?" Thinking it's a joke. He said, "My name's Barney Rosset, and I like your style, kid. How'd you like to come to work at Grove Press as the assistant sales manager?" I had the chutzpah to say, "How much are you paying?" He mentioned a price that was fifty dollars a week more than I was getting, and I was delighted to go. At that point I didn't like Dell anyway, and I knew enough about the Grove Press list to know that I wanted to go there. And I had a great time. Barney was a great pal, and I gave him a lot of arguments for many years, and then one night in a bar ten years later he fired me. But he said, "I'm going to keep you on the payroll for a year till you get yourself together." I decided then and there that I would never go to work for another publisher.
When you got
to Grove, was Barney already fighting his censorship battles all over the country?
Yes. Lady
Chatterley's Lover had been published. Tropic
of Cancer was being published and there
were some battles. The big battles came about a year after I got there, which
was when the paperback of Tropic of Cancer came out and was available in a lot of smaller towns. There were a
large number of lawsuits against the company that nearly put us out of business.
Were you
involved in that in any direct way?
No. I was on the
sales side of things. Among my duties was to go to the jobbers [distributors]
once a week to pick up some money that was due so we could pay the payroll.
That's how tight things were. But we did a lot of wonderful books and Barney,
because he was interested in the editorial side more than the marketing side,
gave me a lot of freedom. I hadn't worked in any big publishing house in a
capacity in which I could make decisions, so I did a lot of things quite
innovatively.
Like what?
I wanted to see
all the orders that came in to the house, which caused a delay in the printing
out of orders, but I wanted to have a hands-on approach to seeing the orders as
they came in and get a feel for what was moving. A few years into the job, we
had to fire everybody in the sales department and I had to travel the country.
I didn't realize until later what a wonderful experience that was going to be
for me. I had to travel to the West coast for three weeks twice a year. I had
to travel to the South, the Southeast, the Northeast. I even had to train a
couple of the editors to go out and sell our list. We were really just scraping
by. Then, when we started to do a little better financially, with one best-seller
after another, I was able to get on the phone and call a lot of these
booksellers who I now knew personally and get them to get behind a particular
book on the list that I thought had the most potential. We never had a large
sales force, even when we were successful. But we did a lot of phone work and a
lot of postcards and we got the independent booksellers behind us, and that
worked very well. There were also times when we would take a gamble. We didn't
do P&Ls [Profit and Loss projections] for acquisitions. We didn't have a
budget. A lot of it was instinctive publishing.
I can remember a particularly episode with a book that turned out to be one of the most successful Grove ever published, a book called Games People Play. I thought it was a terrible title for a book on transactional analysis. We had three colored discs on the cover with lines going from one to the other, and I said to Barney, "With a title like that, and a jacket like that, people are going to think it's a game book." He totally ignored me. Just when the book was being published, I went to the West coast for one of my three-week trips. When I got back, I called Barney and said, "Look, I want us to do a big ad in the Times for Games People Play." Barney said, "Why? We only printed thirty-five hundred copies. I think we've gone back for twenty-five hundred more, and you want a big ad in the Times? We published his first book and it didn't do all that well." I said, "Well, I have to tell you, Barney, I think God is telling me something." He laughed and said, "What is God telling you, Nat?" I said, "Well, I went to the West coast and in L.A., in a restaurant, I saw a woman reading a copy of Games People Play. Then I took the shuttle flight from L.A. to San Francisco and there was someone on the plane reading Games People Play. I said to myself, ‘If I see a third person reading this book, with the print order that we had, I'm going to come back....'" Of course I did see a third person in San Francisco reading Games People Play, which is why I came back and told him God was telling me we had to do a big ad. The American Psychiatric Association convention, at which we always exhibited our books, was coming up, and we decided to do an open letter to the shrinks who were attending the APA about Games People Play. Fred Jordan, who wrote a lot of our ad copy, did almost a full-page letter in the daily Times. We brought up hundreds of copies to sell to the shrinks at our little stand. We sold a lot of copies. And we were selling it to the right audience: young psychiatrists. Then the media got on to us and the book became a huge success, the biggest that Grove had ever had. I think we sold something like 600,000 copies in hardcover. Nobody wanted to buy the paperback rights because they thought for a hardcover of its kind we had pretty much covered the whole audience. So Grove had to publish the paperback itself, which then sold about two million copies. Grove was the kind of place where I could say to Barney, "God is telling me something." There was a wonderful level of collegiality in the company. Sometimes we would gang up on Barney because if one of us couldn't persuade him about something, then eventually all of us could.
Why were you
eventually fired?
The company was
getting involved in the film business. I didn't like most of the films we were
buying up and distributing. It was also taking a lot of our resources, tying up
Dick's attention as well as Fred Jordan's attention, and the book publishing
side was beginning to suffer. The list was not as large, it wasn't as focused,
and I was the big naysayer about it. I was calling Barney on it. I kept telling
him we had to get out of the film business. I became a strong voice of
opposition. Whereas he took my criticism on other matters for a long time, and
in very good form, I might add, on this point he was adamant.
When he began to discover that I wasn't the only one who felt this way, especially when he asked Dick Seaver to fire me—Dick and Fred were senior to me—and neither one of them wanted to fire me, he was convinced that I had gotten everybody on my side on this matter. When he fired me, he said, "I have to restore control of the company. This is mine. Not yours." Only two years later, Barney came to me with a project for which I sold the paperback rights for so much money that my commission was greater than my last year's salary working for him.
So obviously
there were no hard feelings.
Not at all. In
fact, Barney celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday at my home in East Hampton,
which made me very pleased. My best publishing experiences were the years
working for him. I realize now what a great experience it was.
When you get
down to it, what made him such a special publisher?
He was a rebel.
He was attracted to that which turned off other people. He loved a good battle.
He had wonderful taste, and he also had a wonderful outlook on publishing that
doesn't exist at all anymore.
Tell me what
you mean by that.
I'll tell you
about a moment in my life with Barney that had a major influence on the things
that attract me as an agent, especially these last few years. At some point I
noticed that on the upcoming list was a book of poetry, a fairly substantially
sized book of poetry by a Mexican poet I had never heard of, and it was going
to be in a bilingual edition, Spanish and English. I went to Barney and said,
"You know, Barney, I don't think I can sell this book. I've never heard of this
guy." Barney said to me, "I didn't buy it because I thought you could sell it.
I bought it because I liked it and because I thought it was important." And the
book was the first publication in English of the poetry of Octavio Paz. It's
sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it's still in the Grove Press backlist,
and it was a book he wanted to publish because he loved it. You couldn't help
loving a guy who had that philosophy.
When you
left, why did you decide to become an agent rather than an editor?
I knew how to
sell books. And because Grove Press had a hardcover list, a trade paperback
list, its own mass market paperback list, and a magazine, I thought I would
make my services available as a consultant. Which is what I did in my first
year or two. Grove was a distributor for a couple of smaller publishers—Peter
Workman's first list was being distributed by Grove, for example—so I thought
I would approach small publishers and offer my services as a marketing
consultant. Because of the variety on the Grove Press list, and because I had
traveled the country, I think I was able to help some small publishers. One of
those publishers had a book that they wanted to get published instantly. I knew
some of the editors at Dell from my own days there, and I knew Dell did a
number of instant books, and I sold this book to Dell and got my first
commission. About six months later, this small publisher had another book. It
was by an NFL football player who had quit the game and talked about how he had
been supported financially while he was playing football in college by the
university, and some of the illegal things that were going on in football. I
sold the paperback rights for fifty thousand dollars and took a 10 percent
commission. I thought, "Wait a second. Maybe I should be doing this for small
presses instead of offering my consulting thing."
So I started to move from consulting work to handling the subsidiary rights—paperback rights and foreign rights—for small presses. Nobody had ever done that. I kind of backed into agenting by working for small presses. Eventually, some of those presses went out of business and the writers found me because I was the one who had generated the most money for them. At about that point, Judith [Weber] joined me. She came out of an editorial background and wanted to work more with authors. Eventually we phased out of the subrights business, partially because the mass-market publishers started to develop their own hardcover lists, so they weren't so anxious to buy reprint rights from other presses. But I was still doing a little consulting work. I wanted to do other things. As an example, I started the bookstore in East Hampton.
BookHampton?
Right. I started
it with two guys. One of them was the editor in chief of a company called Stein
& Day, which is no longer around. His partner lived in East Hampton. He
asked me about the idea of starting a bookstore, and I had bookstore
experience, so I found the location and we got BookHampton off the ground,
partially because I didn't know whether I was going to make it as an agent.
After two years, the store started to take off.
Were you
working full time at BookHampton?
No. I worked
four days a week at the agency. In the first months of BookHampton, I would go
to the jobbers and pick the books to take out to the bookstore. I would work
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the bookstore. So I was working seven days a week.
I was getting pressure on both sides. I couldn't put in any more time at the
store, and my two partners were pretty much beginning to know how to run the
business without me. We had a financial settlement and I was able to work full
time at my agency.
What were
some of the first books and authors you represented?
I still
represent one of the first authors I represented, a guy by the name of Dr.
Raymond Moody, and in fact I'm working on a new book of his. So he must be one
of the oldest clients I have. He wrote a book called Life After Life, the first book dealing with the near-death
experience. The publisher of that book was a small library press in Georgia.
The publisher came to me in New York because he was trying to sell the
paperback rights to this little book that was very odd for him. He gave me the
galleys and I read it and thought it was an amazing book. The author was a
thirty-two-year-old doctor who had just discovered these cases in several
hospitals in Atlanta. The book was a huge success. We sold it in something like
twenty-five countries, and it was the first big financial success the agency
had. When Raymond wrote his second book, he went to the same small publisher.
The publisher called me up and said, "Nat, this is not the kind of book I
publish. I published that first book because nobody else wanted to do it. But I
think you ought to be his agent." So he turned the manuscript and Raymond over
to me. There are a lot of other stories like that, people I came to know, like
best-selling Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley. He'd been published by a
small press that I was doing the rights for, and I wound up becoming his agent.
But I had no idea that trying to build a list of authors, to make it as an
authors' agent, was going to be such a long and difficult path.
When you were
starting out as an agent, were there any established agents that you looked up
to or went to for advice?
None. I didn't
join the agents' organization either.
You just sort
of figured it out?
I made a lot of
mistakes. I took on a lot of things I shouldn't have taken on, but when you're
getting started, if anybody comes to you, you think, "I'm going to do it. I can
sell it." It's only been in the last twenty years, or maybe the last ten years,
that I became aware, as did Judith, that we wanted the agency to reflect our
tastes, rather than just take on things that were saleable. Our list is our
taste. Which means that there are a lot of areas of publishing that we will not
go into because we aren't interested in them. So we've never done any romances,
for instance.
How
is being a writer different today than it was when you started out as an agent?
I think it's
easier for the writer. Today writers are a lot more aware that they need an
agent than they were then. The so-called slush pile at publishing houses is
almost nonexistent today—a lot of writers languished in those slush piles for
years. I think writers were often tempted by ads run in the writers magazines
by agents who charged exorbitant fees to have their manuscripts "evaluated,"
and much of that has disappeared. By and large, writers get responses from
agents much quicker today because of e-mail. I think the process has fewer
mines in the ground for writers to avoid. But on the other hand, it's much more
difficult to get published if you're a fiction writer. It's a bit of a
tradeoff.
Why
do you think it's more difficult to get published as a fiction writer?
I think you have to really look at the market today. If you look at the
Deals page of Publishers Weekly, nine out of the ten deals
described are nonfiction books. There certainly is a very strong feeling in the
publishing world that fiction is chancier—absolutely chancier—than
nonfiction. Today, you have to have all sorts of other reasons to publish a
first novel—other than that it happens to be very good.
What
do you mean by that?
We keep hearing this phrase, "What's the platform?"What's the fucking
platform? The first time I heard the word platform was
at a writers conference. I was on the dais with another agent and she was
talking about "the platform." I thought, "What the fuck is a platform? What is
she talking about?" Well, what it is is this: What does the author bring to the
table? Talent is not enough. The number of slots open to fiction on a publisher's
list is being reduced all the time.
But
that wasn't always the case. What do you see as the reason for that shift?
I think
there are a lot of reasons. It's not just the conglomeratization of publishing
and the slow disappearance of the independent booksellers. But maybe it's
easier for the sales rep to go and sell a nonfiction book that he hasn't read,
or she hasn't read, than it is for the rep to go in and sell a first novel that
he or she hasn't read. As the sales forces of the major publishing houses have
become decimated, there really is very little time for any of these reps to
read the first fiction on their list. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Almost more to the point, I think, is how agenting has changed in the last ten
years.
I
read something where you were talking about how many agents there are now, as
opposed to the old days when there weren't as many, and the importance to a
writer of picking a good one.
Yes. And how
do you know if you've got a good one?
Exactly.
I
try to impress my client list on new writers. There may be a writer on that
client list whose work you've read, whose work you really like. It should give
you some sort of comfort to think, "Well, if he was so-and-so's agent then he
can't be all that shabby." The client list is a wonderful tool for the would-be
writer to explore. Now that so many agents are putting their client lists on
their Web sites, I think that's a great way for writers to use that tool. Of
course you don't really know how good an agent is until you work with them.
It's like trying to determine if somebody is going to be a good sex partner
without getting into bed with them. At some point, you've got to get into bed.
But I think you would know fairly early on what sort of agent you have. It has
to do with the level of chemistry between you—how they respond to your work,
what they want you to do with it, and how they perform.
Do
you think editors do less editing than they used to?
I
think so. But I also think publishers do a lot less selling than they used to.
They do a lot less promotion than they used to. And this really gets to the
core of what I think about where agenting is going. There are a lot of editors
who are basically acquirers, and there are some who are really hands-on
editors. The editors in that second category are a much smaller number, and
those are the people who I generally go to first with my manuscripts. But I
think the whole question of editing also has to do with how much time the
editor can really give to a novel. That's another reason why I think fiction is
not as sought after by publishers as it used to be. You need a lot more editing
for a novel than you do for a work of nonfiction—although a lot of nonfiction
should be edited as well. But from the standpoint of how much time an editor
has to devote to the books on his or her list, fiction is on the time-consuming
end of it. So we see less time spent.
I think what is evolving today for agents is that they need to be the first line editors for their authors. Judith and I really love the editing process. We have spent years editing nearly every novel we've ever agented. We did that long before we began to discover how little editing was going on in the publishing houses. But today agents need to be far more proactive in almost every other area of the publishing process. We have to be the marketing directors for many of our books. We have to involve ourselves in looking at the jacket design, the jacket copy, the catalogue copy. We have to be very proactive in how we help direct the writer to help sell his or her book. Those are things you never thought about in agenting when I first came into it. You made the deal, you negotiated the contract, and that was it—the publisher took over.
Today the writer very much needs to be proactive. When I have writers who have the kind of personality that they enjoy going out and selling their books, and I've gotten them a big enough advance, they are smart enough, with my guidance, to put some of that advance aside and spend their own money to get the book off the ground. I think that being able to suggest things to writers, things they can do themselves to help sell the book, is getting to be as important a factor as helping them to edit the work. It's been amazing to me how much money a publisher will spend to acquire a book, and how little they will spend to make the book a success. The role of the agent today is a totally involving one—you have to be involved in the whole process. Which starts with helping the writer, as we do, through two or three drafts of the work to bring it up to the level where it is as good as we think it can be. That's not to preclude the possibility of some additional insights from a really savvy editor.
You're
talking about a fairly major shift from the responsibilities of the publisher,
in terms of the editing and the promotion, to the agent and the author. Tell me
why that happened.
I think that
nature abhors a vacuum. It's as simple as that. The vacuum that has been
created in the publishing houses by the reduction in their promotion and
publicity budgets, by the reductions in the size of the sales force, by the
dependence on a few key accounts buying most of the print order, has led to the
reduction in staffs of the publicity and promotion departments, and reductions in
staff throughout the publishing house. The result is that things aren't getting
done the way they used to be. It's not because the people in those houses
aren't willing to do it, they're just either overworked or underfunded. So
perfectly wonderful books get printed and disappear. And if you don't do
something, if something isn't done by somebody...I think the writer has his or
her own future in her hands in terms of what she is willing to do in order to
make the book succeed.
But when you
look at the landscape of the publishing industry, why did that vacuum come to
be?
I think it has
to do with the bottom line. If they can save money by reducing their sales
force, they're going to do that.
And that came
about due to the decline of independent booksellers, right? You needed less
salespeople.
Yes. You could
hire people in an office warehouse someplace to get on the phone and call some
of the smaller booksellers. You didn't have to have book reps. Recently, it
didn't get a lot of attention, but Random House fired some of its most
experienced sales reps. These were people who were better paid and had been
with the company for a long time. The guy who they reported to finally had to
quit himself because he couldn't face having to fire some of the best reps they
had, who were going to be replaced by new, young, and cheaper people. But
somebody forgot along the line that these reps had built up a rapport with
booksellers. They could get a bookseller to take a chance on a book that they
were enthusiastic about. [See Editor's Note.]
Another problem is how the level of enthusiasm has been watered down by the way the publishing houses are now structured. You used to have a situation where you'd have an enthusiastic agent selling a manuscript to an enthusiastic editor, and then that enthusiastic editor would go to the sales conference and communicate her enthusiasm to the sales reps, and then the sales reps would read the book and communicate their enthusiasm to the booksellers. But now the editors don't go to the sales conferences. The sales force doesn't have that direct contact with the person who bought the book. And the sales force itself keeps getting modified so that the enthusiasms don't percolate down to the booksellers who are going to take a chance on that first novel. The system is such that enthusiasm itself has been kind of cut off, at the most strategic place, which is the editor's ability to communicate her or his enthusiasm to the reps and to the rest of the people in the house. There are some editors who are very savvy and very enthusiastic about their books. I love dealing with those people. They don't let a book die. They are going to get out and get everybody's attention. But even they can't go to the sales conference, can't deal with the reps, can't communicate that enthusiasm to the people who have to go out and sell the books.
Tell me about
some of those editors who are especially good at that.
I'm not going to
name any names. I'll tell you why. Because I'll wake up tomorrow and think,
"Why didn't I tell him about A, B, and C? Why did I only tell him about D, E,
and F?" The editors who I really respect a great deal, they know I respect
them.
What
kinds of things are you encouraging your authors to do on their own behalf?
It depends
on how much money they get for their books. When I sold Tim Dorsey's first
novel—Tim is an offbeat crime writer who's written ten novels about a very
amiable serial killer, very wacky novels—we wound up selling it at auction. He
was the night editor for the Tampa Tribune. The money he got—it was a two-book
deal—was more than several years of his salary at the paper. I said, "Tim, I
don't want you to leave the Tampa Tribune until after your first novel is
published." He said, "Does that mean you think I won't ever sell my third or
fourth books?" I said, "No, it's because I have an idea. I want you to write to
the book review editor of every newspaper in Florida, on Tampa Tribune letterhead, and ask
them if they would review your book, as a colleague, so to speak." I said,
"Don't expect the publisher to spend much money promoting your book. I want you
to think about things you can do to help sell your book."
And he did that. He sent out letters on Tampa Tribune letterhead. It worked very well. He came to the [BookExpo America conference] on his own and brought cartons of T-shirts to give out with his first novel. Then he spent many months traveling to bookstores in Florida and Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama. And the fact that he's up to book ten should speak for itself. He has a very proactive Web site where he sells T-shirts and baseball caps and he has an interactive Web site for his serial killer, Serge. Tim is about to make his thousandth bookstore stop. He's made the books succeed and he's made his publisher a believer in him. He's a great student of what the proactive author should be. And the booksellers love Tim.
You also
represent James Ellroy. How did you meet him?
Years ago, my
lawyer was, and still is, the lawyer for Otto Penzler and the Mysterious
Bookshop. He thought Otto and I should get together. I've been Otto's agent for
many years. Anyway, I liked Otto a lot, and we couldn't figure out how a
bookseller and an agent could do anything together. I got the idea, or maybe it
was Otto, to form the Mysterious Literary Agency. This was really at the point
when I was just beginning to represent authors, and the idea was that Otto had
this wonderful bookshop where crime writers came in all the time, and he would
send writers to me who asked how to get an agent. So we started the Mysterious
Literary Agency. We did a whole thing where our letterhead had no address and
no phone number. If you wanted to find us, you had to solve the mystery. New
York magazine did a little thing about the
Mysterious Literary Agency. James saw that. James had had two paperback
originals published and his agent had given up on him. He walked into the
Mysterious Bookshop and said, "I am the demon dog of American crime
fiction." Otto said, "I've never
heard of you." James said he had this manuscript, which Otto sent to me as the
first manuscript of the Mysterious Literary Agency. It was Ellroy's third
novel, which I edited, as did Otto. About that time, Otto got financing to
start Mysterious Press. He told me he wanted to buy Ellroy's novel for his
first list. So the Mysterious Literary Agency went out of business. Of course
neither Otto nor I knew that James's previous agent had had seventeen
rejections on this novel. But we had done a lot of work on the book.
Tell me about
that. I remember seeing some documentary where you talked about the editing
work you did with Ellroy.
There are a lot
of Ellroy stories. I wrote Ellroy a rather lengthy editorial report about that
first novel I represented. I got back what looked like a very lengthy kidnap
letter. It was written in red pencil on yellow legal paper, and some of the
words on it were like an inch high: I AM NOT GOING TO DO THIS. I thought, "Oh,
I've got a loony here. Somebody who calls himself the demon dog? Maybe he is a
demon." But it was a very smart letter. He was very smart about what he would
do, why he wouldn't do certain things. And he did do a lot of work on the book.
I've edited him ever since. Nearly all of the editing is done here. He's been
wonderful to work with.
But isn't
there a story about you removing a lot of words from one of his books?
That's another
story about how Ellroy's style developed. It was for a book called L.A.
Confidential. It was a bigger book, in
length, than he had ever done before. Otto was still at Mysterious Press when
Warner Books bought it, but the editor in chief of Warner had heard that L.A.
Confidential was finished. I called her and
told her I had the manuscript. She asked me how long it was. I said it was
about 850 pages. She said, "No, we can't publish that." I said, "What do you
mean you can't publish it?" She said, "We publish all of Ellroy's books in mass
market, and a manuscript of that size"—maybe it was even longer—"you'll have
to cut 25 percent of the book."
L.A. Confidential follows three cops, and you couldn't take out one of the cops. James came to my house to talk about what we could do about it. I had the manuscript on the desk in front of me, and as a joke I said to James, "Well, maybe we could cut out a few small words." I meant it entirely as a joke. But I started going through a manuscript page and cut out about a dozen words on the page. James said, "Give me that." I gave him the page. And he just kept cutting. He was cutting and cutting and cutting. When he was done with the page, it looked like a redacted piece from the CIA. I said, "James, how would they be able to read this?" He said, "Let me read you the page." It was terrific. He said, "I know what I have to do." He took the whole manuscript back and cut hundreds of pages from the book and developed the style. That editor never knew what we had to do, but she forced him into creating this special Ellroy style, which his reputation as a stylist is really based on. It came from her, sight unseen, saying "Cut 25 percent of the book." He wound up cutting enough without cutting a single scene from that book.
How
do you explain Ellroy's success with The Black Dahlia after six novels that
were basically commercial failures?
It was a much bigger book, a much more emotionally involving book for
James, and it dealt with a crime he'd been thinking about for a long time. So
the manuscript itself was a big leap forward for him. But that doesn't explain
how it succeeded after six novels didn't. James made a huge bet on himself. At
the time he wrote The Black Dahlia, James was working as a
caddie in Westchester. He was writing at night. He had no family and no other
interests except writing. Otto [Penzler] was continuing to publish him and had
bought The Black Dahlia for more money than he'd spent on
James's previous three novels because he thought it was a terrific book.
Word got out about this book, and we got an offer from Warner Brothers, who optioned the book for fifty thousand dollars. That was more money than James had gotten for all of his other books combined. When I called James to tell him, he said, "When the money comes in, call me." When I did call him, he said, "I don't want the money. I want you to call Otto Penzler and ask him what the advertising and promotion budget is for The Black Dahlia." Otto told me they were going to probably spend fifteen thousand dollars because none of the books had succeeded up till then. I told James. He said, "Ask him to double it. Tell him that if they'll double the budget to thirty thousand, you'll be giving him my check for forty-five thousand dollars and we'll have an entire budget of seventy-five thousand dollars to launch my book." And when I did that, Otto agreed to increase the budget to thirty thousand dollars. He was just floored by the fact that James was going to kick in forty-five thousand dollars of his own money—all of what he was getting, after my commission, from the movie sale. James wanted the money to be spent on the front cover of Publishers Weekly, a full-page ad in the Times Book Review, and the rest of it to be spent on sending him around the country for three months. Three months. And he went. Because James has nearly a photographic memory, he remembered every single person he met, and he single-handedly made his book successful. That was more than twenty years ago.
Where did he
get the idea? That's so farsighted for somebody in his situation.
He didn't get
the idea from me. He was smart enough to say, "This is my chance. This is my
book to get out and do it." He made it happen. Whatever success James has is
entirely of his own making. He's a very thoughtful guy. He never went to
college. But he's intelligent, he loves people, and he loves to go out and
promote. Not every writer can do that. Not every writer's as good at it as he
is. Tim Dorsey's as good as that. Others I've represented are. When you've got
a talented writer and they have that charisma, it's my job to advise them about
how to use those tools to make their book successful. So in effect, I am still
the sales manager that I was when I was at Grove Press.
Tell me about how you find clients.
My great
love, and where we've found most of our fiction writers, has been the literary
journals. I don't know how many other agents read the journals. I know it's a
lot more than it used to be, but I certainly read them more extensively than
anybody else.
How
many do you subscribe to?
I don't know
the exact count, but it's somewhere over a hundred. My heroes in publishing are
the selfless people who work at these journals, who either are not paid, or
volunteer, and who spend their lives putting together these journals with
relatively small circulations, but enjoy it. Over the years I've developed a
number of friends among them. I admire them. I admire what they do. And they
are responsible for many of the writers I represent, including Richard Russo,
who I found in a literary journal out of Bowling Green, Ohio, which had a
circulation of something like three hundred copies.
Walk me
through what happened after you got in touch with Richard Russo.
He called me. He
said he'd just finished a novel and asked if I could give him one good reason
why he should send it to me. At that point in my career, I probably had a list
of unknown writers, none of whom he would have recognized. This was the
mid-eighties. I said, "If you send it to me Federal Express"—we didn't have
electronic mail then—"I'll read it quickly and tell you what edits I think it
needs." And Mr. Russo said to me, "How do you know it'll need any edits?" I
said, "I've never read a first novel that I didn't think could be improved." So
he sent it to me, and I gave him my edits.
Were they
extensive?
No. I've
actually given him many more notes as I've gone along with him from book to
book than I gave him on the first novel. I think I was a little intimidated by
the way he responded on the telephone, saying, "How do you know it needs any
edits?" But he responded very well.
And what
happened from there?
I sent out the
novel and had it turned down by twelve major houses before I finally sent it to
Gary Fisketjon, who was then doing Vintage Contemporaries, his list of original
paperback fiction that was getting a lot of attention. While he couldn't give
me very much money, he said he would make it the lead title on their fall list.
He did a great job with the book. What I sometimes quote as a "high four-figure
advance" turned out to be the beginning of a success story for Rick.
When you look
back at the way he built a career—the sort of slow build, book after book after
book—do you think that's still possible today?
In Rick's case,
he's earned out every book he's published, and rather quickly, which has always
led to him getting more money for the next book. But I think it's much harder
today. I think Rick himself would say that he was lucky he got to the right
editor at the right time in that editor's career. In fact, the more I think
about it, the more I realize that with almost every successful book I've had,
it's been the right editor at the right time at the right house. That's the key
to all of the successful books I've ever had—the right editor.
And there's
an element of luck?
Sometimes it's
luck. I think that if I were to look back on my career, I would say I've been
very lucky. I'm going to be the last guy to dismiss the idea of luck.
People in the
business talk about how eight out of ten readers, or whatever the number
actually is, are women. I think it's very difficult for young male writers to
get published, especially today. I wonder what you think about that and how
you've dealt with that in your career.
I certainly
think it's very difficult for male writers who are not writing thrillers. They
have a much tougher road. We've read a number of pretty good novels by male
writers that we know just won't go. Male coming-of-age novels are impossible to
sell. We've already talked about how it's getting more and more difficult to
sell fiction. Let me give you a better picture of it by looking back on last
year. Five of us in the agency read submissions—everyone downstairs and Judith
and myself. Five of us. We have an editorial meeting on Thursdays. I never talk
to Judith about what I've read except at this meeting so it's all fresh for all
of us. We generally read partial manuscripts, or complete manuscripts. Everyone
averages about two of those per week. So, in an average year, that's more than
five hundred manuscripts. Last year, from those five hundred books, we took on
three new writers. And we were only able to sell one of them. Remember that
much of what we get is from writers I've written to after reading their stories
in the literary journals—we get very little over the transom. So look at those
odds.
They're very
tough.
Damn right.
We've spent a lot of time editing through second and third drafts and finally
abandoning books because we don't think we can get the writer up to the level
we want. We have to give up on them. Occasionally those books will get
published too. But the odds are really difficult, and for the male writers it's
even harder.
Is there
anything they can do to make their odds better?
I'm always
looking for the unusual. I think it may require writing something of a
historical nature, with a historical setting. They have to be able to get an
idea of what's on the best-seller list today and see that, outside the thriller
genre, there aren't too many male fiction writers who are succeeding. And I
don't think that's going to change for a while.
But isn't
that troubling?
Sure it's
troubling. I think it's troubling for all literary fiction writers today. But
particularly for the male writers, who are only gradually becoming aware of how
limiting that audience is. But I think you can find good male writers who can
write from the woman's point of view, too. I remember a first novel I sold
years ago. The writer himself was in his early thirties, but the novel was a
first-person novel from the point of view of a sixty-two-year-old woman. It was
entirely in first person, and it was a terrific story. It began his career. So
if a male writer can write from the female point of view, or has a story that
will interest a woman's audience, I think he has a better chance than somebody
who's writing the kind of Hemingway-esque stuff we read in school.
You talked a
little about the decline of independent booksellers. Tell me a little more
about how you think that's affected the publishing industry.
It's
particularly with first fiction. I think Book Sense has done a lot to try to
pick up the slack there. But for first fiction, which is really the future
generations of writers, it has become a real problem for publishers because
they don't have the large list of independent booksellers that they can appeal
to. I forget what the percentage of sales is today from the independents, but
it goes down every year. I think that's affecting first fiction, particularly
short story collections. I love the short story. I love the form. But who's
going to take on a short story collection today? Damn few. I think that's
influencing the market—the market is feeding on itself.
With all the short stories and novels you read, what
is it about something that grabs your attention?
I can't say
what it is that captures my attention. I just know it. I think since I've been
reading all my life, I know on the first page, the first paragraph, if I'm in
the hands of somebody really capable. I wrote an essay that I put on my Web
site about reading the stories in the journals. I pointed out the first
paragraphs of a number of writers whose novels I subsequently took on. And it
was always right at the beginning that I was grabbed.
I remember reading a first novel and turning to Judith and giving her the first page and saying, "I'll bet you can't stop reading." She read it and asked, "Where's the rest of it?" I said, "Aha!" So can I describe what it is? It is entirely a visceral reaction, and it is also very personal and subjective and not easily categorized. It could be, for me, a western (I represent Elmer Kelton, who is recognized as the greatest living American writer of the western); it could be a crime novel; it could be a literary novel. It doesn't matter what the category is—but it gets me. I think that's what keeps us all going. It's the discovery. One of the best things about my job is that when I finish reading the manuscript of a first novel that I really like, whatever the time of day is, I can get on the phone and call the author, even if it's eleven o'clock at night, and know that they'll be very happy to get my call. And how often have you read a wonderful book where you'd love to call up the author and talk about it? That's what I do for a living.
How do you
feel about the decline of independent publishing and independent publishers?
I like to hope
that Morgan Entrekin is not alone in this field. There are some interesting
small presses coming along. I'm really impressed by what they've been doing.
It's interesting how many submissions they're getting from agents these days—agents
who were not able to sell that really good novel to a major house because the
author didn't have a platform but had a terrific book. I think we'll see more
of that. Because, again, as nature abhors a vacuum, I think there's a need in
this country for good writing. And while it may not be commercial, there will
be an audience to read it.
Do you have
any thoughts about the future of books. Have you played with this Kindle thing
that Amazon has made, or the Sony Reader?
No. Listen, I
was probably the last guy to get a computer at his desk. I am a Luddite. I'd
rather read the finished book. I love the feel of a printed book, and I suspect
many people of my age group in publishing feel the same. When you open a carton
of new books that have just come from the printer, take a breath of that air
and the new fresh print. It's intoxicating. The smell, when the box is opened,
is intoxicating.
Do you think
book reviews are as important as they used to be?
I don't think
so. I don't think anybody will tell you they are. A front-page New YorkTimes Book Review can either sell a book or not sell a book. Sometimes
it's because you finish reading the review and you can't tell whether or not
the reviewer liked the book. There was a time when book sales fell off
dramatically when the New York Times
was on strike and there was no Times Book Review. I don't think that happens anymore, unfortunately.
You can see the newspapers are cutting back on their book sections. They're not
making any money. The publishers aren't spending the money they used to on
advertising in the book review section. Look at today's Times Book
Review—the number of ads is very small.
Once a book review section doesn't make money, and starts losing money, it's
going to be cut back. So between the number of reviews now available, and the
effectiveness of the reviews, and where they're placed in the paper, I think
we're seeing the real value disappear.
Tell
me what you think about MFA programs.
A number of
the writers I represent are graduates of MFA programs. But in much of the
material I've seen from MFA
writers, they're writing about the standard stories of family trauma, divorce,
the death of a parent. They're very capably written. But we've seen too much of
that.
You
wrote a piece in maybe the early '90s about the sameness of what you were
reading.
Yes, and I
think if you talk to the editors of a lot of the journals, they'll tell you
that they're used to the same thing—that they see an awful lot of capable
stuff that is not very engaging. I was asked this question once at a
university. I was talking to seniors, and some of the writers were considering
going into MFA
programs. They asked me about the MFA programs. I said I thought it was great for
discipline: You have to write. I mean, you should want to write, but if you
find that difficult and need the discipline of going to class, then you should
go do it. If you want to go ahead with a career in the university, if you want
to teach creative writing, you're going to need an MFA. I think the programs do some good
for people who either need the degree in order to continue in the university
setting or need the discipline. But I think the originality factor is something
that's suffering as a result. We're getting too much of the same old, same old.
But I'm working right now with a writer who's going for his MFA, and he's
writing a novel in first person that is very unusual, and I'm encouraging him
to keep working on it. It's difficult to give you a blank statement about MFAs. There are
good things and there are some quite negative things.
page_5:
What do you think the students in them could do to
avoid that sameness?
They have to
get out and live.
What
do writers who are starting out today need to look for in an editor?
First of
all, I think writers today are thrilled if they've got an editor who wants to
buy their first novel. They're already thrilled with that editor. But I think
they want to be convinced that the editor is really enthusiastic and will help
to get the whole house behind the book—beyond anything that was spent to buy
the book.
Are
you saying an author should be more concerned about having a great advocate
than having a great editor?
Well, since a lot of the editing is being done before the manuscript is
delivered, I think the most important thing is having an advocate. In fact, I
think the best thing an editor can do for a book is to be the great in-house
advocate. That counts far more than the editing process, especially if you're a
writer who feels you've gotten enough editing from your agent. And I think more
and more agents are editing books.
And
that's a good thing?
Absolutely.
I think you have to. The editors themselves know which agents edit their books.
When an editor calls me and says, "I like this book and want to buy it, but I
have some problems with the ending. How willing is the writer to do some more
work?" I have to be in a position where I can say to the editor, "Listen, I've
worked with this writer through three drafts of this book. I know he or she is
willing to do the work and is capable of doing the work." I have to be able to
tell that to the editor. I think, too often, the editor discovers that the
writer didn't get edited by the agent and that the writer doesn't want editing.
Strange as that may seem, it happens.
All agents
have different philosophies about what kind of deal they want in terms of
advance money. Some agents are just concerned with the money. Others look at
other factors. What has your experience taught you about this issue?
My
particular philosophy about this has to be influenced by the years I worked
inside a publishing house. I have a tendency to see things from the publisher's
side of it as well as the author's. While I want to get the best money I can
for a writer, especially when we're talking about novelists who are going from
Book A to Book B, I don't want to price the author out of the market. I have a
pretty good idea, based on sales, what I think the publisher can afford, or
should be able to afford, to pay for the author's next work. I've done my own
mathematics; the number is not taken out of a hat. It's one that I know the
editor can go back to his boss, or her boss, and get, as a not crazy amount of
money. So having a little bit of knowledge about the mathematics has been very
helpful in being able to determine a fair price for an author's next work.
Sometimes I've had a difference of opinion with a writer who thinks he should
be getting a lot more money for his next book. In that case, if I'm not on the
same page with the writer, then the writer is perfectly able to go on their
own, find another agent, and see if they can get the money. But I'd rather see
an author brought along from book to book, with a track record that develops
and enhances his or her value to the publisher, and at the same time gets them
more money. But it's commensurate with how the previous work has sold. I don't
believe in putting a gun to the publisher's head. In the long run, I think the
best deal is where both sides feel they've gotten a good deal.
What
do you love most about your job? Is it that phone call at eleven o'clock at
night, or is it something else?
There are
lots of things I like about the job. The discovery of new talent, of course.
The success of a book that you've worked on and helped nurture. I mean, I spent
a lot of time working with James Ellroy on The Black Dahlia, more than on his
previous books, and I felt I'd made a real contribution to the success of that
book. I like a lot of the people I deal with in publishing. I came into publishing
about the same time as Sonny Mehta did, and Peter Mayer, both of whom I
consider old friends. So I have a sense of community. I love hanging out with
these guys. We have a history together. We've all seen publishing change, but
we're still in the business. We love what we do. There is a kind of a family
feeling to the business, among, let's say, forty or fifty agents and forty or
fifty editors. So you feel a sense of community.
I love to see a first novel get on the best-seller list. I always want to read those books, especially if it's a first novel. I mean, look at how [Nancy Horan's] Loving Frank, for instance, succeeded as a best-seller last year. I wanted to read that book. I wanted to see what it was. But I do know there was great in-house enthusiasm for the book. And I know what a splendid job Algonquin did with [Sara Gruen's] Water for Elephants. And what a great job Morgan did with [Charles Frazier's] Cold Mountain. I mean, they don't happen very often. But every one of those successes keeps us all in the game.
What are the
disappointing aspects of working as an agent?
The novel that
you worked on for months, through two or three drafts, and then you can't sell.
Terrible. You can't help but take it personally. The writer who leaves you
after several books, either because the books didn't go anywhere or because he
feels he's ready to move up to a big-time agent. But I think a lot of these
things happen to people like Peter Mayer and Sonny Mehta, too. So it's part of
the game.
What do
editors do that drives you crazy?
When they don't
answer my mail.
Why is that?
Well, we could
get into a whole discussion about common courtesy, and how it seems to have disappeared.
But especially
in this business, right?
More among
younger editors, who aren't aware that if you've asked for a book, and there's
a closing—and I never send a manuscript to an editor unless they've asked for
it—then they have to call and let you know. Sometimes you wait all day to hear
from them, or you have to chase them again. That pisses me off. I don't get too
many form rejection letters anymore. I usually respond by sending my own form
rejection letter to the editor. I tell the editor, "Our agency no longer accepts
form rejection letters and we have decided to remove you from our submission
list."
What makes
you love an editor?
A quick
response. An intelligent response that shows me they've read the book. Maybe
they pinpoint a problem in the book. If I have a difference of opinion with a
writer about some aspect of their novel, I may say, "Well, why don't we try
three editors and see what their responses are." I'm hoping to hear from the
editors that they have the same problem with the manuscript. If I get that kind
of response, I can go back to the writer and make him make the change before I
go elsewhere with the book. But I don't get that kind of response very often.
The editors I like are the ones who instinctively know that there's a good book
here but it needs this, that, or the other thing—and they are willing to tell
me. A lot of editors aren't willing to tell you what the real problem is with a
book. The stock phrase will be "I couldn't summon up enough enthusiasm" or "I
didn't feel passionately," none of which tells you anything. But the editors
who tell you specifically what it is that they didn't like about the book are
valuable. And you don't get too much of that. You talk about editing in the
publishing world? Getting intelligent responses to our manuscripts is almost as
important for us as getting an offer is, these days. You don't get too much of
that.
Tell me about
some high points and low points in your career.
For low points,
I told you about the writer whose work you really love, or you really like them
a great deal, and for one reason or another they leave you. That's always a low
point. Maybe they feel their careers aren't going anywhere. The publisher isn't
offering as much money for their new book as they did for their last book, and
they think that some of that is your responsibility. As one writer who I liked
a great deal once wrote to me, "I can't fire me, Nat. You're the only one I can fire." And he fired me. That was the whole letter!
His career didn't go anywhere, but that was one of the nicer rejection letters.
The real high points are the writer who you've worked with for several years, and their career's gone nowhere, and you've been working on their new book and it's really terrific—it's different from anything else they've written—and you've gone out with that book and sold it in the face of the fact that any check of BookScan will reveal that they sold hardly anything of their last book. But you found an enthusiastic editor who's willing to take the book on despite that and really run with it. That's a great moment, and that's happened to me a few times. I say that to writers who have had poor results with their first few books and feel that publishing doors have closed to them. Because the sales track is clearly one of the things an editor looks at. Sometimes they can't see how incredible a new book is—they can only look at the author's track record at another house. So when you can overcome that, as an agent, and convince an editor that they have something special, you've really made a breakthrough, especially in this market.
Do you worry
about the future of books and reading?
I don't think
you can be in this business without worrying about that subject. But, you know,
when I got started in publishing, I can remember an old salesman telling me,
"You should have been here in the forties and the fifties, Nat. That was the
great period! Now it's all gone to hell." I think every generation probably
feels like, Geez, you should've been here twenty years ago, kid. Where were
you twenty years ago when it was really great?
I think there's always going to be that element—that it's not as good as it
used to be. But it is tougher today.
What do you
still want to accomplish?
I just love
doing what I'm doing, and I hope I'll be able to do it for many more years to
come.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
[Editor’s Note: Following the publication of Jofie Ferrari-Adler’s extended interview with Nat Sobel, we received a letter from Stuart Applebaum, executive vice president of communications for Random House, who takes issue with Sobel’s views of the firing of the publisher’s sales reps. We reprint his letter below in its entirety.]
While Mr. Sobel is well entitled to express his opinions about book publishers, his observations about the Random House, Inc., sales force demand clarification, in particular, two points in his quote.
First, the Random House Sales reorganization he cites took place some eighteen months ago—not so “recently,” as he misleadingly pegs it.
Second, his suggestion that the Random House field reps who left were “replaced by new, young, and cheaper people” is simply untrue. In virtually every instance the accounts affected at the time of the change were and continue being sold by longstanding, highly knowledgeable Random House veteran sales representatives with great rapport and effectiveness with their customers.
As a point of reference, about one-quarter of our field reps have more than twenty years of service. All but nine of them have at least five years of field-sales service. And speaking of tenure, at our national Sales Conference in March 2008 we celebrated three RH Sales Group members with thirty-five years of service; six celebrating thirty years; three with twenty-five years; and five commemorating twenty years.
Stuart Applebaum
Executive Vice President, Communications
Random House, Inc.
The author responds:
In his essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell warns us about words that are "used in a consciously dishonest way." I was reminded of that warning when I read Stuart Applebaum's letter about the Random House sales force's "reorganization" (Orwell again: "Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them").
Mr. Applebaum's first complaint is almost too minor to be taken seriously, but, for the record, this interview was conducted on January 6, 2008, and the cuts to the Random House sales force were reported in Publishers Lunch on November 10, 2006, which places the actual time-span at less than fourteen months. Readers can decide for themselves if fourteen months can be reasonably considered "recent" for an agent with Sobel's decades of experience in the business.
Mr. Applebaum's second complaint is not minor at all. It could have been pulled straight out of "Politics and the English Language," and therefore it is troubling. Just after Mr. Applebaum assures us that Sobel's comment is "simply untrue," he qualifies that phrase and everything that follows it by inserting the word "virtually." Again, readers of this magazine know enough about language to look at the letter and decide for themselves what the word's presence tells them.
Obviously Mr. Applebaum is just doing his job, and I have a hard time faulting anyone for that. It should also be noted that it is impossible to prove or disprove Sobel's supposition without having access to information that is personal and proprietary, namely the salaries of the sales reps who were fired and the salaries of any reps who may have been hired to do the same work in the interim. But I am disheartened by Mr. Applebaum's attempt to distract readers from the larger truth of Sobel's observations—that reps are overburdened, and that publishing veterans are routinely replaced by cheaper help in order to save money, both of which hurts writers as well as readers—by issuing a statement that, when you really look at it, says virtually nothing.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Chuck Adams
Like anyone, I'm a sucker for a good underdog story. In a world where the bad guys always seem to come out on top, give me Gary Cooper in High Noon or Fred Exley in A Fan's Notes or even, I'm sorry to admit, Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. Who doesn't appreciate a life-affirming tale of triumph and redemption in the face of adversity?
Not long ago, I went down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to seek out the protagonist of one such story: Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books. A native of Virginia who was educated at Duke, Adams moved to New York City in 1967 and found an entry-level job at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. He moved on to Macmillan, then Dell, where he built a reputation as a brilliant line editor, and was eventually recruited by Simon & Schuster to work alongside celebrated editor Michael Korda. In the years that followed, Adams edited and acquired an extraordinary range of best-selling and award-winning books by authors such as Sandra Brown, James Lee Burke, Susan Cheever, Mary Higgins Clark, Kinky Friedman, Ellen Gilchrist, Joseph Heller, Ronald Reagan, and Elizabeth Taylor. In all, nearly one hundred of the books he's edited have gone on to become best-sellers.
In the winter of 2004, however, like many editors of a certain age (and pay grade), Adams was rewarded for his years of service with a pink slip. The news hit him hard. Believing that his career was essentially over, he moved back to North Carolina, where he had gone to school and still owned a house. Not long afterward he got a call from a literary agent and friend who told him that Algonquin Books, the small literary publisher in Chapel Hill, was looking for an editor. He landed the job and soon acquired a book by a little-known novelist named Sara Gruen that her previous publisher had rejected. Anyone who's walked into a bookstore in the past year probably knows the rest: Water for Elephants has gone on to become a publishing phenomenon, spending a year and counting on the New York Times best-seller list with sales of more than two million copies to date.
But the redemption story is only part of why I wanted to talk with Adams. I heard a rumor that he was a straight shooter, and I had a hunch that his experience at publishing houses both large and small, and his extensive background with commercial authors, would yield some unique insights that writers of all stripes might find useful. In our wide-ranging conversation, Adams spoke with rare candor about everything from how to craft a compelling narrative to what the best agents do for their clients to the intricacies of working with an editor. We talked in his office, one wall of which is dominated by a thank-you gift from Gruen: a large, wildly colorful abstract painting that was made by—you guessed it—an elephant.
I've read conflicting things about your background. Where are you from?
I was born in Virginia, but just over the border. I think it was Publishers Weekly that said I was from North Carolina. I went to school at Duke—I did undergrad and then law school and spent seven years here. So coming back to Chapel Hill and Durham is coming home for me. I studied English as an undergrad and then went to law school because my father wanted me to go to law school, and Vietnam was happening and I didn't want to go there. The irony is that when I finally finished law school and had to go for my physical I didn't pass it because of a hereditary skin disorder—psoriasis, the heartbreak of psoriasis—and I had thrown away three years for nothing, I thought at the time, because I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I did know that I wanted to go to New York. So I took a job as a lawyer with a bank in New York just to get there. I kept not taking the bar, and they finally said, "You don't really want to practice, do you?" I said, "No, I really don't." By then I had become acclimated to the city and basically just took the law degree off my resumé and went out and found a job at Holt. It was an entry-level job in production. I spent about three or four years there and worked my way up pretty quickly. Then I went to Macmillan and was hired as a managing editor. I think I was hired because they had been fighting for so long over who to hire that they basically said, "We're hiring the next person who walks through the door." I was the next person who walked through the door. I had to learn the job, and I was terrible at it.
How did you make the transition to becoming an acquisitions editor?
I made a couple other moves and eventually wound up at Dell. By then I knew what I was doing. I was good. Dell was very much into movie tie-ins. As managing editor, I oversaw a lot of stuff, but there was an editor who did the acquiring of all the tie-ins. At some point they decided they weren't going to do that anymore. They fired that editor and said, "Chuck, you take over the tie-ins. It's basically just getting the artwork from the movie companies anyway." I said, "But if something comes my way, can I acquire it?" They said, "Sure." The first think I bought was a tie-in to a miniseries called The Blue and the Gray. It was a complicated situation, and the author and I didn't get along. He had come up with the idea for the miniseries and somebody else had written the screenplay. But he retained the rights to novelize the thing. So he wrote the novel but he didn't have the approval of the edit—the producer had that. I read the novel and called the producer and said, "This is terrible. I can't accept it like this, or, if I do, it has to be rewritten, and I will rewrite it because I want to make it a success." He said, "Do whatever you want." So I completely rewrote it. The author was really upset. You know, I had destroyed his career and everything. We published it that way, as a paperback original, and it went on the New York Times best-seller list. We sold it to something like fifty foreign countries. It was a huge success. We made a fortune off it. So I'd taken my first book and turned it into a big success, and after that they encouraged me to acquire more. Eventually, Susan Moldow made me just an editor. But my reputation thereafter was based primarily not on my successes but on the books I didn't buy.
What do you mean by that?
I got a reputation for wanting to buy certain tie-ins and being told, "That's a terrible idea." For example, I was desperate to buy the tie-in to Cocoon. When I told them the plot, they practically laughed me out of the editorial meeting. Another was V. Another was The Last Starfighter. They all went on to be huge best-sellers. I was a big I-told-you-so person. When it came my turn in the editorial meetings, and they'd ask if I had anything that week, I would stand up and read the New York Times best-seller list to them. So I had this reputation for knowing what I was doing but never getting to do it. Eventually it became apparent to them that I did have talent as an editor. I'm good at it. I had done it a lot more than I had realized. I could type, which was rare back then before computers. I'd taken a typing class in high school, and in college I was the only guy on my floor who could type. I'd be typing guys' papers for them all the time, and I'd say, "This isn't very good. Do you mind if I change a few things?" They'd say, "Sure, go ahead. I don't know what I'm doing." So I'd rewrite their papers, and sure enough they would get much better grades. So I knew a long time ago that I actually did know how to write.
So you basically taught yourself how to edit?
Yes. Completely. Nobody mentored me, nothing like that. I got a reputation for being a really strong line editor, and eventually I heard that Michael Korda was looking for somebody to come work with him. That's how I got hired at Simon & Schuster.
Did you know Michael before you went to work with him?
No, I'd never met him. What happened is that a headhunter, Bert Davis, called me and said, "I've got a job for you. You've just got to promise me that you aren't an alcoholic or a drug addict." I said, "Okay, I'm not." He said, "Don't ask." It turned out they had hired somebody for the job and it became clear very quickly that he had a real problem—I don't know if it was drugs or alcohol or what—and it didn't work out. I guess they figured that was the one question they forgot to ask. So I went over and had an interview with HR. I was really pissed about that. I thought, "They called me. I'm not applying for this job, am I? Why am I having to go to human resources?" I remember the question that cinched the job for me. The HR woman said, "Rate yourself on a scale of one to ten." I said, "Ten!" She said, "Good, that's good." I realized that was what they wanted—belief in yourself and arrogance. Because it was more in my nature to say, "Oh, you know, like a seven and a half." I think I was just irritated with her.
When I met Michael I immediately loved him, of course. At one point in the interview he said, "What do you think is your greatest talent?" I said, "I grovel well." That may be the thing I said that got me the job. I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the other things that happened at Dell was that I started being assigned to a lot of problem authors. I've always been a placater or a mediator—my shrink tells me it's because I grew up in an abusive environment with a lot of drunks, not my parents necessarily, but I was around a lot of that—and it became clear to the people at Dell that I could get along with anyone. They would just throw people at me and say, "Let Chuck handle this one." So when I told Michael I groveled well, I think he liked that. I was basically hired the day I met him.
Tell me how your relationship developed.
On a personal level, we liked each other and still do. We just became friends, and we still talk on a regular basis. On a professional level, Michael is probably the most talented editor I have ever known. There were sessions with him and writers—I'm thinking of times when a writer was having trouble with an idea—and on a day when Michael completely focused, he was brilliant beyond belief. I remember one day in particular with an author who was stymied on this one plot problem. I had thought about it and hadn't come up with anything either. We went in and sat down with Michael and he just started to talk. He talked for about half an hour—talking through the story—and he resolved the problem and went on from there. It was a hair-raising experience. I was so moved by it. It was so exciting. I thought, "This man is brilliant."
Michael could do anything—I'm sure he's a great line editor—but he was more than happy to let me do the line editing. So, for the most part, I did the heavy line work on books and he did the more developmental side. That's especially true with Mary Higgins Clark. Mary is a dream to work with, one of the nicest people in the world, and I think an extremely talented writer, because she's a great storyteller, and I put storytelling ability above fine writing. When she was starting on a book, she and Michael and I would meet, usually for dinner. She would say what the idea was, and then Michael would spin this whole thing. She'd take that and run with it and do her own thing, but Michael helped her come up with the direction. Then I would go in and line edit the book.
Michael and I had a great working relationship, and we had that relationship with most of the authors we shared. Every now and then there would be somebody who I didn't work with. For example, Michael took on Philip Roth, who I got to know ever so slightly, but Philip Roth is Philip Roth and you basically leave it alone. I didn't work with Larry McMurtry at all. Larry is not the easiest person in the world to get along with, and he and Michael had a great relationship, so I was happy to stay out of that.
How did it work, technically? Would you both acquire your own books and then acquire some of them together?
I acquired books on my own, but usually, if an agent sent me something that I really liked, I would go to Michael and say, "I really like this and I want to try and buy it." And 90 percent of the time Michael would say, "I like it, too. Let's buy it together." So that's what we would do, and he would do the same thing with me. Every now and then he would get something—he was in the RAF and knew about planes—where there was no reason to involve me. We didn't do every book together, but we did the majority of them together. Usually agents would send the big authors to him. But Sandra Brown and James Lee Burke were submitted to me.
When you look back, what did those years working with Michael teach you?
Well, I learned an awful lot about the business from Michael, of course, because Michael is incredibly savvy. I also learned the limits of ego.
What does that mean?
I believe it's never, never, never about the editor. That was the only thing with Michael that I sometimes disagreed about. The most important thing is to have a really strong relationship with the writer and have them be confident in you and the house. As the editor, I'm not important in that equation. I genuinely believe that. I mean, I have an ego, but it's not important. Michael would occasionally let his ego get in the way of things. There was one celebrity—we did a lot of celebrity books—and they had a fight, the likes of which.... I had seen it coming. I knew it was going to happen. And it ended up that I was the only one she would talk to. His ego could occasionally get in the way. I have come close to losing my temper with authors, but I've only actually done it twice, once here and once, famously, at Dell.
Famously?
Well, it was famous there, not anywhere else. Again, it was me trying to prove myself when I was young and trying to prove myself. I bought a work of nonfiction about an FBI guy who went undercover and got so deeply undercover that he became a criminal himself. A journalist had written a proposal to write this story. Susan bought it, and when it came in she gave it to me to edit. It was terrible. The guy was a good reporter—he dug and dug and dug—but he hadn't a clue about writing or putting a book together. I looked back at his credits and realized that he had been with People magazine, and his articles always said they were "reported by" him but written by somebody else. So I thought, "Okay, we're going to make this work."
I started rewriting it. When I was done with the first chapter I sent it to him. He said, "Oh, I see." I said, "Can you do this now? Can you look at what I've done to this chapter and redo the rest of the book?" He sent it back and it was still terrible. No better. I thought, "Either I reject it or I rewrite the whole book." So I started rewriting the whole book. At some point he started pestering me about when I was going to be done. I sent him the first half. He called me and said, "Forgive me. This is brilliant. I love what you're doing. Keep going." So I kept working on it and got about another hundred pages done—it's like four hundred pages long—but then he called me again. Now, I'll admit, it had been three or four months by this point. But he called me again and said, "Where's the rest of it?" I kept putting him off, but eventually he started calling me every day. One day he called me and said, "I'm really getting upset about how long you're taking with this."
I have a terrible temper, but I don't lose it very often. I'm usually able to keep myself from going off the handle. But that day I was just in a bad mood or something, and I said, "You know what? I hate you and I hate your book." And I slammed down the phone. I was sitting there, kind of hyperventilating, and then I heard Susan's phone ring, and about thirty seconds later I heard her walking down the hallway to me. She yelled at me, of course, but she was nice about it. She said, "You should have rejected this. You should have come to me and said, ‘This is terrible.'" I said that I just didn't want to give up on it.
Tell me about some of your more memorable celebrity experiences at S&S.
There were so many. Going to Cher's house and sitting in her strange living room and just talking with her—that was pretty awesome. I liked her. I can't say I ever got to know her. I think she's very afraid of exposing herself. So she limits her world to people who are right around her and she trusts, and we were never going to be part of that. But it was fun to work with her anyway. Esther Williams was memorable and probably one of my proudest publishing experiences, because everyone laughed at me when I bought the book. They said, "What a joke. Nobody cares." But thanks to two other people I worked with—one in subrights, one in publicity—who also loved Esther and loved the book, it became a big best-seller. It probably sold 120,000 copies, which was great for a book that everyone said I was stupid to buy. And I loved working with Esther.
Two of my more memorable experiences involved celebrities I never actually did books with. One was having lunch with Diana Ross with Michael at the Four Seasons when her memoir was being shopped around. She wanted Michael to be her editor and I think it had been requested that we have lunch with her. I was immediately besotted with her. I just thought she was the most exciting person I had ever met. It may have all been a performance—it probably was—but when I walked out of that restaurant I was ten feet off the ground. I was just in love with her. The other one was dinner with Sidney Poitier when his book was being shopped, and he was wonderful and brilliant and charming.
Working with Charlton Heston was great. I loved him. We never talked politics or gun control, and he was just a genuinely sweet man. I even said to him at one point, "I've worked with a lot of celebrities and they are many things but they are usually not nice. How can you be so nice and be a household name?" He said, "Good thing you didn't know me thirty years ago." He was really well grounded. Meeting Elizabeth Taylor was exciting. There were a few people I worked with who I got to know pretty well. Neil Simon and I became pretty friendly when we were working together. Paul Mazursky, the director, was another. Maureen Stapleton was a sweetheart.
You mentioned Diana Ross coming to Michael. There is obviously a cult of personality with some editors...
Michael, having been a child of Hollywood himself, made a lot of these people feel comfortable. The drawback was that sometimes I think they felt he was also competing with them.
As you were coming up were there any other people who had an important influence on you?
Susan Moldow was a huge influence, just because she gave me a chance and encouraged me. Carole Baron was one of the greatest people I've ever worked with. I just loved her. Ray Roberts at Macmillan was a huge influence on me. I love him. He and I were incredibly close friends. He gave me confidence in myself about what I could do.
Is that because your personality type was similar? You didn't have to be an oversized personality?
Exactly. There was an editor at Macmillan at the time who just died this week, Eleanor Friede, and she was an oversized personality. She was kind of daunting. I liked her a lot but, you know, it was like, "Now that's an editor." I could never be like that. I could never be like Michael; I could never be like Nan Talese. I just don't have that in me. I was always happiest just being in my office and working and not necessarily being out there.
Why were you were ultimately pushed out at S&S?
It's a complicated story, and I'm not sure I know the whole story. I was told that they had to cut back and that Michael had declined to retire. They wanted him to retire. And because he wouldn't retire, they were going to fire me. They wanted me to continue editing [on a freelance basis], but they told me I should just retire.
You were making too much money?
I guess. It didn't seem like it to me, but I don't know what everybody else made. I was certainly well paid. But, mind you, when David Rosenthal came to Simon & Schuster he immediately gave me a raise. He said, "You're not making enough." I was never one who went and lobbied for big raises. So I think it was a combination of things.
How did the Algonquin job come about?
When I was fired from Simon & Schuster, I was given something like four months notice, mainly because they wanted me to finish editing the new Mary Higgins Clark, which had to go to press in March. So I had until the end of March to clear out. An agent, Cynthia Manson, who is a friend and a wonderful person, called me and said that Peter Workman was looking to hire somebody. She knew Peter and asked if I would be interested in talking to him. I said that would be serendipity because Algonquin was in North Carolina, where I already had a house and spent a lot of time.
But, to be honest, I had little hope for it because...Mary Higgins Clark? Jackie Collins? Those weren't exactly the kind of authors I thought of when I thought of Algonquin. But Peter could not have been nicer or more inviting. He basically said, "I don't what you to learn to do Algonquin books. I want them to learn how to do the books that you're comfortable with." So that gave me some hope that this actually might work. No one else offered me a job, and I could've done freelance and probably made more money than I'm making here, but I didn't want to do that.
The thing that I love about what we do as editors is, first of all, working with the authors. But I also love this excitement when a new manuscript comes in and you think, "Okay, I'm ready to fall in love again." It doesn't happen very often, but when it does it's just unbeatable. I didn't want to give that up. I could have kept editing on a freelance basis, but I would have missed that love experience. So we worked out everything and I was very happy to take the job down here, and it has been, I think, the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my career. I mean, who would have thought? I got a third act here.
I read somewhere that Water for Elephants is the biggest seller in Algonquin's history. Tell me about the acquisition.
The acquisition process was simple. Emma Sweeney e-mailed the book to me and told me that it had been under contract to Morrow—I believe this is right—and they had rejected it because they wanted another romantic contemporary book like Sara's first book. I had been the underbidder on Sara's first book [Riding Lessons] at Simon & Schuster, and I had met her when she came around to meet people. So that was the reason the new book came to me. I started reading it and immediately just loved it. I gave a copy to Ina Stern, our associate publisher, on a Friday. We both came in on Monday and went, "Oh my God! We have to have this book." It was the first and, with the exception of one other book I've brought in, the only time that every editor here and the publisher said, "We have to have this book." Usually there's one naysayer, and sometimes several, but in this case everyone agreed. I remember saying at the editorial meeting, "I don't know that this book will be a best-seller. But I think this author will be a best-seller because she's an animal person and will continue to write about animals." Her first book had involved horses. I said, "You've got the opportunity for off-the-book-page publicity because you have an author you can promote," which is infinitely easier than just promoting the book. So we took it on with great enthusiasm.
Was it a competitive situation or did you have it exclusively?
It was out with a number of other houses. I told Emma, "Look, I really just want to take this off the table." I think I offered her fifty thousand for world rights. She asked me if I could go up, so I went up a little bit, and we got it. A few months later, after the book had been edited and everything—it didn't take much editing because it was really clean—our publicity and marketing people had a meeting to talk about the next season. They meet every season and choose one or two books—we promote all of our books a lot—but they choose one or two that they hope can be especially big. They chose another novel as the big book for that season. But it turned out that our marketing director, Craig Popelars, hadn't read the novel yet. So, after that meeting, he read it. Afterward, I remember, he walked in here with the manuscript and said, "Best-seller. We can make this a best-seller. I can give this to my mother, I can give this to my father, I can give this to my wife, I can give this to my old college roommate. This book is universal." I was a little jaded by that point, so I said, "Sure, you go ahead and make it a best-seller." And damned if he didn't. Craig along with Michael Taeckens, the publicity director, and Ina Stern, the associate publisher, got behind this book and just made it happen.
In the lead-up to publication, what are some of the key things that you and your colleagues did?
Craig got on the phone or emailed thirty or forty key independent bookstore people around the country. He said, "I want to send you a manuscript that I think is going to be huge. If you like it as much as I think you will, I want you to give me a quote that I can use to put together an ad." He sent out the manuscript and the comments that came back were universal. There wasn't one negative response. The independent booksellers got behind the book in a huge way. He took those quotes to sales conference in New York, and the sales reps had started reading the book and agreed that it could be a best seller. Michael started putting together a thirty-city tour. We had started out thinking the first printing would be fifteen thousand copies, but by the time we actually went to press it was fifty thousand.
Did the author do any key things in terms of promotion?
Well, Sara's got a great personality, but I don't think she'd mind me saying that she's not a natural in front of crowds. She actually can have a little stage fright. But once she's there, her charm and her warmth come through, and she did an amazing job on the road selling the book. That was a huge thing. But ultimately, I think, it's about the book. People love it. We just went back to press, this week, and printed our two-millionth paperback copy. It's been an amazing ride.
What was the most exciting moment for you?
The first time it got on the New York Times list. And the millionth paperback copy. That was fun—the entire office went out to dinner. We had champagne here and then went out to dinner.
Tell me about trying to keep her.
We tried very hard.
I imagine that you put together some kind of creative offer.
Yes. I don't want to talk about the amounts, but we put together a very creative offer. It was a reasonable amount of money up front and guarantees of more if certain things happened. It was a shared risk situation. Financially, we just can't afford to pay millions of dollars and have a failure. Other companies can. We can't. We just can't take the risk. So it was a shared risk—more money if this happens, more money if this happens. I would have loved to have kept her.
You're on record as saying you understand her decision.
I do. I do, completely.
But it must also be frustrating.
It is. It's particularly frustrating for the others here who worked so hard to create the book's success. I mean, it hurt. I can't say that our feelings weren't hurt a little bit. But I put myself in her shoes and I think, "x dollars here versus x-x-x-x-x dollars there?"
Tell me about the major changes you've seen in the industry over the course of your career.
Things have changed a lot. I started at Holt in 1969, but because I was in production I can't say I had a great feel for the industry because the industry, let's face it, revolves around editorial and publicity and so forth. By the time I got to Dell, which is where my career really began, I did understand what I was getting into. Dell was a big mass market house, and the mass market kind of ruled. I remember when Nancy Friday's My Mother / My Self reached one hundred thousand hardcover copies and everyone went, "Oh, God! That's amazing!" Now one hundred thousand is nothing—you may not get on the best-seller list with that. There's been a shift away from the mass market side.
Now things have just become big business. Advances have gotten kind of out of control. I'm not saying I liked it better the old way, it's just that I've never been one who liked to pay big advances. I'm not tight with money—God knows I waste a lot of it—I just hate risking things. I want to see the company make money. I've seen too may authors' careers go down the toilet because of big advances. I had an author at Simon & Schuster who I just loved. He was a great writer and he was great to work with. I had done a nonfiction book with him, and I encouraged him to do novels. So I bought two novels from him for something like fifty thousand dollars. The first one was great and got terrific reviews—a daily New York Times review, the cover of the Los Angeles Times Book Review—and sold moderately well, fifteen or twenty thousand copies. That was good for a first novel. It launched his career. The second book was just okay—it wasn't great—and it did okay but not great. When it came time to negotiate for the next novel, his agent wanted three hundred thousand dollars. We tried to get to a reasonable amount, but the truth was there was another editor who wanted him and I think had already put the money down. So he left for the money, and the third book sold like the second book and the first book. And the fourth book sold like that. And now he's not writing anymore, to the best of my knowledge. He could have built a career if he'd just been patient and hadn't become greedy and gone for the money.
But it's hard to resist that kind of money.
I know it is. I just get frustrated when agents and authors go for the money like that and don't think about building careers. I think sometimes we all just get carried away with this need to buy these things without any thought of what we're really going to do with them. But here, fortunately, we only do twenty books a year and we can't do that. We have to think carefully about everything we buy. But in a culture like at Simon & Schuster, and before that at Delacorte, to some extent, you would just buy things because you needed to fill up a list. You know, every month you had to have your three or four big books, but you also needed to have another fifteen or twenty down at the bottom. You would just buy stuff and fill them in. Too often, books that are acquired for hundreds of thousands of dollars get put in the midlist because they decide they aren't going to sell. "We can't make it into a big book, so we'll just put it there." I've had books like that. I've been guilty of this. I guess there's no way we cannot pay big advances because that's the culture we're in, but I think it's bad for so many careers.
I just took on a book this week where I was one of the bidders when it was sold a year or more ago. The author interviewed all the editors and went with another house that offered a lot more money than I offered—almost three times what I offered. But he called me out of the blue a few weeks ago and said, "I made a mistake. I really wanted to come with you but the money was just irresistible." So he's buying himself out of the contract and coming here. He just felt like he wasn't getting the guidance he wanted. I don't know if we'll have a great success or not. I think he's really talented. But the money is almost impossible to resist, I think.
It seems to me that publishers are responsible for a lot of these problems, especially the problem of the midlist writer whose career has stalled. What should publishers be doing better?
I think they should be publishing fewer books, or publishing more carefully. At Algonquin, because of the kind of house we are, doing twenty books a year, every book has to work for us. We can't afford to just throw something out there. We have to work like crazy. We'll say, "Okay, we think there may be fifty thousand people out there who will buy this book. So let's go find those fifty thousand people." That's what marketing and publicity do here. They dig for those readers. They don't always succeed, but they always try.
How are they doing that?
A lot of it is on the Internet. A lot of it is contact with booksellers. Take this book by Roland Merullo, American Savior. It's a satirical novel about Jesus coming back and running for president. We're taking a big position on this book in the way we're positioning it with bookstores. But we've also been in touch with all sorts of religious organizations, especially liberal religious organizations, trying to get them interested and supportive. We just go after all these different things that the larger companies don't have time to do because they're publishing so many books, and they're going to put their effort behind the ones they paid the millions of dollars for. So, here, because we only do ten books a season, we work those ten books to death. We're not afraid to take somebody who has languished in the midlist. If we feel like they're capable of rising above that.
Do you think the industry is healthier now than it was when you first started?
Well, it's much bigger, so I suspect it's less healthy. Originally it was small operations that weren't publicly owned. You didn't have corporations demanding that you meet certain budgets. I saw this at Simon & Schuster. We had one year when Judith Regan, who I like a lot, had Howard Stern and I believe Rush Limbaugh in one year, and another editor had The Book of Virtues, and there were a lot of other books that worked. So let's say the year before we had made ten million dollars and our budget for that year was eleven million. But it was such a great year that instead of making 11 million, we made more like 111 million. So next year, does Paramount or Viacom say, "Your budget this year is twelve million"? No. They say we're supposed to make 112 million. So all of a sudden the bar has been raised that much higher. If you make the budget, keep in mind, you get not only a pat on the back—you get a bonus. So everybody wants to make the budget. When May or June comes around and you start looking at the numbers, you think, "We're not going to make our budget. What can we do?" What you do is start taking books that were supposed to be published later on and moving them up, throwing them into November and December just to get the numbers out. A lot of books and authors get sacrificed that way.
What does all of that mean for the future? Are the large corporations ever going to realize that the industry doesn't have the kind of growth they want and give up?
I don't know. Going back to the beginning of my career, when I was at Holt and we were owned by CBS, I remember the people at Holt laughing at the people at CBS. The powers that be at CBS had called the people at Holt and said, "You're doing something wrong here. If we put a dollar into our broadcast operations, we usually get back $1.75. You're only giving us back a $1.02. You're doing something wrong." They just didn't have any idea. They hadn't even researched what they were doing. In our business, $1.02 on the dollar is not bad. Any profit is good. But these corporations expect big growth. It's creating mega hits, and that's fine. Simon & Schuster is one of the best at that—they're amazing at event publishing. But so many little books, so many promising little books and talented authors, get sacrificed.
But what do you see on the horizon—do you think it's going to keep going the way it's going?
I have no idea. Seeing Warner get out of the business is probably a good thing. Viacom will probably ultimately get out of the business—it's actually CBS now, I don't know how they'll figure that out. Bertelsmann is probably pretty solid. They seem to know what they're doing. I don't know what kind of pressures are on people in-house on a bunch of things. I don't know what it's like. I bet it's not too dissimilar, but at least it's not publicly owned, so you don't have the Wall Street pressure. I think that's probably one of the biggest problems: the pressures from the stockholders and so forth. It's not a business that's ever going to function like a normal manufacturing operation or a normal big business. It's just not. So much depends on the personalities and quirks. There are so many ways to go wrong in this business, and it's so difficult to get it right.
Did you read Jon Karp's recent essay in the Washington Post?
No, I didn't see it, but somebody was telling me about it.
He was basically arguing that the future of books is quality stuff and not the sort of quickie schlock that a lot of publishers make a lot of money from.
I haven't read the article, but I don't necessarily agree. Look at Judith Regan. She's a good example. I think she's brilliant. I think she showed us something we all kind of know but don't like to admit, and it's that we're in fucking show business. She showed us that if you give people what they want, they will buy it. You can call it schlock if you want to. Books on wrestling, and books by porno stars, are not things that I necessarily want to read. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be published. There are people who want to read them, and she gave that market what they wanted. And, okay, it's schlock, but it got people into bookstores, and they bought books. I've always thought, "Give me more Harlequin romances." Get people reading! You just want people to read. I don't put down any form of publishing if there's a market for it. For too long, in New York, we've been in this culture of publishing what we like and not what readers want. Hopefully, we'll come around to trying to understand what people really want to read so we can interest them in reading in the first place.
When I was at Simon & Schuster, they started this thing on diversity in publishing, and we were all supposed to go through diversity training. To my knowledge, I'm the only person who was not summoned to go through diversity training. I think it was because I wrote them such a scathing reply to their initial query of "How do you feel about diversity in publishing?" I said, "There is no diversity in publishing and we're not likely to get it as long as you just pay lip service to it." There are virtually no African Americans in this business, there are virtually no Hispanics, virtually no Asian Americans. It's because we don't pay competitive salaries, we don't make an effort to recruit them, and, frankly, if they came in and really had a sense of their area of publishing, the bosses wouldn't know what to do with them and probably wouldn't give them a chance to do anything anyway. They expect you to be white like all the rest of us. There's too much of the elitist school culture in New York. The only people who can afford to take jobs in publishing are those who come from enough money and whose parents will help support them. We don't encourage a diversity of people in the business. We don't. We just want more of the same because they're the ones who can afford to work in it. And I don't see that changing. I know that profits are a problem and you can't afford to pay huge salaries. I know the argument. But it's a problem. And when somebody like Judith comes along and really tries something different and gets pilloried for it? Okay, she overstepped the bounds. I'll give you that. But she showed us that there is a readership out there if you're not too proud to go there.
Let's talk about agents. There are a lot of them, and I'm curious about the factors that you would look at if you were a writer, knowing what you know, and had your pick of a few.
I would want them to ask certain questions. "Who do you think the audience for my book will be?""How do you think my career should progress?" I think writers should be asking about career, not just about selling this particular book. "What do you think I should be working on now to follow-up this book?" I would want a very careful reading of the book in order to make sure that they did read it and really understood it and weren't just hyping me up. I would do as much research as I could. I'd want to know who their other clients are and how their careers are advancing. I'd want to talk to some of their authors, if possible. I'd look at how well the books that this agent has sold are being published.
You want an agent who is both incredibly easy to get along with and incredibly determined to get the best they can for their authors. The best agents are the ones who keep after me and don't leave me alone. You know, "What are you doing? What's going to happen next?" They want to keep on top of things. The ones I'm leery of are the ones I hear from only once or twice a year. Marly Rusoff, for example, is a great agent. She works so hard for her writers. Well, she was an editor, too. I think some of the best agents used to be editors—because they know the business. And so many editors are now agents, of course, because you can make more money.
What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Oh, there are so many things. The worst thing an agent has ever done to me involved a novel by a Hollywood-based person who had been in show business. This person had written a memoir before, and he was a pretty good writer, but the novel was a mess. The writing was pretty good and the background was interesting—the material was all there—but it just wasn't well done. So I passed. But when I passed, I said, "I do like this. I think there's potential here, but it's not ready. If you don't sell it, and the author wants to talk to me about reworking it, I'd be glad to have a conversation with him." They didn't sell it. The author called me and we went back and forth—calling, e-mailing—and he started to rework it. He said, "I think I've got a great idea now, so thank you." A couple of months later, my assistant drops the revision on my desk. It has a letter from the agent on top—multiple submission. I called up and said, "What are you doing?" The agent said, "You didn't really expect to get this exclusively, did you?" I said, "Well, I'm passing. Thank you." She said, "You're not going to read it?" I said, "No." I couldn't believe that.
Here, I have actually taken options on two books in that situation. I'm working with the authors now, trying to get the books right, and if we get them right we have an agreed upon purchase price. It's a formalized way of doing what I did in that case, and it protects us, obviously. When you read a book and you see something there, and it's a good writer, I'm loath to give up on it.
Are there any younger or less well-known agents out there who are really good but who maybe writers aren't aware of yet?
There are two agents in particular, right now, who I send people to when I'm asked for help in finding an agent. I think of them first and I go to them first: Doug Stewart at Sterling Lord and Daniel Lazar at Writers House. Both have sent me really, really good things. I have not bought anything yet from Doug—actually I did because I sent him an author and then I bought the book. I've bought a couple of things from Daniel, who has consistently amazed me with the stuff he sends. It's off the wall sometimes, but I just love it.
What are you looking for in a piece of writing?
The first thing is the voice. If it's got a strong voice, I'm going to keep reading. And if a story sneaks in there, I'm going to keep reading. To me, those are the two most important things. I want a voice and I want to be hooked into a story. I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they're definitely not about editors—they're about readers. You've got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you're telling. You can't just write down words that sound pretty. It's all about the reader. You've got to bring the reader into it right away. If the writing is poetic and so forth, that's nice. I'm reading something right now that has an amazing voice, and I'm only fifty-six pages into it, but I'm already getting a little tired because it's so nice, if you know what I mean. It's so pretty. It's like every page is a bon bon, and I want a little break somewhere. It's become self-conscious, in a way. I want the author to surprise me and excite me, and so far he hasn't. He's just made me think, "Oh, that's nice." I even called somebody and read them half a page because I thought it was so nice. I don't know. I'll give it another fifty pages and see.
How long does it take you to know?
You can usually tell after a paragraph—a page, certainly—whether or not you're going to get hooked. Every now and then, something will surprise you. I remember one novel at Simon & Schuster that I was reading, more as a favor than anything else. The writing wasn't great, and the story was a little on the predictable side—it was okay, but a little boring—but then I got to the end and it surprised the hell out of me. I went back and thought, "Fuck, this is really something. I would have given up after fifty pages if I hadn't promised somebody that I would read it." I ended up buying it and it did really well.
Are there any specific elements of craft that beginning writers tend to neglect?
I think beginning writers tend to not think about a reader. They tend to think about themselves. They think about making themselves sound smart and good, and they forget that this is really all about telling stories. I used to joke that I was going to put a big sign over my desk that said, "Quit writing and tell me a story." The problem is that they just write. They fall in love with their own voice. They write and write and write, and they lose sight of the fact that they're trying to entertain somebody. You have to reel them in.
Do you have any pet peeves about mistakes that you see writers making again and again?
Oh, there are little things. "‘I like you,' she smiled."[Laughter.] And you see that kind of thing from fairly good writers sometimes. You know, if you want to get the smile in there, it's "‘I like you,' she said with a smile." It's just little things like that. But if I'm reading something and I'm on the fence and I see too many of those, it goes against the book. I don't see it a lot, but every now and then, I read a novel that someone has obviously written with a thesaurus beside him. I'm not a stupid person. But I don't know every word. When I have to get up from my desk and look up words to understand what I'm reading, that's another thing that sends me to the other side of the fence.
You have said that you work very closely with the writer, with the reader in mind, to make every book as commercial as possible. Why is that important to you?
It's very difficult to make a living in this business. I'm told that there are something like two hundred writers who actually make a living at writing. Or maybe fewer. The others have to supplement their incomes in order to make a living. If a writer really wants to make a living as a writer, they need to sell copies. I want them to be successful. If they're successful, we're successful. To some extent, it comes down to money.
But I don't believe in just going after stories to make money, obviously. There are some books I've been able to publish here—one example is An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England—that have been a fight. So many people here hated that book. It's interesting. I haven't done this in six months or a year, but it used to be that if you looked at the Amazon page for that book, the reviews were split fifty-fifty between five stars and one star. Half the reviews were like, "This is the greatest book I've ever read," and the other half were like, "I would give this book zero stars if I could." It gets that kind of reaction. It makes people angry. I love that kind of book. It inspires people to really talk about it. Some people despise it and start to sputter because they hate it so much, and other people go crazy over it.
Go back to this notion of working very closely with an author—with the reader in mind—to make something as commercial as possible. What are the nuts and bolts of that process? What does the page look like?
Physically, it's a mess. I write all over it. I'm not a shy editor. I edit in ink, and I just sit down as a reader. I start reading, and when I come to a word or whatever that makes me stop, then I think, "Okay, there's a problem." Because any time a reader stops—whether it's because they didn't understand something, or the word is an odd choice and it throws them off, or a character does something slightly out of character—then you have to stop and say, "This is a problem. How do we fix it?" Usually I will have a fix that I just go ahead and write in. I always tell the authors, of course, that my fixes are suggestions. I say, "You don't have to do it this way, but you've got to do something here. Whenever I find a problem, you've got to address it. You can't ignore it. You can find your own solution, but you have to do something."
I go through the whole manuscript that way. Sometimes I just write in the margins, sometimes I write pages of notes and type them up and send them to the author. Sometimes it's just a matter of cutting and connecting and writing little one- or two-word transitions. But it's always a matter of taking the reader with me. I want them to be able to follow everything that's going on and not have to stop and puzzle anything out.
What's the most satisfying big edit you've ever done?
It was probably Kitty Dukakis's memoir. It was one of the first manuscripts I was given to edit at Simon & Schuster. It was an unusual situation: It had been bought jointly by Alice Mayhew and Michael Korda, who are two radically different editors. The manuscript was huge, about five hundred pages. Alice called me into her office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much in here about politics. People want to know the personal story. You need to cut out a lot of this political stuff." Michael called me into his office and said, "Chuck, there's way too much personal stuff in here. People want to know about the politics. You've got to get rid of a lot of this personal stuff."
I sat down and thought, "Okay, who are you going to please?" I decided to just please the reader. I went through it and did what I wanted to do as a reader. The cowriter on the book was wonderful, but she had not controlled Kitty in any way. Kitty had just rambled and the cowriter had organized everything but hadn't cut it at all. For example, every time Kitty had gone to a different town and had a different hairdresser, she'd spend a paragraph thanking that hairdresser for doing such a great job. I said, "Kitty, there's an acknowledgments page. That's where all of this has got to go." I went through the book and just carved. It was almost like carving a block of marble or granite or whatever to try and get the statue that was beneath. I painstakingly went through the thing a couple of times and carved away and connected things. When I was done, I thought it was great. And both Alice and Michael did, too. I was really proud of that. I knew I had done a good job, and they were really proud of it too. It went on to be a big best-seller for us.
This is the magazine's MFA issue. Do you have anything to say about them?
Obviously a lot of good writers have come out of MFA programs—you see it in their bios—so I know there's a lot of good work being done. I will confess that many of the MFA novels I see are better written than they are good books, if you know what I mean. There's a lot of good writing, but that doesn't necessarily add up to a good book. I feel like perhaps in those programs too much emphasis is being put on style and word choices rather than actually thinking about how to communicate with people. It's too much about—to make it sound terrible—but it's too much about showing off and not enough about trying to please a reader.
Again, I go back to the whole thing about storytelling. I'm old enough to have started reading back when it really was primarily about stories. I guess there were a lot of quality literary books being published then, but my mother didn't buy them. I read what was around the house: Edna Ferber and Daphne du Maurier and Mary Renault and Thomas B. Costain. These are writers you don't hear anything about anymore, but they were brilliant storytellers. They were also good writers, mind you, but they were brilliant storytellers. They would grab the reader right away and just not let go.
Today, I'm seeing better writing than the writing in those books, but I'm not seeing better storytelling. That was why Water for Elephants excited me. Sara is a really good writer. She's not a great stylist or anything—you're not going to sit down and read her sentences just for the beauty of them—but she tells such a great story. She knows how to pace a story. She knows how to make it work for the reader. When I read the book, I said, "This is like Edna Ferber. She's taken an intimate story and played it out against a very large backdrop." And it works beautifully. Look at Michael Chabon. He's had success from the beginning, but it wasn't until he wrote The Amazing Adventures ofKavalier and Clay, where he took his formula of two guys and a girl and put it against this big panorama—the Holocaust, the Depression, World War II—that he turned the intimate little stories he'd been writing into a big story. It's not that difficult to do. It's not easy to do, either. But when you really look at what he did, you just have to come up with the right backdrop and put the story in front of it and make the story one that people really relate to and care about.
I'm trying to get Susan Cheever to write a novel for me here. I love her. I think she's a brilliant writer, and I don't think she's ever gotten the attention she should have because people unfortunately review her name and not her books. They resent her name, for whatever reason. I think she's capable of writing a really great novel. We keep talking about what it should be. I keep saying, "Look, write Romeo and Juliet or write Jane Eyre or whatever. But put it against a big backdrop. Steal somebody's else idea, but just make it your own."
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What you're talking about just emphasizes to me how important the elements of a story are. Are the elements appealing? Are they things that people really want to read about?
Kathy Pories was reading a novel this week, and she asked me to read a part of it too. We all share everything here. I loved the writing. The voice was great. I was immediately drawn into the story. I hadn't read much, maybe twenty or thirty pages, and I told her, "I really like this." She said, "Well, wait until you get to the end." What happens is, you're reading along, you like the main character; he's interesting and complex. All along, you know that something bad has happened. And then he rapes somebody, in the first person. You read that and you're like, "Um, you can't do that." Fortunately, the author understands, so hopefully Kathy will get to buy the book. But she's got to go back through it and find a way to get rid of that problem. You lose your reader immediately when you do something like that.
Do you think literary writers need to be effective self-promoters to have a successful career today?
It's a lot easier to promote an author than a book. If you have an author whom you can get on NPR, for whom you can get some kind of press coverage because of their personality or something in their background or some quirk like that, and they're willing to be promoted that way, then that's a big plus. We always take that into consideration when we're talking about taking on somebody. Because you know that if you have a situation where you can promote only the book, it's harder. I have an author who unfortunately is in a wheelchair and we can't do the kind of tour that this company likes to do. But we're getting really great reviews, and we can capitalize on that, so I think the book is going to do fine. But without that, we would have had a real problem. It helps, obviously, if you have an author who is willing to promote.
As far as self-promotion is concerned, I'm always happy when an author says, "I'm going to network. I'm going to blog. I've got a list of people to whom I'm going to mail postcards." That's always great. It also helps when writers are well connected and their books come with guaranteed blurbs.
What would your ideal author be like?
My ideal author would be one who is anxious—not just willing—but anxious to work with me. I don't mean me, Chuck Adams. I mean me, the editor. Someone who understands that, while they are happy with what they've done, there may be room for improvement. They're open to listening to my suggestions and, once I have shared my wisdom with them, they do something with it. As I said, when I make these suggestions for changes in the manuscript, I don't want to be ignored. Because I'm not wrong. "There's a problem there, and we need to work on it." I may be wrong with the fix I suggest, but I'm not wrong with the need for a fix, and I want the author to respond to that and not argue with me. I see the creation of a successful book as very much a collaborative thing. The author always has to be happy with the book, or otherwise it doesn't matter, but I also have to be happy with it for the company's sake. We've got to feel like we can go out with confidence and make money on this book.
I'm working with an author right now on a novel that I think is brilliantly conceived and could be extremely successfully because when I describe it to people, they go, "Oh, God, I want to read that!" I'm in the editing process with him right now, and he's got his little darlings in there, as Stephen King calls them. He loves his little darlings. Trying to convince him to kill those darlings off, because they're getting in the way of the story, is difficult. I think I'll prevail because he has an agent who's very good and very proactive and understands what I'm doing and basically agrees with me. I think, together, we'll get the manuscript we need. This experience will in no way keep me from wanting to work with this author again. But I do want him to wise up. I'm not making these suggestions because I'm trying to make this Chuck Adams's book—I'm making them because I want the book to sell and to reach a big audience. I think he understands that and it's starting to sink in.
That can take time.
It does. Look, I know how much effort goes into writing a novel. I know how hard it is to hear someone say, "Okay, these sixty pages go in the garbage." They say, "But that's my best work!"
Continuing with this ideal author, how about after the editing? How involved would they be in the publishing process?
They should be thinking about ways they can help us. We're going to be doing our best to convince bookstores to stock this book. In some cases, we'll actually buy placement, and in other cases we have to depend on bookstores to do that. We will do everything we can to get reviews, but there's no guarantee. Everybody wants a New York Times review and everybody wants Oprah. Well? You just get very few. Anything they can do to help us—any contacts they may have, for example—I want to know about them. I want them to say, "You should know that I went to school with so-and-so." Good, get on the phone with them. Talk to them. Tell them about your book. Promote yourself. Don't be shy about it.
That is the one thing I don't understand about writers sometimes. It takes so much work to write a book. It takes a lot of ego to write a book. And then they finish it and find a publisher and go, "Oh, I'd feel cheap trying to sell it." Bullshit. That's part of the process. You wrote the book for a reason: You want people to read it. Help us. Help us get it out there. I want writers to be as proactive as they can be. Not to the point of being a nuisance, however. Don't expect miracles, and don't call up and say, "Why isn't this happening? Why isn't that happening?" Believe me, we're doing everything we can to make it happen. Don't keep after me about why it isn't happening.
But some writers, maybe not at Algonquin, know that their publishers are not doing what they can. They're putting their efforts behind the books that have gotten the huge advances. What should those writers do?
Anything they can to get people into the bookstore to buy the book. I don't know what their resources might be, but if they have any personal connections that can help get the word out—again, the Internet is a great way to reach people—that's the key.
Having worked at both big and small publishers, what would you say to a writer who finds himself with identical offers of, say, twenty-five thousand dollars from a big house and a smaller house?
When I was at Simon & Schuster, I would use the argument of "This is Simon & Schuster" for why an author should come there, knowing that I probably wasn't doing him a favor but also knowing that I needed to buy books and I liked this book. I was not a good person sometimes. We all have to fill our quota of books, and if the publisher liked the book, and I could buy it, I would pull the trump card of "This is Simon & Schuster," knowing that the author probably might be better off at another house. Now that I'm at the other house, I can admit that I did that. I think a writer who gets bought here is lucky. I really do. We don't succeed every time. But we try every time. And I can't say that's true with the big houses. There are other houses like Algonquin—we're not alone—who really think about what they're doing with every book.
First of all, if a writer is offered a choice between a Simon & Schuster and an Algonquin, I think their agent should advise them about what's going to be best for them. I think agents would generally say to go with Algonquin. The author should talk to both editors—I think authors should always ask to have a conversation with an editor before committing. Then they should go with the one they like best, hopefully at the smaller house where they're going to get more attention.
The problem with a company like Simon & Schuster or any of the large houses isn't that they're not good publishers—they're really great publishers—it's just that they're not great publishers of all the books they do. Your book is either going to be one of the ones that gets attention or you're just going to be thrown out there with the rest of them. A writer has to think about that before they commit. A lot of effort goes into every book at the smaller houses, because the smaller houses can't afford to bury anything.
If somebody gave you a magic wand and you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?
I guess I'd go back to what we talked about earlier, the idea that we need more diversity in this business. We need to become a more encompassing business. We need to recognize the fact that we are serving a very narrow portion of the marketplace. There are people out there who we probably could get to read if we published books that they would enjoy—if we didn't feel so fucking superior to them all the time. There's a tendency of publishers to pooh-pooh books that are really commercial. You get this at writers' conferences sometimes. "Oh, how can you edit Mary Higgins Clark?" People just shiver because they think she's not a great writer. I'm sorry, she's a great storyteller, and she satisfies millions of readers. I'm all for that. Again, Harlequin romances—give me more of them. A lot of good writers have come out of Harlequin romances: Nora Roberts, Sandra Brown, Barbara Delinsky, to name three right there. I think literary fiction is great, and the ideal book is one that is beautifully written and tells a great story, but if it's just a great story that's written well enough to be readable, that's good too.
Are you worried about the decline of independent booksellers?
Of course. I worry that there's nobody out there to sell books. I don't mean to put down people who work at the big chains. We've hired an assistant here who works part time at Barnes & Noble, so I know there are good people out there working at Barnes & Noble. But too often they could be selling shoes or light bulbs. They don't have any real passion for books. I think people need to be passionate about books in order to sell them. They have to believe in the book and love it.
I saw that with Water for Elephants when we went out to Lexington, Kentucky, at the request of Joseph-Beth. They were doing a thing in conjunction with the Lexington newspaper, and they wanted Sara and me on a panel. The booksellers were so excited about that book. It wasn't even a book yet—it was still in galleys—but they had all read it. Everybody in the store had read it, and they couldn't stop talking about it. That kind of passion is what sells a book. Without the independents, without that kind of passion, I don't know.
It's great that Barnes & Noble puts a book in the window, when you pay them to, and it's great that they put it on the front table, when you pay them to, but it means so much more when the independent bookstores really get behind something. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against Barnes & Noble. I think they have made reading sexy, in a way, and they've made it fun with their coffee shops and all that stuff. I think they've done a great service in many ways. I just worry that the price we'll pay will be the loss of the independent bookstores.
How are you liking the culture at an independent house compared to the culture at S&S?
To be honest, I didn't dislike the culture at Simon & Schuster. I lived in it for a long time and felt comfortable with it. I loved my job at Simon & Schuster. I don't have bad things to say about Simon & Schuster. It was a good company to work for. It was a difficult company to work for. When I first went there, my friends said, "You'll never survive. You're too nice." What my friends should have known, and what I said, was, "I'm not nice. I'm pleasant, but I'm not nice." They found out pretty soon at Simon & Schuster that I'm not that nice. And they found out here that I'm not nice. In fact, I think I surprised a few people because I came here with this reputation of being so nice.
How does that manifest itself?
I'm stubborn as hell. I'm like a dog that won't let go when something gets me, either positively or negatively. I'm just not going to stop until you've listened to me, until I've been paid attention to, and, usually, until I get my way. One of the things that I guess surprised them here is how demanding I can be sometimes. I know what I want, and that's what I'm going to get.
What does that usually involve?
The cover. The type. Things like that. I mean, I don't necessarily have to have my way. But I have to be listened to, and they have to try and placate me, or I'm just not going to stop complaining. I don't think people realized that about me. I heard Kathy Pories telling somebody that I surprised them when I came here because everyone thought I was going to be a pushover for everything, because I had that reputation. But I'm not. At Simon & Schuster I didn't have occasion to fight about things as much. I fought with the publisher all the time—and I think that's one of the reasons why I got fired—but I didn't have to fight with other people there.
At the end of the day, what's the most satisfying part of the job for you?
At the end of the day in the big picture, feeling like we've published a book well and done well for the author. At the end of the individual day, it's usually that I've started reading something I'm excited about, and I'm looking forward to getting back to it.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Janet Silver
Considering that it took Janet Silver only a few weeks to land a plum new job as editor-at-large for Nan A. Talese's imprint at Doubleday, perhaps it isn't worth going into the whole convoluted chain of events that resulted in her ouster, back in January, from her position as vice president and publisher of Houghton Mifflin, the venerable Boston-based house she'd headed since 2001. No doubt it would be cleaner to avoid the subject altogether and talk instead about her background (she was raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and educated at Brown and the University of Chicago); the staggering list of authors she has edited, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Robert Stone, Natasha Trethewey, and John Edgar Wideman; or her charming house in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, where our conversation took place.
After all, maybe Silver was sacked after twenty-four years at Houghton for reasons having nothing to do with the ambitions of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish businessman named Barry O'Callaghan. But that seems unlikely. The facts are as follows: O'Callaghan is one of the richest men in Ireland. Although his background is in law, investment banking, and venture capitalism, in December 2006 his Dublin-based educational software company, Riverdeep, pulled off an audacious, highly leveraged reverse takeover of Houghton Mifflin. After the merger, he moved the new company's official headquarters to the Cayman Islands (always a promising sign). Then, seven months ago, O'Callaghan acquired another piece of low-hanging publishing fruit, Harcourt, taking the next step in an apparent attempt to build a publishing empire. In the fallout surrounding that merger, Silver was one of several well-regarded veteran editors to be shown the door.
Admittedly, it's hard to summon up much outrage about the conglomeration of American book publishers these days. Huge corporations have been buying and selling them with abandon for the past five decades. O'Callaghan is just the latest member of an elite fraternity whose top dog has to be Rupert Murdoch (his News Corporation owns the numerous HarperCollins imprints). Still, just as one can't help feeling a chill to realize that revenues generated by books like Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A People's History of the United States are paying the lighting bills over at Fox News, O'Callaghan's recent actions, and their consequences, are poignant reminders that the media moguls who hold sway over today's publishing houses tend to look—and, more to the point, behave—less like Alfred Knopf or Bennett Cerf and more like Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. The problem is not so much that men like O'Callaghan continue to buy publishing houses, but rather that they rarely care enough about the work publishers do to hang on to them when it stops suiting their bottom line. Which is about the time when people like Janet Silver and her colleagues start losing their jobs—and their authors lose their most passionate advocates.
If any of this keeps Silver up at night, she didn't let on during our conversation, in which she spoke candidly about what she looks for in first novels and dispensed some useful advice for writers about agents. We talked in her living room while her dog, Roxy, and her cat, Phoebe, lounged on the floor beside the fireplace.
Tell me a
little about your background.
I grew up in
South Orange, New Jersey, which today has become a little like Brooklyn in that
a lot of people from publishing seem to live there and commute. When I was
growing up it was not like that at all. I went to college at Brown and graduate
school at the University of Chicago. It was when I was a graduate student at
Chicago that I began to realize I was more temperamentally inclined toward
editorial work than scholarship.
You were
studying English?
Yes. I was
actually on a track for a doctorate. But while I was in school I needed to
support myself. I got a job as the managing editor of this quarterly, Critical
Inquiry, which was one of the journals
published by the University of Chicago Press. This was in the mid-seventies,
late seventies. It was kind of wild. The journal did criticism in the arts, in
all of the arts, but primarily in literature. This was in the heyday of the
great deconstruction rage, so we were publishing the first translations of
essays by Derrida, for instance, and Lacan, and some essays by Jacques Barzun.
It was very, very intellectual. It was very abstract. But we were also
publishing the early essays by people like Skip Gates. I got to work with some
amazing writers, and we really did edit the pieces, because when you work for a
journal things have to be a particular length and they have to make a
particular point. A lot of the academic writers we worked with really welcomed
some input.
The other nice thing about working for a journal—unlike working on a dissertation, which is endless—is that there was an end product four times a year. It was this thing that other people read. It was a way to be engaged in a cultural conversation that seemed important—at the time, anyway. I loved the interaction with the writers. I loved the opportunity to learn about the production of a journal. We were a very small office. We did all of the editing, all the copyediting, all the proofreading. It was this little mini-education in a certain kind of publishing.
How did you
get from there to Houghton?
I was there for
five years, doing my course work and working full time. But before I finished,
my husband and I got married. He had finished his doctorate in philosophy and
was teaching and on the job market. This was a time when there were pretty much
no jobs unless you were willing to go from North Dakota to South Texas to
wherever. That wasn't what he wanted to do. So, like many people with
doctorates in that era, he went to law school. As much as we both loved
Chicago, we also wanted to come back east. So we came back and he went to
Harvard Law School and I needed to work. The only skill I had was editing. I
started doing freelance work, some of it for the Museum of Fine Arts—I also
have a background in art history—and some of it for Houghton Mifflin. It just
sort of evolved and I began to work there full time.
What
was your position when you started at Houghton Mifflin?
Manuscript
editor. Some publishers used freelance copyeditors—this was 1984—but Houghton
always had an in-house group of people, whom they called manuscript editors,
who did copyediting and a lot of developmental work. It was a chance to get in
the door and begin to learn trade publishing from the ground up. I never did
the standard editorial assistant thing where you go up through the ranks that
way. When I was a manuscript editor, one of the earlier books I worked on was
[Margaret Atwood's] The Handmaid's Tale. Nan Talese was at
Houghton Mifflin at the time—so it feels like a nice symmetry that it's come
full circle now.
Was there
somebody who taught you how to edit?
I pretty much
learned by doing it. To some degree I feel as though the opportunity to edit
articles first was a great way to start. It's much smaller. It's more
contained. You learn to focus on every line, every paragraph, and get that fine
detail down. I never thought of myself as a detail person, but when you start
working that way, you kind of become one. You are forced to slow down and not
only think about the larger argument and whether it's flowing naturally, but
also to concentrate on a more micro level. To some degree, the authors teach
you. You make your mistakes, and boy, do they let you know it. But the other
thing is that, having spent a lot of time reading, you just naturally know if a
narrative is flowing well or if you're stumbling over things and things don't
seem entirely clear. When I was in graduate school, my concentration was in
fiction, so I naturally gravitated toward editing fiction more than other kinds
of narratives.
Were
there older people at Houghton who helped you make the transition to being an
acquisitions editor?
I was there so long I
kind of think of it in terms of eras. There was the Austin Olney-Nan
Talese era, which is what I came into when I joined. And that was kind of old
school. The nice thing was that there were editors who had too many books to
edit and really wanted additional help. So I was able to pick up some work that
I might not have had the chance to do otherwise. The next era was the Joe
Kanon-John Sterling era. That was when I really began to take on books of
my own, with John's encouragement, probably four or five years into the job. I
was very fortunate because I did get the support of people who encouraged me to
go out on my own and acquire, and that doesn't happen for everybody.
I never thought of myself as particularly ambitious for myself, but more for my writers. At a certain point I found that I became so invested in the books I was editing that it felt like a loss to turn them over to other people. The longer I'd been at the company and had a chance to see the way books were published, the more opinionated I became about what to publish, especially what kinds of books to publish. Houghton went through a lot of changes—grew and contracted, grew and contracted—but the one thing that I always felt about the list was that it had a certain kind of profile as being fairly conservative, especially in fiction—a little sleepy. Some of Nan's authors helped to change that profile: writers like Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Valerie Martin. The authors she was publishing at Houghton are still the people she's publishing today, which is much to her credit. But it was a moment when the publishing world and the readership were changing and evolving, and it seemed like there was room on the Houghton list for different kinds of voices.
Likewhat?
More books by women.
More books by ethnic writers. One of the first novels I acquired was by a young
woman named Connie Porter, a young black woman who had graduated from the
[Louisiana State University] graduate writing program. She had written a first
novel called All-Bright Court, which was about a community of African
Americans who had migrated up from the South after World War II when there
seemed to be a lot of opportunity. The book was about this aspiring community
of black workers who came to find that the promises they were given really
didn't come through. And that book is still in print. The wonderful thing about
it was that here was a young writer talking about a certain kind of community
and experience that wasn't very well represented in the market.
Another example is a collection of stories by a young woman named Carolyn Ferrell called Don't Erase Me. Carolyn comes from a mixed background. Her mother is white and her father is black. The stories she wrote were very literary and ambitious and challenging in a particular way. Edward P. Jones is a writer whom I might compare her to. That book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. I just felt there was a need to hear from those kinds of voices—and that Houghton should be supporting writers like that.
Where
does that interest come from for you?
I don't know. Maybe it's
just the idea that in every era there are the voices you haven't heard from
before. In the 1940s and 1950s it was Jewish American writers. The thing that
makes reading interesting is hearing from different voices and different
perspectives, especially in fiction. And the book that probably typifies that—the
most symbolically important of the books I acquired with that mission—was
Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.
How
did she come to your attention?
It
was a combination of things. She had just graduated from the Boston University
writing program. She had a couple of small publications, and she did have an
agent—who's no longer an agent, Cindy Klein—who was with Borchardt. I think
Cindy sent me four or five stories. I pretty much knew right away that she was
a writer I really wanted to publish. But I also knew about her through Peter Ho
Davies, who called to tell me I was going to be seeing this collection and this
was somebody I should really pay attention to. And she was also one of the
writers who was on Katrina Kenison's radar for the Best American Short Stories,
of which I was the in-house editor for many years starting in the eighties. I
met with Jhumpa and talked with her about her writing and her ideas for the
stories and the collection. We were very much on the same wavelength in terms
of my editorial suggestions. And one of the great benefits Houghton could offer
at the time was the opportunity to publish in paperback original.
Let's
talk about that.
Mariner had just
started, and the fact was that it was really hard to sell short story
collections in hardcover. A lot of publishers were shying away from them unless
they came with a novel that you could publish first and then have the stories
trail along afterward. I think the opportunity to publish in paperback original
really made a lot of sense at the time, although when Mariner started it sort
of defied conventional wisdom. A number of publishers had tried that format,
and the books being published in that format got a reputation for having a
particular persona. You know—edgy, downtown.
Like
the books published by Gary Fisketjon's Vintage
Contemporaries.
Exactly. But in its
first year Mariner published a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, who was in her seventies
at the time, called The Blue Flower, which became a phenomenon. I think the fact
that it was published in paperback original made a huge difference because it
enabled people to take a chance. That's the beauty of it. A lot of publishers
had published Fitzgerald's work in hardcover in the States with very little
success. But here was a way to say to readers and bookstores, "You're going to
read these fabulous reviews, and it's twelve dollars, so take a chance." And
the publicity department waged a really aggressive campaign with reviewers,
which I think was important. Because that was the other thing about publishing
in paperback original—they were seen as second-class citizens and not
necessarily to be taken as seriously by reviewers. We made a point of saying,
"No, this is really just a way to reach readers by making the price point more
accessible."
This was also the moment at which booksellers were switching over to computerized inventory so that ordering was happening based on the sales of the writer's previous book. Well, if you can increase sales simply by lowering the price—if you can double or triple or quadruple the sales you would anticipate in hardcover—then you can establish a base from which a writer can grow.
And now when
we're talking to writers and agents, making the argument for paperback
original, one of the books we always point to is Interpreter of Maladies.
Right.
But there
wasn't any resistance at the time?
It was a short
story collection by an unknown writer.
And nobody
knew it would win the Pulitzer Prize.
Right, but it
really began to sell well before it won the prize. You have to remember that
when I bought the book she hadn't published in the New Yorker yet. They bought two stories shortly after I
acquired it, and she won the New Yorker's first fiction prize at the end of that year. When the book came out
it got great reviews—that always helps—and it won the PEN/Hemingway Award. So
by the time she won the Pulitzer there were already something like forty-five
thousand copies in print. Then there were a lot of copies in print. Of course
it's hugely gratifying to find an author like her. I wasn't by any means the
only one to discover her, but I was first.
So the decision about paperback original just made a lot of sense. It made sense to her. Her agent was probably hearing from every publisher, "Well, short story collections are really hard." And we were saying, "No, we know how to do it, and the first printing will not be twenty-five-hundred copies. It's going to be at least fifteen or it doesn't make any sense." So that argument made a lot of sense to her and to her agent. But it was a two-book contract. We had the novel under contract too.
But even
after all the successes, authors and agents still resist paperback original. Do
you think it will ever take over like it has in Europe?
Well, Europe is
certainly way ahead of us. I like to think that Mariner set a precedent that
other publishers followed so that the whole idea of paperback original became much
more appealing. I guess the problem now is that the economics are even more
challenging. The big economic problem with paperback original is that it costs
just as much to publish and promote the book, but the revenues are half—for
everybody. So you have to make sure it's the right book, that you're not
flooding the market. I think it's important for publicity departments to
continue to wage that campaign with reviewers. But I don't think it matters as
much for reviewers anymore. I think there was something about the uniqueness of
the Mariner list when it started—with writers like Penelope Fitzgerald and
James Carroll, who had just won the National Book Award—that gave it a certain
kind of profile. So while the world at large may not have known what a Mariner
book was, booksellers and reviewers did. Now that it's more common, it doesn't
have any particular cachet or imply a particular kind of publishing.
Unfortunately, that means it's just like every other book. So it's complicated.
I don't know where it's going. I think Morgan [Entrekin] did something very
interesting with Man Gone Down, by
upping the production values, with the French flaps and the rough front, to
make the book itself a kind of object. Today the trick is to distinguish these
books. Once the distinction disappears, it's going to become harder for
everybody.
When you
became publisher of the company in 2001, you became Philip Roth's editor.
Philip started
at Houghton with Goodbye, Columbus in
1959, and after being with many other publishers over a long career he came
back to Houghton with Sabbath's Theater, when Joe Kanon was the publisher. Roth always worked with the
publisher. After Joe left, his editor became Wendy Strothman. When Wendy left,
I became his editor. That was when we had just published The Human
Stain. He was definitely at a high point.
And what a privilege to be able to work with him. It was fun because my parents
grew up in Newark and I grew up with Philip Roth in many ways. He was of my
parents' generation, grew up in the same town, went to the same high schools,
and also sort of made that same migration out of Newark and into the suburbs,
to the South Orange and Maplewood area. So it was a world that I had not only
been reading about in Roth's novels for all these years, but also kind of knew
intimately.
I imagine it
must have been incredibly intimidating to suddenly be Roth's editor.
Well, nobody
"edits" Philip Roth. It was a real privilege, I would say, but also a
responsibility. The biggest responsibility was to make sure that he was
published as well as possible—and to be published without a hitch. Philip Roth
is extremely knowledgeable about publishing, and very deliberate, and very
attentive to detail. My job was to make sure all those details fell into place.
The first time you get a Roth novel in manuscript it's very, very exciting. The thing comes to you. It's complete. And you're one of the first people to have a chance to read it. So there are no preconceived ideas about the book, no reviews to sway you one way or another. The first book I read in manuscript was The Plot Against America. And when I read that manuscript, I just knew it was going to be his best-selling book. I just knew it.
Because of
the hook?
Because of the
hook and because I think he just hit a nerve. He hit a nerve and an anxiety in
the American psyche at the right moment. He is so attuned to the American
psyche. And the fact is that he didn't, as he said, write the book to make any
particular political statement about current politics. He really did want to
write about that era. But what he discovered in that alternative history was a
way to touch a nerve that's very raw in our generation.
He is a very private person, and he didn't really talk much about some of his previous books, but we were able to convince him to do some publicity for that book, and to his credit, I think he actually enjoyed doing it. So Katie Couric interviewed him and he was on Terry Gross, who had interviewed him before. That was an opportunity for us. His willingness to talk about those books—he did a little bit for The Human Stain—really made all the difference. People want to hear from him, and his generosity in doing that was tremendous. Somebody said to him, "How come you decided to give interviews about Plot?" He said, "Well, my publisher asked me to do interviews and I said okay." It's much more complicated than that, but I think he was able to talk about the book on his own terms, and what more could any reader want than to hear him talk about a book on his own terms?
When we published American Pastoral, we had Roth come to sales conference. I'm not sure it was that book, but I think so. And this was amazing for the reps. I mean, to have Philip Roth at the sales conference? Edna O'Brien had come in the day before, and if you've ever encountered Edna O'Brien, she's very dramatic and theatrical and just has this regal quality to her, and she swept in and gave a marvelous speech and left. The next day Roth came in. Everyone was so nervous about meeting him. But he strolled into the room, and rather than standing up and giving a speech, he sat down at the table—this open square, the way a sales conference goes—and he talked a little about the book and then asked if people had questions for him. Nobody was going to ask him a personal question about something he didn't want to talk about—he knew he could trust us that way. The [Barnes & Noble] rep raised his hand and said, "I just want to thank you for putting New Jersey on the map." And we all laughed and from there he answered every single question he got about the book, about his writing career.... Someone asked him if he had other people read his manuscripts, and he said there were six people in American who he really trusted to read his work—he doesn't read reviews, that's not important to him—and the opinions of those six people were the only opinions that mattered to him. I just thought he was so thoughtful and gracious and generous in the way he answered and responded to every single question. I think it made such a difference.
Do you have
any insight into this amazing productivity—both in quantity and in quality—late
in life? It's kind of unusual.
I think that a
lot has come together in his writing. There's a particular fury that's always
been a part of his work, but at this time in his life he's been able to focus
it on a large canvas. When he accepted the National Book Foundation's
distinguished medal, he talked about having the great American writers as his
models. By that he meant he didn't necessarily think of himself as a Jewish
writer—that he's not necessarily Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud or the other
writers he's usually grouped with. This is speculation, but at this point in
his life maybe he sees his own writing in an even larger way—more in the
context of the history of American writing—and that's partly where some of
these more recent novels come from.
You also work
with Cynthia Ozick. Tell me about your experience with her.
She's a delight
in every way. Cynthia was at Knopf for many years. She got a new agent, Melanie
Jackson, and I think that she was ready for a change—some writers just need a
boost. She's a writer who I'd been reading for years and who I adore and who I
think both in fiction and nonfiction—especially as an essayist—is without
peer. She writes a better essay than any American writer. She is a public
intellectual, in a way. I don't always agree with her. But she's so deeply
engaged in this cultural conversation—like it or not, in terms of her opinions—and
she cares so deeply about American culture and what's happened to it and where
it's going, and she's so eloquent, that you must read her.
But she's also a great fiction writer in the tradition of Henry James and my favorite nineteenth-century Victorians. When I found out that she was looking to move—I had already brought over Anita Desai, who is also represented by Melanie Jackson—I immediately expressed my interest. Melanie sent me the novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, which was untitled at the time. Actually, it was called The Bear Boy because one of the characters is based on the real life model for Christopher Robin in the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I started reading this novel and I was just blown away. I said to myself, "It's her Middlemarch." And, in fact, the main character is named Dorothea, and there's this whole family drama that takes place in the Bronx. It's George Eliot in the Bronx! When I had my first conversation with Cynthia, I said to her, "It's your Middlemarch," and she knew that I understood where she was coming from. We had the best meeting. It was a love-fest all around.
I just felt that she was so important that she had to be published at the top of the list. She just had to be. Sometimes when you love a writer, and an agent brings you a book, it's just not the right book to move. You really want to be able to make a difference. Boy did I think this was the book where we could publish it in a different way and make a difference. All of her books had a similar look, a kind of "Cynthia Ozick look," and instead of doing that we gave it this bright cover with foil fireflies on the front and a title that was unlike any Cynthia Ozick title you've ever heard before. We got her to meet booksellers, which she had never done. She had never had a chance to go out and meet booksellers. Lots of people had seen her on panels and in that context, but they had not been able to sit down at dinner with her and just talk. She is just the most delightful dinner companion you can imagine. She truly is so generous and so deeply interested in what people have to say.
You also edit Tim O'Brien. Was he
always a Houghton author?
Tim is one of a number of authors
who left Houghton and came back. I can't take credit for all of them by any
means, but a lot of them stayed under my direction. Roth came back, obviously.
Bob Stone came back. Tim O'Brien came back. He had been brought to Houghton by
Sam Lawrence, the legendary Sam Lawrence. After Sam died, John Sterling became
his editor. About the time that Houghton published In the Lake of the Woods, John went off to start up Broadway Books. Tim went
with John. As sad as it was, I love to see that. I love to see an author be
really loyal to an editor. But he just never felt the same about the house. And
at a certain point he came back and talked to our CEO, Nader Darehshori at the
time, and said he wanted to come back to Houghton Mifflin. I met with him and
Wendy Strothman, who was the publisher at the time. We had this great lunch,
and he said to me, "I want to come back and I want you to be my editor." How
gratifying is that? That's pretty great.
We just have a truly wonderful relationship. I think writing this last novel, July, July, was very hard for him. He's gone through so many changes in his life—he moved to Texas and got married and has two children. But all this time, and especially when we were working on this last novel, which evolved from a collection of short stories into a novel, we've just had such a wonderful back and forth, and I've also been able to get a sense of his own ambition and his own frustration with being boxed in as a writer who's expected to produce a certain work, always about Vietnam. The Things They Carried will always be the book he's known for. It just will. But, much to his credit, he really wanted to do more than that, and always has. He has always sort of tested that, and I admire that tremendously. His writing is so complex and so edgy, in a way, that I think people could relate to it in war stories but it's more unexpected when it comes to other kinds of stories. That's been a real tension in his work for a long time. But he's working on a new book now, I'm happy to say.
I'm curious
about your transition from editor in chief to publisher. First of all, what is
the job of the editor in chief in your mind?
I can only talk about
myself—I think it's different at different houses—but in my mind it's really
to guide the editorial group and to encourage editors to grow in their own
ways. I became editor in chief at a time when the editorial ranks were really
depleted. There had been a lot of change at Houghton, after having stability
for literally generations. We were bought by this French water processing
company, Vivendi, which had aspirations to take over the world. They bought us
and sold us very quickly, so there was a lot of turmoil.
When Wendy Strothman became publisher, her background had been at a university press and then at Beacon Press. She had a strong affinity for books on social change and felt that Houghton could be doing more of that, which we did, with some success, but not with the kind of breadth that I felt the list really needed. But she was able to help me focus the list in a way to return it to its real strengths—rather than trying to be all publishers to all people and trying to compete with much larger houses with much bigger resources in all of the same categories. My feeling, and I had her support, was to really focus the list on areas that would sell over time, and to focus on narrative nonfiction in areas like science and history and biography that Houghton had a strong background in. Actually, Houghton was less known for science—we had been known for natural history—but I felt that you had to grow organically, and the natural way to grow out from natural history was to publish more science. So I wanted to hire a science editor. I wanted to find a history editor. My role was to find specialists who could really speak to authors in their own language. That's one way of being convincing when you have more limited resources: to find the most brilliant editors, with a deep knowledge of a subject area and experience editing those kinds of books, and to say to an agent and an author, "Let's get these two together. Let's have a conversation."
Eamon Dolan is a great example. There's someone who now, at a young age, has become a very legendary editor. Eamon was known for a certain kind of narrative book. But Houghton published sports books, and what did Eamon bring us? He brought us the best of sports. He brought Buzz Bissinger and Three Nights in August. I remember when he brought that book to the acquisitions committee, which includes sales, marketing, and all of that. The sales people sort of shook their heads. "Oh, it's regional." This was before Friday Night Lights became a movie and a TV show and popular in that way. Eamon said he didn't think it was regional. I didn't think so either. So sometimes you defy the internal wisdom. Eamon also found Eric Schlosser and Fast Food Nation. Again, there were some in-house doubters who said, "It's a magazine article. Is this a book that's going to sell over time? Isn't it all about the current moment?" But Eamon was convinced, and he convinced others, and he was right. So that's what you do as a publisher. You find the best talent and you let them shine.
Talk
me through how you decide how much to pay for a first novel.
It's partly enthusiasm
in the house. It's the uniqueness of the voice. It's passion. But unfortunately
it's also "Who does this remind you of who has sold really well?" It's all of
those things, and there's no one way to decide. When Jonathan Safran Foer's
novel came to us, Eric Chinski was the editor at the time. He got that
manuscript around to people so quickly, and so many readers in-house instantly
knew that this was something very special. That was an investment unlike any we
had made in a first novel before. I can tell you—I was the editor in chief at
the time and Wendy Strothman was the publisher—that she was nervous about it.
But she also saw what was going on in-house. She saw how many different readers
were responding to it, and not just in editorial, but in sub-rights, in
publicity, in marketing, in sales. And not everybody agreed. There were
definitely naysayers, which is the best way to go about it. You want people to
love it or hate it—mediocrity is the thing that you should pass up. But the
people who adored it were so passionate that she was willing to take a very big
flyer, and it was certainly worth it. It was a great bet in the end. It was
also something that allowed us to push a little bit on the kinds of fiction
that Houghton did, not to have a reputation for doing only one kind of thing in
fiction.
One of the nice things about the era in which we were publishing writers like Jonathan, and building writers like Richard Dawkins, is that it was very much a group effort. As a publisher, you want to encourage your editors to work really closely with marketing and publicity, and to bring the author in as well. One of the things that we've all learned in publishing is that the authors know their audiences very well. We want to have them participate as part of the conversation.
That seems to
have become increasingly important over the last decades. How did that evolve,
from your perspective?
It's happened in
different ways. First, it happened with the book tour. Today the book tour has
become less and less productive for some authors—so now we have the book tour plus media. But I think publishers also have found that
there are special interest groups for particular books that their authors are
aware of, and that that kind of micro-marketing—whether it's regional
marketing or a medical group or something else—can be really effective. I'm
thinking about Jacki Lyden's memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, which was a great success for us. This was a very
compelling memoir about her mother's manic-depression. Since it was published,
Jacki has really been on the circuit. She talks to support groups,
psychological associations, groups that work with families who have
manic-depression in their families. She was aware of some of that in advance,
so we were able to think of different ways to approach the promotion of the
same book.
More and more, publishers are looking for nonfiction ways of talking about fiction. You have to find new ways to interest people. You have to get them to pick up the book. If one of the ways to do that is to find an extra-literary element to talk about, and if the author can do some of that talking and not just the publisher, it makes a big difference.
You've never
worked in New York. Was that a conscious decision?
No. I made my
home here, and I was very lucky because I started building a list at a moment
when it was still not difficult to do that—there was still enough publishing
in Boston that it wasn't an outpost. Little, Brown was still here in addition
to Beacon and all the university presses. There was a real publishing community
that doesn't exist as much anymore.
Still, I
would imagine there are advantages to being in Boston now.
Well, that's
what we all say. Everybody has always said that the great advantage of being in
Boston is that you're not so much in the center of the hype. It's a little bit
easier to have some perspective. And to some extent it's true. If you're not
always talking to the same people in the same small publishing community, I
think you don't get quite as caught up in the machinery. Houghton really had to
think about distinguishing itself from the rest of the publishing community in
order to attract the best authors. So, one way you do that is to say that it
has this long, distinguished tradition with a vision that's outside the New
York publishing community. But I think the main advantage is that it's a very
sane life. It's a wonderful place to live. And there's a kind of intellectual
energy because of all the universities, a kind of cultural energy around you
that's really fabulous.
Which is a
nice segue to talking about poetry.
My great love.
Yeah?
Yes, it is.
Were you
always editing poetry?
I started
editing poetry pretty early on at Houghton. We used to have a fellowship, a
poetry contest, and as soon as I came on I knew I wanted to be one of the
judges for that. Peter Davison was the poetry editor at the time. Houghton had
this long history of publishing poetry, but one way of bringing on new writers
in addition to Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall and the Houghton stable of
writers was to find new talent through this annual contest. I became involved
in judging it, and one of the early winners—maybe even the first year I was at
Houghton—was Andrew Hudgins for a collection called After the Lost War, which is about the Civil War. I just loved having a
chance to be engaged with those writers, so I copyedited that book. I
copyedited Tom Lux and Rodney Jones and some of the other writers who were there
at the time.
Peter was a great supporter of poetry and a poet himself, which maintained a certain profile for the list. But from where I sat we were really just publishing one poet at a time rather than having an actual poetry program. So at the point when I could make a difference, when I became the editorial director and then the editor in chief and the publisher, I wanted to expand the list, to bring on some different kinds of poets, and also to try to engage the rest of the house more. It's so hard for a trade house to publish poetry if it's just one book at a time. But if you can go to a reviewer with a whole campaign for the house's poets, three or four on a list, and you can advertise them together, you can get more attention and spread the costs over several books. I think they just needing some nurturing and attention and a sense that marketing and publicity were behind them.
What other
things did you do?
I hired Michael
Collier, who is the head of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. First I brought
Michael to Houghton as a poet, and then the busier I got and the more I had
need for somebody else to manage the program as it evolved and developed, I
felt that Michael would be just the right person for that. Poetry is such a
small world and there are so many egos involved that you need someone to manage
it who is just so open-minded and generous. As the head of Bread Loaf, he's
used to dealing with a wide array of writers and personalities. He also has
impeccable taste. Another nice thing about having Michael come on is that he
was able to really edit the manuscripts—I didn't have time to do that anymore—and
to keep the poets in the loop about other book that were coming out and to
foster a sense of community among the Houghton poets.
One of the other ways in which I worked with Michael was to take on the publication of the winners of the Bakeless Prize, which is awarded by Bread Loaf annually. Houghton would publish the winners in paperback original in Mariner. One of the earliest winners was Spencer Reece for his collection The Clerk's Tale—the judge was Louise Glück—and this was just a fabulous collection. This is another example of a way in which you can talk about poetry in the same way you can talk about fiction, with a nonfiction hook. The Clerk's Tale was an obvious allusion to Chaucer, but Spencer himself had a wonderful story. He was a clerk at Brooks Brothers in Florida. That's what he did for a living. After he won the prize, Michael was able to send the poems to Alice Quinn, and she loved them and published the entire title poem on the back page of the New Yorker. I think that was unprecedented. So here was a way to launch a poet with a prize-winning collection and to talk about his work in ways that could attract popular attention. It was always about quality, but it was also about good publishing—finding ways to grow the poetry list and bring attention to it.
As
you've read first novels and story collections over the years, have you noticed
any common mistakes that beginning authors tend to make? I'd like to get a
sense of how you evaluate first fiction.
The one thing that every
aspiring novelist and story writer should know is that it's really about personal
taste. So much depends on taste. People always talk about the pros and cons of
creative writing programs. It's a little clichéd now to say that there's an
identifiable "writing program style," but there kind of is. It can be
solipsistic, it can be dialogue based. I do think that some of the work coming
out of those programs is being published too early. I find that the best
writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of
contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.
There are a couple of things I see in first fiction that always tell me something is not for me. The first is usually in fiction by young women. There will be a young female protagonist with a vaguely artistic temperament who goes to New York to do something. At some point, usually about page ten, she looks in the mirror and describes herself. And you see this device in many wonderful novels—this is the way the author's going to let the reader know what the narrator or main character looks like—but now you just see it too much. So I usually get to that on page ten and say, "Not interested."
The other is that you're only allowed one dream per novel. Because it's too easy. It's sort of like looking in the mirror—you get to know something about the main character's fears and inhibitions or whatever because it all came out in a dream. If there's more than one dream, I think, "Oh, wow, that's just too easy."
What
about the opposite? What are you always looking for in a new writer?
I tend to like
character-driven fiction by writers who are sort of pushing their own ambition
and their own vision. Someone like Peter Ho Davies, who has this marvelous
background. He can write about his Welsh heritage or his Malaysian heritage—and
sometimes the two meet—but there's always a strong sense of history. In his
story collection The Ugliest House in the World, there's a central
story called "A Union," which is about the Welsh mining strikes. But it was
also about a marriage. And I just loved the way these characters were set in
time—which is not to say that I like historical fiction, because I don't
especially—but I really do like to know that the author has a sense of
history, so there's a context and a richness, a textural kind of context.
Peter's stories take you all over the world, but they also are very grounded in
his sensibility.
I also like when a writer can write all different kinds of characters. Back in the nineties we published a story collection called The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byers. He was a Seattle-based writer who now lives in Michigan. And he could write from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old immigrant living in Seattle as easily as a twelve-year-old girl or a forty-five-year-old man or an elderly woman. That flexibility, the ability to inhabit a character so fully, to make them totally believable on the page, is something I really look for.
Tell me about
a particularly memorable editing experience.
Peter Ho Davies
comes to mind. The greatest thing for an editor is when you read a manuscript,
you give some comments, and then the author goes off and does something
completely different from what you expected, but it's brilliant and wonderful.
With some of Peter's stories, especially that one I was just describing, I gave
him some comments, and the story came back about three times as long. So there
was this kind of ebullient response from him—a kind of magnanimous sense of possibility. You could see him sort of stretching toward a novel
in that experience.
How many
times do you read a manuscript you're editing?
Quite a few.
When I first read a manuscript, I feel like I have to read it all the way
through without putting my pencil down, and then you make notes and go back
through and make more specific comments. Then you get a revision and you have
to do the same thing all over again. So I probably read every manuscript two or
three times. Sometimes, if you've been through enough drafts of a book, you get
confused. You forget if something was in this draft or a previous draft, you
lose track of what's been dropped. When I was editing Jonathan's second book, Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close, there was this
line in the beginning where Oskar was talking about his grandmother—they
needed to get somewhere—and she says, in this perfect Jewish grandmother kind
of way, something about how she believes in God but she does not believe in taxis.
In a subsequent version of the manuscript that line got dropped, and it stuck
in my mind, and when I realized it wasn't there, I thought, "I loved that line.
Put it back in!" So he did, just for me, I think.
I find that the best writers, the most ambitious writers, are the greatest readers, and not just of contemporary fiction, but of classic fiction.
page_5:
The last
person I interviewed was lamenting that editors aren't allowed to go to sales
conference anymore to communicate their enthusiasm in person. As a publisher,
what do you think of that?
Well, there are
economic factors, and I know that every house does things differently. But I
think it's so important that every editor, no matter how much access you have
physically to the sales reps or to anybody else, thinks like a publisher. By
that I mean that every single book needs support, whether it's getting the
right blurbs or getting in touch with a particular rep and saying, "Take a look
at this one."
One of the things that I did throughout my career was to make a point of visiting every territory, getting out of the house and going around with the reps to meet with booksellers, to the degree that they were able to give me some time. Not so much to sell, more to just make personal contact and talk about publishing in general, to talk about the obstacles, to say, "Well, if you loved this, you're going to love that." I had a wonderful experience at Tattered Cover one time. It was in the morning, before the store opened, and it was just me and Margaret Maupin and the staff. I brought a bunch of books, and I said, "Here are the stories behind these books." Here's why an editor acquired something, how it came about. Getting to tell those behind-the-books stories, and having that personal contact, not only with the buyer but with the clerks on the floor, the people who talk to each other all day, was just something I enjoyed. I learned so much from talking to booksellers. It was a complete education. Every editor should spend time talking to booksellers.
Yet that
doesn't happen much.
No, and it's too
bad.I think people get stuck in their
offices. I really do. I think it's so great to get out of the office.
Why don't
publishers make them get out of the office?
People have time
constraints. Booksellers have time constraints. I also think that so much is
just too managed, that publishers may be a little bit too cautious about
sending people out. I don't know. That's my sense of it, that, "Oh, who knows
what's going to happen in that exchange." And the sales force has to be on
board for it too. The sales rep doesn't want the editor walking in and stepping
all over his territory, literally. It's a delicate thing to do, but I think it
really helps everybody if it can happen, if there's more of that contact.
Speaking of
bookselling, I'm sure you've spent a lot of time thinking about returns. Could
the system ever change, without destroying booksellers and their ability to
take a chance on something?
I think it's
changing itself. Both the wholesalers and the retailers are taking fewer books
up front. They just are. That's a reality of the business: It's becoming more
of a wait-and-see business and fewer risks are being taken. That's just
something that publishers are going to have to figure out how to manage. It's
managing inventory. It's making sure that you can ride a wave when it starts to
build—when a book is taking off—but before it crests. There needs to be
really good communication between the booksellers and the reps. Part of the
problem is that people are overstretched. There are just not enough people in
marketing and publicity to go around, and the reps have so many books in their
bags. What I hate to see is for the small books not to get a chance, because
every publisher has had the experience of the book they least expected—maybe somebody did, but not the whole house—just selling and
selling and making the year. Those little surprises are so important, and you
want to make room for them. You want to allow them to happen. Maybe they take
more work than they used to. A lot of it is just luck and...you know, Oprah.
The
computerized systems that bookstores use to track sales is also something
you've seen evolve.
Yes, exactly.
This whole conversation is really about that. It's about how few risks
booksellers can take, are willing to take, and how much they're ordering up
front. But I'm probably naively optimistic about this. People go into
bookselling because they love books, and they still love finding new things.
They love making discoveries. And the sales reps can be really wonderful in
helping to do that. I think it's fabulous that they have the reps' picks at BEA—again,
as long as it's not entirely orchestrated. I don't like to see everything sort
of programmed in advance, where what the reps get to say is only what has been
agreed upon in-house because these are the books that must sell. I think every rep should have the opportunity to
say, "Here's this little one that I'm hunchy about."
Of the
changes that you've seen in the last thirty years, what would you say is the
single most significant?
It's hard to
say. It's really the confluence of so many different things. I mean, it's the
rise of the chains and Internet selling.... It's got to be the computer in every
way that you can imagine. The way it now manages inventory and selling. But I
also think there are some things that have been consistently wonderful, that
some things have not changed.
Like what?
Editors still
have the opportunity to be creative, to test their own talent, to try to find
new things and not always to do the same thing. That's been true all along. The
other thing that hasn't changed is that in every era you can imagine, in my
thirty years, someone has always been saying that publishing is in crisis. When
I was cleaning out my files, I came across this article by Fran Kiernan, who
was an editor at Ticknor and Fields—an imprint that was relaunched and folded
in my time at Houghton Mifflin. The article was called "The Great Publishing
Crash of 1989." I looked at that and said to myself, "This industry loves a crisis. What would we do without a crisis? We must
have one to thrive."
Maybe it's worse now than it ever was, but everybody thinks their own time is worse than it ever was. I really believe that. Publishing is in trouble as much as every industry is in trouble. The economy may be worse than it was in 1989, but I'm not so certain. And for all of the change, there will always be blockbusters, there will always be bodice-rippers, there will always be literary fiction. There just will.
If
you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the publishing industry,
what would it be?
I would say the emphasis
on high advances. There's so much risk—huge risk—that comes with huge
advances, and so much distortion of the value of a particular work based on how
much is paid. I think that if there were more opportunity for editors to take
some risks at a lower level, that there would be more opportunity to continue
to publish smaller books because you wouldn't see disappointment based on how
high the advance was. I think that drives so many other things. When a book
doesn't do as well as expected, it sometimes makes the relationship between the
author and the editor complicated. Of course everybody wants a million dollars,
but I don't necessarily think that's always the best thing.
How did we get to the current situation? Was it the crazy
paperback auctions in the old days?
Beats me. I really don't know. I don't think that agents are
evil, but I do think that that's certainly been a very big factor—having
agents with reputations for selling books for a lot of money. You know,
whenever you get a Brockman project, for example, it's going to be expensive.
Tell
writers one thing about agents that they don't know but should.
That they can ask a lot
of questions; that they should ask a lot of questions. I think that writers, especially
first-time writers, sometimes feel as though, "Well, whatever the agent says.
Of course the agent knows best." But in the same way that I think authors
should be having conversations and asking a lot of questions of editors, they
should ask potential agents, "Okay, whom do you represent? Which houses do you
work with? Which editors do you like? How do you go about deciding where you're
going to send something?" I'm just astonished again and again when I talk to
writers at writing programs that they don't know they can ask those questions.
So
you think it's healthy for aspiring writers to take an active interest in
understanding the publishing industry?
I do. Well, it can be.
What you want, all around, is for expectations to match, and I guess it can be
kind of depressing for an aspiring writer to find out too much about the
industry, because it's a tough business. But I think being more educated is
always better than being less educated. It shouldn't mean that an author thinks
they know better than their editor or agent, but just to know something about
the way things work. I think it's important.
How
are you feeling about what you've just been through at Houghton?
I'm very much looking
forward to starting my new job. It's a huge change, of course,
because I was at the same place for all those years. But that's so unusual in
this industry. I was very fortunate to be able to build a personal list and to
create an editorial group that could publish so many exciting books, and that
is a wonderful legacy to leave behind. Now I can turn some of that energy back
toward my own list, which I had not been able to do for quite a while. When
you're a publisher, you just can't. I acquired fewer and fewer books the bigger
and bigger my job got. I'm not expecting to start acquiring like crazy, but I
am excited to be able to focus my energies on individual writers and how best
to support them over time. Just to publish any one book particularly well is an
exciting challenge. Having known Nan all these years makes it very comfortable.
I think her reputation for excellence and quality and sticking with writers
over the long term makes it a really nice fit. I was very deliberate in making
a decision to go to a place where I felt that my authors would be comfortable
and I wouldn't need to do any convincing. It just made perfect sense—for my
writers, for the agents. And it's a lot less stressful not to have to worry
about all of the finances and the hiring and the firing, and especially not to
be at a place that's in turmoil.
Are
there any books—not books you've published—that you find yourself going back
to and reading again and again?
Middlemarch. Moby-Dick.
Really?
How many times have you read Moby-Dick?
Oh, many times—four,
five, maybe six times. I spent a lot of time on it when I was in graduate
school. And, yes, I do read the whaling chapters. I love nineteenth-century
fiction, and that's what I go back to.
But recently I've been rereading a lot of Faulkner and Salinger.
It's interesting how your perspective changes on a lot of this reading when
you're not studying it like you were in school. Reading Salinger as an adult,
especially as an adult with children, is a very different experience. What I
found was that there was a certain way in which he got those voices, in Catcher
in the Rye for example, he got that voice
so perfectly. I heard my own son's voice. At the beginning of the book, when
Holden is talking about his older brother, the first thing he says about his
brother, if I'm remembering right, is something about how his brother has this
incredibly cool car. The first thing he says about his brother is about his
car! I thought, "Yeah, that's what my kid would say too, and in just that tone
of voice." There was something completely timeless about that. So no matter how
dated some of the other stuff gets, especially the sort of pop psychology that
Salinger fell victim to, he got those voices really right.
What keeps driving you?
I've always felt that I needed to have a goal
and a mission, and at Houghton it was helping to change the shape of the list—diversify
the fiction, support poetry—and then as a publisher to bring in editors who
could really find the best stuff and be creative about publishing it. I still
feel really ambitious for particular writers. I would love to have the opportunity
to publish the fourth, fifth, sixth book of a writer like Peter Ho Davies, for
instance, or Michael Byers, or Monique Truong, and to continue to work with
writers like Cynthia Ozick and Anita Desai. I think it's important to publish
them well.
I also think—this will sound incredibly snobby—that this culture is sort of deeply debased. I don't think of myself as the one and only guardian of intelligent conversation in this country, but you do want to keep it going on some level. Which is not to say that everything I do is high-minded, not by any means, but there's got to be a place for it. There just does. So it would be great if I can contribute to that.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Pat Strachan
In an industry known for its larger-than-life personalities, Pat Strachan, a senior editor at Little, Brown, is something of a revelation. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, and educated at Duke University and the Radcliffe Publishing Program, Strachan moved to New York City in 1971 and spent the first seventeen years of her career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), starting as an assistant and rising to vice president and associate publisher by editing top-shelf writers such as Joseph Brodsky, Lydia Davis, John McPhee, and Marilynne Robinson. Over almost four decades in the business, she has edited some of our most celebrated poets—Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Philip Larkin, Czeslaw Milosz, and Grace Paley, to name a few—and an equally impressive roster of prose writers, including Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody, Edna O’Brien, Jim Shepard, Tom Wolfe, and Daniel Woodrell. In 1982, she was awarded the PEN/Roger Klein Award for Editing. Yet despite these accomplishments, she remains a gentle and unassuming presence—an echo of Max Perkins in the era of Judith Regan.
When Strachan leads me into her office, the first thing I notice is that her large, L-shaped desk is neat and uncluttered. She explains that many of her manuscripts are at home, where she does her reading and editing. The office is decorated with dozens of framed photographs, drawings, and other mementos from a life in books: here a black-and-white photo, taken in the 1970s, of Derek Walcott at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop; there a shot of Padgett Powell and his beloved pit bull, Spode. On the wall to my right is a poem by Seamus Heaney titled “A Paean for Pat,” which he presented to her when she resigned from FSG in 1988 to become a fiction editor at the New Yorker. In 1992, after four years at the magazine, Strachan returned to book publishing, holding senior-level positions at Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Little, Brown in 2002.
Shortly before this interview went to press, the literary world was shocked by news that Tom Wolfe, whose books Strachan edited at FSG, had left his publisher of forty-two years and given his next book to Little, Brown for an amount of money that anonymous sources have placed at between six million and seven million dollars. Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, speculated in her weekly column that “by choosing Pat Strachan, wherever she is, Wolfe is declaring that sometimes it’s the editor, even more than the house, that counts.” I dropped Strachan a line to ask if she thought that was the case. True to form, she ducked the opportunity to take any personal credit, replying, “I can barely believe my great good fortune in being able to work with Tom Wolfe again. His new novel will be both an enormous amount of fun and an important reckoning with our times, as readers know to expect of Tom.”
In this interview, Strachan talks about her years at the New Yorker, the art of editing literary fiction, and what authors should consider when trying to land a publisher.
Maybe you can start by telling me a little bit about your background.
I was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis. Marianne Moore lived there when she was young, with her brother and mother. They lived with their uncle at the parsonage at the First Presbyterian Church. I only learned that later, when Mr. Giroux went to her funeral and brought back the program. Basically it was a postwar suburb. I went to public schools all the way through and then Duke University. At Duke, I found a flyer advertising the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course. It was run by a woman named Mrs. Diggory Venn, which I think was a pseudonym. So fate took me to that course, and that’s where I met my husband, who was also taking the course. There were seven men out of seventy-seven students, and he was one of them. We met and married a year later, when I was twenty-four. That’s the nutshell story.
Did you know you wanted to go into publishing when you were growing up?
Oh, no. Books came into the house via an aunt. My father died when I was small—five—and this aunt from afar sent us books all the time for some reason. She would send us the Caldecott and Newbery award winners. So I read Thurber, for instance. My mother was a reader but she was more a periodical reader—the New Yorker was always in the house. But she preferred to read to learn something. A third grade teacher, Mrs. Hunter, somehow spotted me as a reader and encouraged me to read as much as possible and kept feeding me books. You know, this was third grade, so it was Little House in the Big Woods. She was extremely influential. In fact, I went back to St. Louis last April to see Kathryn Davis at Washington U. Kathryn asked me what I wanted to do most when I was back, and I said I’d like to see my third grade teacher. So we found her and went to see her. She turned one hundred in July. And she’s still reading and she’s still bright as anything. So, that, I think, indicates how much I felt I owed her.
The second teacher was a high school English teacher, Miss Andrews, who was a fanatic about literature and especially Moby-Dick. There was a harpoon over her desk. She was very passionate, and she encouraged me to work with the literary magazine as an editor—really as an editor more than as a writer. I was a timid writer, and we didn’t really do creative writing in high school. A few people did obviously or there wouldn’t have been a magazine. She pushed me. She pushed me to become involved. And the goal for women in those days when you went to college was to become an elementary school teacher if you were a reader, or if you were an action person to become a nurse. And Duke had a nursing school and an elementary education division. So you majored in English if you wanted to teach elementary school. I knew fairly quickly that I didn’t want to do that.
One day I went to a lecture by what we used to call a woman lawyer with my roommate. I walked out knowing I didn’t want to become a lawyer, but that’s when I saw the flyer for the publishing course. It was a eureka moment. So I went to Boston. It was a six-week course, and after it was over, my husband—my future husband—got a job at Anchor Books with Anne Freedgood, a wonderful, wonderful editor. So he moved to New York and I stayed in Boston and worked in the Radcliffe publicity department for a year. And then it was another fateful moment when my boss at Radcliffe—she knew I wasn’t very suitable for that job—told me Mr. Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux had an opening. She reviewed books for the Boston Globe and knew what was happening in publishing. So I basically just flew down there fast.
Had you been to New York before?
To visit Bill but not to live. So I flew down, got that job, and moved to New York. That was 1971. And it was very lucky.
Did you like New York right away?
No.
It was a pretty scary time to be here, wasn’t it?
It was extremely dangerous. We lived in a group house on the Upper West Side on a block that is now quite nice, West Eighty-fifth Street, but was then deemed the most dangerous block in New York City. And yet we got used to it. We got used to it fairly quickly, and then Bill and I got our own apartment. And, of course, the wonderful thing about those days was that you could get an apartment for practically nothing. We made nothing and the apartment cost practically nothing, so living was a lot easier. Union Square, where I worked, was very rough. No one would walk across it except Roger Straus—in his ascot. He had no fear whatsoever. And now, of course, it’s beautiful. It looks like an English garden now.
Tell me about your first impressions of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
I felt as if I were in heaven, really. Mr. Giroux (whom I call Bob to his face but still call Mr. Giroux in public, as I first addressed him) was very supportive and kind and kept giving me more things to do. Mr. Straus was a character—very brilliant, very outspoken, very self-confident, and very personable. He walked around the office twice a day and said hello in one way or another to everybody.
Michael di Capua, who was mainly doing children’s books, was a huge support. He always pushed me to try to do more, to try to acquire—to do this—and gave me a great deal of help and confidence. So I was very well taken care of. I remained an editorial assistant for five years, which is sort of unusual, but I just didn’t see why I would leave. At that point I was taking care of some of Mr. Giroux’s authors, some of the poets, and then when Tom Stewart left, I was promoted. Tom Stewart was taking care of—I say taking care of rather than acquiring—Tom Wolfe and John McPhee at the time, and I inherited them. So really, am I not the luckiest person in the world? Now the trick was to start acquiring.
What were some of the first books you acquired?
A book about the Cajuns. I liked Cajun music and decided that there should be a book on the Cajuns and their story should be told. I found a writer at an alternative paper in New Orleans—his name was William Faulkner Rushton—and he said yes, he would do the book. We had a gumbo party at my apartment when it was published. The book was in print for about twenty-five years, so it was a good book.
Basically you had ideas and Roger [Straus] would throw you things, like, “Here’s a great book on papier-mâché, baby.” And you would edit a book on papier-mâché. I edited a book by Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura Huxley, which was a self-help book about getting closer to your true feelings.
[Laughter.] Those were the days.
But that’s how you prove yourself as a worker. You will do anything and you will get these books into shape. It was fun, really. Then Larry Heinemann’s book Close Quarters landed on my desk—the first Vietnam War novel I had read. Ellen Levine sent it to me, probably as a single submission. I just adored it and was able to buy it for a very low price. This was maybe 1977. The book was basically about a grunt’s tour of duty—very vivid language—and his next novel, Paco’s Story, which I also edited, won the National Book Award. I believe that was the first serious book I acquired. The second also came from Ellen Levine, whom I owe a great debt, which was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
That was the second book you acquired?
Yes, the second serious one. It was possibly a single submission as well, for a modest price, and there was no question that it was a great book. I read it, and Mr. Giroux read it, and we signed it up. But, you see, things were a lot easier in those days. There wasn’t the same competition. You had time to read it, consider it, and you could buy it if you liked it.
At the time, did you have any sense of what Housekeeping would become?
I thought it would last. It’s not just the writing, but the feeling. It’s a rendition of loss without heaviness, and of course loss has a great deal to do with all of our lives. It was just too gorgeous and affecting not to last.
Was there any real editing to be done?
Let’s put it this way: Marilynne and I sat at my dining room table and did some back-and-forthing. And I would say in 99 percent of the instances of questioning, Marilynne’s opinion stood. The book is really almost the same as it was when it came in to me. I have notes and papers and some record of our back-and-forthing that wasn’t done at the dining room table, which is really wonderful. She’s so articulate in explaining why she had done what she had done, why she had used that word rather than another word. She’s just brilliant.
Was the title always Housekeeping?
It was always Housekeeping and the title was questioned. The questioning was put to rest because that was the title Marilynne had always had while she was writing the book. So Housekeeping stayed. And the jacket process was basically, “Marilynne, what would you like to have on your jacket?” She said, “I’d like the bridge across the lake,” which was roughly Sandpoint. So we commissioned someone to paint the lake and the bridge. It was an oil painting. Someone asked me recently, “Where is that painting?” Well, I don’t know.
It’s probably in the art director’s apartment.
You know, maybe not. Maybe it was tossed. Who knows? In any case, that was the second book. And then there was a cluster around then, late seventies, early eighties. Jamaica Kincaid. I read one little story called “Girl” in the New Yorker, found out who the agent was, made an offer, and signed up the book. Edna O’Brien was also around that time. Of course she wasn’t a first novelist, but she’d switched publishers one too many times and was sort of at sea. We put together her collected stories and got Philip Roth to write the introduction and got a front page TBR [Times Book Review review]. And then there were Ian Frazier and Lydia Davis and Padgett Powell. So you had this base of authors and they would write other books, obviously, and it was a wonderful base to have.
Tell me about working with John McPhee.
John had been published at Farrar, Straus for several years before I got there. I can’t tell you who first acquired him. I think it was Hal Vursell. And then Henry Robbins and then Tom Stewart. I took him over with the book about general practitioners. John is a perfectionist, and he had very strong opinions about things, but always in a very nice way. He didn’t want his picture on his book jackets, though I think we finally broke him down on that. He didn’t want any pictures in the books—he was doing it with words and didn’t want to compromise that. He was very particular about his jackets. If we sold reprint rights, for instance Coming Into the Country, he said, “I just want to make sure that the paperback publisher doesn’t put an Eskimo with a ruff on the cover.” I said, “Just talk to them about it. Just say, ‘There’s one thing I really don’t want: an Eskimo with a ruff.’ ” And then the cover came. You guessed it. I can’t remember if it got changed or not.
I got very sick in 1994 and had to go through the whole treatment and surgery and everything. And John called me—at that point I was unemployed, Harcourt had let go of almost everybody in New York—and asked if I would edit, together with David Remnick, the second John McPhee Reader. He was basically giving me a job when I was in a bad spell, both professionally and with my health. So he’s a really good guy.
And now his daughters are writing. He had four daughters, and his wife had four daughters, so there were eight girls. And when my daughter was born I remember he said, “Congratulations—you have fourteen years before she’s fourteen.” So he’s also really funny.
Coming Into the Country was his first best-seller. That was very exciting. That’s probably the peak of excitement on a certain scale—when a company has published twelve books and the thirteenth becomes a best-seller. And then all the books thereafter sell better.
When did you meet Tom Wolfe?
He was working with Tom Stewart, who left the house, and I stepped in starting with The Right Stuff, which was so great. He had done a serialization of The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone but then revised it completely. Tom is a reviser. So the deadline is coming up and the book is expected and he’s revising up to the last minute. My job with Tom, mainly, was to make sure that nothing had slipped up in the revision process, that there weren’t any inadvertent repetitions or timeline problems. The wonderful thing is that he revised in different colors. He must have used some kind of soft colored pencils because the lines were thick—it wasn’t this stingy little pencil line—and there would be several layers on the manuscript of green, blue, red. It was beautiful to see. The copyeditors loved it too. It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but nobody seemed to mind because he was, and is to this day, I’m sure, extremely courteous with everybody and so apologetic that these further changes had come forth. He was a pleasure to work with. After The Right Stuff there was From Bauhaus to Our House and then Bonfire of the Vanities.
That must have been a big book for you. Or was The Right Stuff the bigger book?
Well, The Bonfire ended up selling more copies. They were both big books. I guess The Right Stuff must have been a best-seller as well. I forgot about that. I remember when Bonfire was out and I was sitting at my desk typing something and young Roger, the sales director, came in and kissed me on the forehead. I said, “What’s that all about?” He said, “You’re number one.” And I didn’t know what he was talking about. Bonfire had hit number one on the best-seller list, but I didn’t viscerally relate to that.
Why?
Because it had been a long time since the editing and I was already on to something else. Of course it was wonderful for Tom and wonderful for everyone involved, but my work was pretty much done. I had nothing to do with it becoming number one.
That’s interesting because today editors are so involved in the promotion and the talking and the chatter, getting everyone fired up. Has that been a change in the space of your career?
That is a bit of a change. I mean, I always did a lot of hobnobbing on my authors’ behalf and that never let up. We were not quiet and genteel at FSG. We were very fervent and committed. But my basic job had been done, in that particular case, and now it was up to someone else to make it a best-seller. And Tom didn’t need my help. He didn’t need quotes. He was already a well-known writer. But we hobnobbed in different ways. It was less within the house than it was outside the house. It was like each editor was his or her own brand. The decision on what to publish was pretty much up to you, and therefore you had to justify your decision. And the responsibility was all on your head for every book you signed up. Certainly fiscal responsibility reigned at a small, private house where, you know, the bank was at our door a lot. So those profit-and-loss statements—whatever they called them then, before you signed up a book—were important. You saw what the last book did and sort of tailored your advance to that. We were very careful with money.
Roger was notoriously stingy.
[Laughs] He was careful with money. John McPhee actually called him McStraus, and he called him that to his face, and we all laughed. But John never had an agent. John just took the deal every time and eventually we had the best-seller with Coming Into the Country.
How did you actually learn to edit? Was there a mentor?
The mentor, initially, was Mr. Giroux. I would Xerox his manuscripts after he edited them. He took the month of August off every year and would edit three or four books during that time. But the closest teacher was a woman named Carmen Gomezplata, who was our chief copyeditor. We were the children, and we and Carmen were in and out of each other’s offices all the time. We would ask her questions and as we grew into our roles we continued to ask her questions. She really taught us to see those copyedited manuscripts in great detail. In those days, you went over them and then sent them to the author. You really learned. That was a valuable experience. That’s the technicalities of editing. The editing itself—I mean, not the punctuation and if you put the possessive here or there, but the instinctive editing—is hard to explain. That has to do with your own ear and your own sense of the language. Every editor is different, and the editing is generally subjective and instinctive, which is why everything is pretty much put in a question form. That’s what I call the slow reading, rather than editing—slow, slow, slow reading. You have to have a very long attention span as you know and just not get up for a long time to keep the continuity. And if you are a sedentary person anyway, which I am, it’s a marvelous, marvelous job.
Did you know that you liked it right away?
I did. It’s because the writers were so wonderful. One after the other would come into the office—most of them did, anyway—and they were so interesting and so fun to be with. It’s not as if the editing of their books was the penance part, but the association was such a joy, and I knew I wanted to be among that group of people who were writing and publishing books.
You were also editing a fair number of poets. How did you come to meet Seamus Heaney?
I met him through his books. Seamus had been distributed by Oxford University Press—his Faber and Faber editions—and Faber had for a while wanted Farrar, Straus to publish him. I started publishing him with Field Work, which was maybe 1978. And that was really, really a wonderful opportunity. He’s so kind, and so funny. This is what I find about a lot of poets: Before the kind, the funny. Why are poets so funny? Joseph Brodsky: hilarious. Derek Walcott: hilarious. Mark Strand—they’re all funny. Even Gjertrud Schnackenberg is funny. Grace Schulman’s funny. They don’t have as much at stake as far as becoming financial successes. There is a limited readership, even with someone like Seamus. They are jealous about prizes and jockey in that sort of way, but basically they’re pretty satisfied with what they’ve chosen to do in life. It’s a choice that was almost made for them. It’s who they are.
I have to confess that the idea of editing poetry is mysterious to me. What does it amount to?
It shouldn’t be mysterious. Because once again it’s just slow reading. If there’s a dangler in there, the poet doesn’t want that dangler. “No, I didn’t mean for that to refer to that.” I think it’s basically just catching mistakes. If there’s something you really, really think should be clear—it’s meant to be clear but it’s not, it’s coming forth as obscure—then you ask. And if they say no, it was supposed to be at a slant, that’s fine. But you just ask. Editing poetry to me was asking the dumb question again and again and again, and having absolutely no pride about that. So that the poet knows that everything there is what she wanted to say. It’s asking a lot of dumb questions. And there is work to be done with poetry, work that’s very concrete, just like any other piece of writing. And you would find that too if you sat down with a manuscript of poems. All the mystery would go away.
You also edit the novelist Daniel Woodrell.
Daniel is new to me. I can credit my husband, Bill, for Daniel. Bill was editor in chief at Holt when Dan was published there by Marian Wood. He really liked his work and met him and liked him very much. After his seventh or eighth book, Daniel decided that he wanted to try a new publisher, which is very common and often legitimate. Just to see if another sales force might do better. It had nothing to do with the editor at all. So a partial of Winter’s Bone was submitted to Little, Brown. And the partial was so strong that we bought the partial and an unwritten novel. And with fiction, that’s very unusual. Obviously he’d written books in the past, but we hadn’t worked with him in the past. It turned out to be wonderful. We’ve been able to at least double, if not triple, his sales. We were able to do the same thing for Rosemary Mahoney with her travel memoir Down the Nile.
Tell me about that. What do you do for a writer who’s maybe midcareer, whose career may have stalled a little bit in terms of sales?
It’s tough. Getting new sorts of support for the writer that he or she hadn’t had before is sometimes helpful. For Winter’s Bone, Edna O’Brien gave a comment. I know her, but she’d never read Dan before and would not have praised the book if she didn’t really love it. So to have a blurb from Edna O’Brien, that sort of points to something about the language in the book, whereas people may have been thinking, “Oh, does he just write country noir? Or are these crime novels? Or are they mysteries?” I’m also very proud to have gotten Tom McGuane, who I don’t know and who doesn’t know Dan, to read it and write a comment about it. That in turn helps the reviewers to think about the writer again. And we got a ton of reviews, and big ones, and really nice ones, for this book. And reviews do sell books at a certain level. So it’s a very gradual sort of chipping away process and nothing is really guaranteed. You can’t make someone give a blurb. I’ve always regretted that—that you can’t write the blurb yourself and sign it.
You also had a very close relationship with Laurie Colwin, the late novelist and food writer.
Our children started it, the first day at City & Country School, on Thirteenth Street. Our children were barely two years old. She needed time to write and I needed for my child to have some action other than the babysitter. We sort of circled each other. I knew she was a writer, she knew I was an editor. And we were very standoffish at first. This is all about the children. This is not about business. And then it was clear we were just made for each other. As mothers. As friends. She did teach me a lot, as a friend, about what the writer’s life is like, how challenging it is, even for such a popular writer. How Spartan it can be. Of course she countered that by making things nice, and often it was through food. Food was very important. Halloween was very big in her and Juris’s part of Chelsea, and so the Halloween meal would be served at their apartment. You never had a drink before dinner at Laurie’s. You just sat down and had dinner and got right to it. And then you talked and talked and talked. She was a very dear friend. A lot of my writers were friends. Laurie wasn’t my author, so that was a different situation. I was constantly amazed that she was interested in anything I had to say. Because she was so interesting, and I’m just an editor, a boring person who works at a company.
Take me back to the early part of your career and talk about the atmosphere of the industry in those days.
Well, I must say that there were a lot of parties. There were those George Plimpton parties. It was to celebrate writers. That was the purpose of the parties. Publishers would give parties at their houses and invite total strangers. George Plimpton was one of those people and Roger Straus was one of those people, too. Roger actually had a standard poodle named Schwartz who was sent downstairs at eleven o’clock to sort of herd people out. Eleven o’clock was the time you were supposed to leave if it was a dinner party. The parties may not have been very useful, but you met people. You met friends of your writers who might want to publish with you. You met people who might want to support your writers. That sort of networking was very easy to do because of publication parties. If a party was at the National Arts Club, every editor at the house was invited, as well as all the publicity people. It wasn’t very focused, frankly. Everybody came: the young people, the older people, everybody. It wasn’t just for the press.
This was all over the industry?
I think it was fairly industry-wide that publication parties were expected. I’m not saying it’s a huge loss that we don’t have as many publishing parties as we used to, but the kids had a lot of fun—the younger people, I shouldn’t say kids—because you got a lot of free food and you met a lot of people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. It was a benefit, it was definitely a benefit. And people did have fun outside the office. Michael di Capua was just a workaholic in the office. You couldn’t get him to look up or stop yelling about something that went wrong. But outside the office, we would costume up and maybe go to Studio 54. And you didn’t talk about work outside the office. You may have talked about books, but you didn’t talk about the office. It was a different time. This was the ’70s and ’80s.
In those days, who were you were looking up to in the industry? The way that someone my age would look up to Galassi or whoever.
Cork Smith—Corlies Smith—everyone called him Cork. He was an editor at Viking for many years. He was just an addictive reader. I remember him saying to me once, “I know it’s bad, but sometimes I finish the manuscript when I know I’m not going to buy it.” Because he just couldn’t stop reading! He always wanted to know the end of the story. He was very laconic and he looked like…what did Cork look like? He was extremely handsome. As Elisabeth Sifton always said, “Well, just stand in line, because there are a lot of people in line and he’s been married to Sheila for many, many years.” He looked like Marlon Brando, only tall and thin. That’s pretty good looking. And everybody really admired him.
Alan Williams was another one. Alan was at Viking as well. He had a piece recently, I think in the Yale Review or somewhere, about his career—he died a few years ago—saying, “All right, here’s what my liberal arts education did for me. I learned how to talk about anything for five minutes and to talk about nothing for more than five.” And that’s the definition of a trade book editor. You’re constantly becoming an expert in every area. You can do fiction and nonfiction, which we all do, and there’s this continuing education aspect to it. Bob Gottlieb was always highly admired for being interested in everything—interested in the way the ad looked, interested in every aspect of the process. He had very catholic, broad taste—he could publish a thriller or anything else. Peter Mayer at Penguin was also extremely well-respected and liked.
What was it about Peter that you admired?
His commitment. That publishing was his life, is still his life. And that’s really the only way you can do it. You know, you don’t go home and switch on the TV every night. You’re always thinking about how you might push this book, how you might help the book, how this world event might help. There’s an article in the paper about Polish workers in London, and I think, “How can I attach that to Rose Tremain’s book?” And of course you can’t. But it becomes habitual that you are always thinking about the publishing process and the books that you’re working on. It’s that way-of-life mentality of some publishers. Roger Straus. Bob Gottlieb. Cork Smith, who was more an editor than a publisher. Alan. Peter Mayer. There must be others I’m leaving out, certainly Roger Straus and Bob Giroux. You know, as Edmund Wilson always said, “Literature is life,” and in some ways if you’re in publishing, publishing is life. And it gives back. You’re constantly learning.
Do you have any great Roger Straus stories that you can tell?
He was extremely personable. He loved people. He was a liberal at heart in the way that he trusted people. He trusted other people’s opinions, not just his own. And I think in a way, like Alfred Knopf, who probably wasn’t as friendly, he depended on advice, and that was a way to build a great house. Whether it was the CIA people he had out there in Italy finding Alberto Moravia, or later it was Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky advising, he trusted other people. Not that he couldn’t judge for himself. But why not get the people who write for a living and read for a living, the total-immersion people, to tell you who’s best of these twenty Italian writers? And he was self-confident enough to do that, to take advice, and Knopf did the same thing. That’s how Roger built up his European list. And he trusted his editors. Now, of course, if you didn’t get the good reviews, he would stop trusting you. So that’s why your standards became very high—because you didn’t want to disappoint him. And a bad review was not acceptable. He wouldn’t say anything, but you knew he was disappointed, and that was a great motivation to sign up the best things you could find and not take it lightly.
Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?
Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.
I have a few little bugaboos. I learned one of them at the New Yorker. It’s called the “stopper.” A stopper is usually a graphic or upsetting image that causes the reader to stop and read in a daze over the next pages. The reader has a visceral reaction. And you don’t want to do that and follow it up with important stuff. You don’t want to do that too fast, you don’t want to do it too soon—especially in a story. It’s more than prudery. There are certain rules about how a reader is actually reacting, that I have in my own mind at least. But the stopper was a New Yorker term, and I thought it was really very wise.
Who was editing the New Yorker when you were there?
It was Bob Gottlieb, lots of fun, and the deputy was Chip McGrath, marvelous, and Roger Angell was the head of the fiction department, which he probably still is. Alice Quinn was there doing poetry and some fiction. Linda Asher and Dan Menaker, lots of fun, plus assistants and about three people who did nothing but read.
Why did they call you? This was after Bonfire?
Yes. It was right after Bonfire, which was my first best-seller after Coming Into the Country and my last best-seller. I knew John McPhee very well, and they were looking for a fiction editor and John, I know, recommended me to Roger. And I knew Chip fairly well. They may have thought I might have been unhappy because I was passed over for the editor in chief job at Farrar, Straus, which was offered to Jonathan Galassi, who’s done such a beautiful job ever since. Because of the length of time I had been there, they may have thought my nose was out of joint, which it really wasn’t. But the opportunity presented itself and it was lovely. The magazine was more limited in some ways, but it’s more expansive in that you had an audience for each story of possibly eight-hundred-thousand readers. Now I think it’s up to nine-hundred-and-something thousand. The idea of distributing a piece of fiction that you love to so many people is alluring. For selfish reasons, it’s nice because the piece of writing you’re working on is very short. There’s no interior design to be fooled with. There’s no jacket. There are no reviews, no subrights. Being a fiction editor at a magazine is a very distinct task, as opposed to books. Surely there are people who can’t image the sluggishness of our process—“How can you have the patience to work with books?”—but that was what I was used to. So that’s why I left after four years, very tearfully, because I loved the people and I loved the magazine but I knew I wanted to be back with books.
How did it work at the New Yorker in terms of deciding what got published?
The way it worked then, which was 1988 to 1992, was that when you found a story that you liked you would write a little report on your manual typewriter—maybe we had electric by then—fold it over, and pass it on to the next reader. All the editors read all the stories, and the report would circulate with the story. The next editor would read the story, open up the piece of paper, and add his or her paragraph. It would go all the way to the top that way, to Chip McGrath and eventually Bob Gottlieb, and Bob would make the final decision. We rarely talked about the story until the process was over, which must have come from years of experience, from knowing that talking about fiction can often lead you into an emotional tug-of-war, that the responses to fiction are very often psychological, and the discussions could become very heated and the opinions just wildly divergent, even within the fiction department at the New Yorker. So it was best not to talk about the stories until it was over. Then you could say, “What did you think about that?” when the stakes weren’t quite so high and there was either a yes or no already. I thought it was a very elegant way to do things, and they may not have even been aware of it.
What was it like to work for Bob Gottlieb?
I wish I had seen more of him. He was very busy because he ran the whole magazine. He was absolutely ebullient and excited about just about everything and very outspoken when you eventually got to speak to him. But I felt that I was working more for Chip and Roger and those people because Bob had the responsibility of the whole magazine. He did say, when we moved offices—we moved from 28 West Forty-fourth Street to offices overlooking Bryant Park—I remember him saying, “We are going to have individual radiators and individual air conditioners, just as we did in the old office, because I don’t want to do climate control issues.” He was so wise. I don’t want to do climate control issues. That’s usually what the discussion is in every office—whether it’s too cold or too hot.
Getting back to books, I wonder if you would walk us through your day a bit to give us a sense of how an editor spends her time.
We don’t read or edit in the office. If someone asks you to read something really quickly for them, you might stop and read, but you want the leisurely hours to read. We have meetings: editorial meetings, acquisitions meetings, marketing meetings, focus meetings, meetings about the jackets, meetings about the titles. There are lots of meetings and often there’s preparation for those meetings—we don’t just walk in cold. An agent or two may inquire about one thing or another: distribution of the book internationally, some question about the catalogue. Usually there are several agent inquiries a day. They’re trying to keep on top of what’s happening with their clients’ books.
I correspond with writers, obviously. I do miss the phone contact, but e-mail has become so much more efficient. If they’re not home—and they’re often not home—the e-mail is still there. So that’s a lot of the day. We always look at Publishers Lunch for too long. Rejection letters. Rejections are things that you try to compartmentalize and not think about too much. It’s probably the least pleasant part of the job. It takes a lot of tact to do it without hurting anybody’s feelings. Doing it so that the author could possibly see the letter and feel encouraged rather than discouraged is time-consuming. It’s anonymous, unsung work. Everybody in the company knows what you signed up, but they don’t know what you didn’t sign up. There are also lunches. Lunches are the best. That’s with the writers or the agents. Lunches are always interesting to me, and I feel really privileged that I get lunch. You get your bearings back when you inhale a little oxygen and actually talk to people. I don’t think lunch is a universal love, but it’s certainly one of mine, and it’s very useful.
Tell me about your most memorable lunch.
Maybe it was my first lunch with Tom Wolfe. Of course, I took the subway. I was headed to the Four Seasons. And the subway got stuck. Tom, the most courtly of men, was waiting at the Four Seasons for forty-five minutes, close to an hour, and he didn’t leave. And when I finally arrived it was memorable for its tension released by his gallantry. Another was with Joseph Brodsky, when he learned at lunch that I didn’t know much about classical music. He was really horrified. After lunch, he took me to a record store and bought me a basic set: Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Purcell’s FuneralMusic for Queen Mary, Brahams’s Third Symphony. A few basics to get me started. And I’ve been listening ever since. My daughter is addicted, has to go to sleep by it. So I guess that was a life-changing lunch in terms of my cultivation level. The horror on his face! I loved a lunch with Jamaica Kincaid. I think it was my introductory lunch with Jamaica. We were at the Gotham on Twelfth Street, and we both ordered rosé, and the waiter brought red, and she looked up and said in her beautiful Antiguan accent, “You must think we look stupid!” That was all she said. And the red was exchanged for rosé.
Book editors serve all kinds of different masters: the authors, your bosses, the agents. I wonder how you think about those allegiances and responsibilities.
An editor always wants to make their writers happy. That is a priority. There’s had to be some adjustment and adaptation to the systems as they work now. For instance, the attitude toward the book jacket is more sophisticated than it once was. Today we wouldn’t necessarily get someone to paint an oil of a certain scene for a jacket. It’s become more sophisticated. So the editor’s role, in part, is to translate for the writer the logic behind certain decisions on the house’s part. There’s more gentle persuasion that needs to take place for jackets, titles. But that’s about it. The rest is between the editor and the writer.
How many new books do you try to buy in a year?
As many as I love, really, and it varies from year to year. I might buy four one year and eleven the next. Sometimes they come in clumps. The books you like come all at once. And that can be awkward sometimes. You’ve just signed one up, why should you be signing up another one? Well, it may be six months before another one comes along. So the acquisitions rhythm can be jerky.
Take us behind the scenes at an editorial meeting. I think a lot of writers would be very interested to know what happens.
There are two levels of meetings. First there’s an editorial meeting, where the editors and the editorial assistants basically air their views on significant manuscripts that have crossed their desk in the last week. Often it’s to find out if your colleagues might have a particular interest in, say, Rufus Wainwright, because you know of this Rufus Wainwright book that’s going around. And if there’s significant interest then you might chase it more readily than you would otherwise. So that’s sort of determining subject interest, topic interest. Even now and then with fiction writers, you’ll get a manuscript and want to know if other people have read the writer and what their opinion was. It’s sort of just airing things so there’s a forum for all the material that’s coming in every week. Every now and then, someone will mention a significant turnaway—a reluctant or significant rejection—that sort of thing. “I passed on this even though it’s going elsewhere…” It’s like our live newsletter—what’s been happening at your desk. And it’s not so much a decision-making meeting. Every now and then our editor-in-chief, Geoff [Shandler], will say, “I wouldn’t pursue it. I don’t think it’s right for us.” But not too often. Everybody likes to talk. We talk a lot. It’s a little bit of togetherness, and then we retreat back to our lonely desks.
The acquisition meeting is a decision-making meeting, and we prepare fairly rigorously for it. We write our opinion of the book. We do a description of the book. We give some background on both sales and critical reception for the author’s previous books. We make a profit and loss projection—always an estimate, but something to go by. Every acquisition meeting varies from one company to the next as far as I can tell, but generally a decision is made in the meeting whether or not we’re going to make an offer for the book, and about how high we would be allowed to go to buy the book. So it can go either way. It can be yes or no. And you have to be very manly about it. If I’m unable to sign up a book I want, that’s when I have to be my most manly. And everybody has the same experience. It’s not always a book the company can do, or feel it can do well. But the main thing, your main desire, if you love a book that isn’t signed up by your house, is that it be signed up at some other house. And there are very, very few titles that do get lost. So while it’s a disappointment, it’s not tragic, generally, if your book is turned away. If that’s the worst sort of trauma we have to suffer, it’s not so bad.
So are these decisions made, on some level, by consensus?
On some level. Different voices speak up. Editors. Publicity people. Salespeople. And everybody’s just sort of gently giving their opinion. Then our publisher has to make the final judgment. But it’s often the result of what’s gone on before.
Do you feel a sense of competition with editors at other houses?
That’s a good question. I can’t say that I do. If I admire an editor, and I can’t do a book and they can, I have to honestly say I’m happy for the book, because the writer landed with a good editor. So I don’t really feel competitive. There are some moments when I feel envious, but I don’t feel active competition.
Say you get a debut novel or a debut collection of stories. What is it about something that gets your attention, compared to all the other ones that don’t?
Well, take this collection of stories by Peter Orner, Esther Stories. It was sent by Rob Preskill, an agent in San Francisco who I’d never done any business with and didn’t even know was in business. The stories came out of the blue. I started reading them, and I just found them enormously emotionally affecting. They’re very spare, and the writing is fantastic but not fancy. I just found them very serious—I mean, sometimes they’re funny—but the intent behind them is very serious. They’re basically about families. I was able to find another reader, Eric Chinski, who also loved them, went completely berserk over them, and I was able to buy them at Houghton Mifflin. We put them into an original paperback and lots of wonderful things happened for this book. I published his second book last year. Esther Stories was a very pure acquisition. I’d say that’s about as pure as you can get. Never heard of the agent, no stories published in major magazines.
If you’re talking about a more obvious way of having a book of stories come to your attention, there’s Uwem Akpan. This is a Nigerian writer who is also a Jesuit priest and who got his MFA from the University of Michigan in 2006. He’s written a collection of stories called Say You’re One of Them. It’s about children in various African countries who are in crisis because of conflicts they can’t control. I read the one story, “An Ex-Mas Feast,” in the New Yorker. I read many New Yorker stories, but this one really bowled me over, in, again, a visceral way. And I couldn’t stop reading once I started. So we took action fast. Michael Pietsch, our publisher, felt the same way about the story. I wrote to Uwem. We waited. We waited until the second story came out. Then he got an agent. We waited at auction. We bought the book. It was as if it was fated—it was going to happen. But a lot of publishers wanted a story that was so powerful, and a collection that also had the New Yorker imprimatur.
On the other hand, what is the most common problem with first books?
They can be too controlled. I find a lot of first novels too careful and too polite. I mean, let’s face it, Housekeeping is a wild book. I don’t think Marilynne had ever published anything before, even short pieces. She was doing what came from her mind and her experience. Larry Heinemann’s book is another example, a graphic war novel, but just gorgeous. Sometimes others can be a little tight and a little fearful of being messy.
Do you think MFA programs contribute to that problem?
I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to counter it in some way. I think they try to coach the students to…Look, any time you do something for the first time, you’re more fearful than you are the second time. So the feelings often don’t come forth right away.
But in your opinion are MFAs a good thing for a writer to do or a bad thing?
I think it doesn’t hurt if you have the time. If only to meet other writers and to meet writers with more experience. To learn to talk about writing and the different ways people approach it. I think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it damages writers. I don’t think you can teach anyone how to write, but it can certainly teach people what to expect from themselves, and give them a communal feeling—that this isn’t easy—and give them some endurance power. I don’t think there is a plethora of the programs. I’ve been to several and I always find the writers so alive.
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I read somewhere that you can tell if you’re interested in a novel within the first two pages. Is that true?
Some part of my brain really responds to an interesting sentence. Over two pages, if there isn’t an interesting sentence or thought or description, or if there isn’t something vivid, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop reading, because that would be wrong—there are certainly worthwhile books that don’t impress you with the language in the first two pages—but I pretty much know if I’m interested or not, even though I’ll read to the end in many cases anyway. Some books are more dependent on story than other books, and it can really depend on the outcome. You read the entire book because the outcome might be smashing—the cumulative power of what comes before. But certainly, stylistically, I know pretty quickly whether or not it’s a book I’m going to love. I would say two pages is an exaggeration. Probably ten pages.
How important is it to you that your books sell well?
It’s important to me because I want people to read them. Because when they do, and I get reactions, it makes me feel good, as if I did something valuable. And it’s most important to me for the writer, because the writer wants readers. It’s usually not about the money at all. They want as many readers as they can get. It’s hard to project what’s going to sell and what isn’t, so I just assume that what I buy is going to sell sufficiently to not create a debt at the house. That’s my job. That’s my professional job—not to lose money—and I try very hard not to lose money. And having a great big book to offset some of the books that sell less well would be wonderful. I think I have some lurking in the future.
Agents have assumed a new primacy for writers in the last several decades. How do you feel about that?
I’m very glad to have the agents’ help. The agents know much more about publishing than the writers do, obviously. Some of them have worked at publishing houses and can explain the logic behind the publisher’s decisions. They know what to ask for and what not to ask for. I think agents have become more important to writers because there is not as much continuity in publishing now. So if a writer is jumping houses, if the houses are making the writer jump, then you need one stable person in your life to put everything together. So I suppose that’s the single biggest reason that that shift in loyalty to agents took place. The agent’s job is also a lot more complicated now because of the multiple submissions and auctions and the complexity of selling a book that is desired by many publishers. I don’t want to keep harking back to the days of single submissions, but it was pretty relaxing. If you sent a manuscript to Bob Giroux, he would be really irritated if you sent it to anyone else while he was reading it. Wasn’t his time worth more than that? It was a simplified process.
Are there any younger agents who you’re finding yourself doing business with or liking or admiring lately?
Julie Barer, who has her own agency, is wonderful—very supportive of her authors and enthusiastic about her projects. More for nonfiction, Brettne Bloom at Kneerim & Williams has great energy and intelligence, as does Julie. There are lots of fine young agents, but for fiction and nonfiction, those are two good suggestions.
From your perspective, what do the best agents do for their authors?
They write a very good letter introducing the writer and the book under consideration. If previous books have been published, they include full reviews with the submission. They try to match an editor to a writer—temperamentally, aesthetically—as much as they try to match a writer to a house. Then, once the process begins, they know what to push for and what not to, how to choose their battles. And that’s a very delicate dance. Because often the writer would like a little more pushing than should or could be done, and the agent has to have a good sense of that.
How involved or not involved do you want authors to be in the marketing and promotion of their work? Is it healthy for an author to be involved?
I think that, in the end, the older writers learn that it’s better to be writing their next books. Of course, everybody needs a break, but it can be distressing to become involved. I remember when I left Houghton Mifflin, one of my poets, Glyn Maxwell, said, “Well, Pat, it’s just publishing.” And I thought, “What a poetic thing to say.” Publishing is my entire life and yet he says, “It’s just publishing.” So, in other words: “I’m a writer. I’ll publish my poetry somewhere. We’ll still be friends.” I thought it was very healthy to see it that way—there is writing and then there is publishing. And they’re two quite different processes. I think involvement in the publishing process can be frustrating, and if a writer can resist, I would resist, frankly.
Put yourself in the shoes of an unpublished writer. Are there any intangible things she can do to put herself on the radar of an agent or a publisher, besides the obvious things like publishing in magazines?
Get to know other writers. Not so much to learn how to write, but to meet people and learn something about the professional way to do things, so you won’t be sending out e-mails from the blue. Knowing writers will convince other writers to read your work, and possibly give a comment on your work, which might be helpful in selling it. My advice would be to not be alone.
What are the important things for an author to look for in an editor and a publishing house?
I would look at the list and look at the catalogues online, which you can do now. I suppose there’s some way to look at which editors do which books by looking at the acknowledgments. I think it’s important to determine that the minds might get along, to learn the kinds of books the editor edits and the publisher publishes—every publisher has a wide variety, but in the field where you’re writing—to see that you’d be in the sort of company you’d like to be in. And if you can’t get that, then accept an offer anyway. Michael di Capua used to say, “Small children won’t die from this,” when the jacket came out the wrong color or something. It is important—the publication of the book and how it’s done—but the book is still there, and there are only so many different ways you can publish it. So I wouldn’t—as a young writer—get too hung up on who the publisher is.
Obviously the industry has changed a lot over the years, from small shops like FSG to very large corporate companies. Having experienced both, what do you think about what’s happened to the industry?
I don’t feel discouraged. I feel that any good manuscript I read is going to be published, and that’s almost true. I don’t feel that there are good books languishing any more than there used to be. And if that’s the case, I’m fine with it. If it wasn’t the case, I would be less fine with the changes. And the changes are that the business is now considered a conventional business. Or, rather, that conventional rules are applied to what started as a cottage-industry business. It’s very difficult to twist publishing into a conventional business. And yet you have to try. Because how else are you going to learn what works? And how are you going to report to your superiors? You have to accept that there are going to be different ways of doing things now—less off-the-cuff, less impulsive. Yet that off-the-cuff impulsiveness is there every time you read a manuscript. And you’re still making those same sorts of impassioned decisions that you ever were. So maybe the final decision about whether to publish or not to publish is more complicated and complex, and maybe there are more obstacles in the editor’s way. But if you don’t publish it, somebody else will. So it’s not a tragedy. It’s not tragic in the larger sense that we’re now conglomerated rather than small. I really don’t think so. I think big versus small is sometimes difficult for the younger people who are learning, because with small you pretty much go to every meeting—production meetings and advertising meetings—and you pretty much learn the whole business. You know why the book is priced this way and why it’s that format instead of this format because everybody goes to all the meetings. That’s a wonderful apprenticeship to have. In a larger company, it can get a little more Balkanized by virtue of necessity. So I think it takes a little while longer for young people to learn every aspect of the business.
What’s the biggest problem or challenge in the publishing industry today?
This is fairly broad, but I would say bringing readers to books. Let me try to personalize that a little. My husband is from a small town in northern Minnesota, and we used to go out there frequently. I once brought John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, which is a book about conservation. My in-laws mainly read the newspaper, and nature guides, and cookbooks—very little serious literature. But when we came back the next year, the book was in tatters. It had been passed all around the town. There were five thousand people in the town, and it didn’t have a book store. The people got their books from the Book-of-the-Month Club. So they were all reading Portnoy’s Complaint, but they didn’t know about John McPhee. And that, to me, was a very touching experience. It showed that if they had known about the book, it would have been a best-seller. There were so many people who were interested in these issues. There are so many people who would love so many books if they could be led to them in some way. I don’t have a solution. But I think there’s so little exposure to the choice, and the choice has to be more apparent.
Recently, at a dinner party, there was a sort of roundtable question of “What did you read over August vacation?” And the people who weren’t in the book world really felt they had discovered a writer who was extremely well known—not necessarily on the best-seller list, but well known. They thought they were introducing this book to all of us, when anyone in publishing would know the writer and, you know, know the book itself, know where it was on BookScan, know where it was in the Barnes & Noble display area. But people who are outside the business have other things to do. They’re not keeping track of what books are coming out. I don’t have a solution. Maybe Jason Epstein, who’s very smart, has a solution. The shrinkage of the book review media is unfortunate. That was certainly a way to bring news of books to people. I hope that isn’t dropping out of the national conversation.
Are you discouraged about the state of books in this country?
No, I’m not. In some ways, it’s thinking selfishly, because you would like your writers and your books to be read by as many people as possible. And, of course, it’s dreaming. But I certainly don’t think books are going to go away. The object itself it too essential. The idea of having your privacy is too wonderful. A book signals to other people to stay away. I’m in my private zone right now. I think that’s why so many women who are over-stressed read.
How do you feel about the decline of independent booksellers and publishers? What effect has it had?
I think the decline of independent bookstores has had some effect—I can’t measure it, I don’t know the facts—but some effect on the mid-list book. You might not get that surprise success that comes from bookstore recommendations as often. But other systems have taken over, like Book Sense, where they get the word out on a larger level, and maybe that sort of evens things out. We’ve lost bookstores, but they’re louder than they used to be. There are all sorts of areas in publishing where—it’s very easy, as a person who’s been in it for a long time, to be critical—but there are a lot of areas that are improving and much more professional than they used to be. I don’t find the reduction of independent bookstores to be a disaster by any means. It’s fun to get a Discover selection at Barnes & Noble and know they can be very effective too. And they have lots of ways of doing that.
The independent publisher situation? That’s just a big one. I try not to look at the big picture too much because there’s so much to look at in the small picture: your desk, what’s on it; your author, what their concerns are. The work doesn’t feel any different, big or small. The work seems to me to be pretty close to what it was when I started in publishing. Certainly there is more presentation or performance today in one way or another—more written and oral presentation—but aside from that, the work is just the way it always was. I think, as an editor, you’re a little under the radar of whether you’re large or small, and I think as you go up the ladder it probably makes a much bigger difference.
What do you think about the future of books? Do you think this digital revolution or print-on-demand revolution will happen?
I’m not very well educated in this area. I don’t think that the hard-copy book is ever going to disappear. It’s just not. Maybe it’s unthinkable to me, and that’s why I don’t think it. But there’s something about the aesthetic value of the book, the thingness of it. People like things. They like beautiful objects.
But they like their iPods, too. There’s all this talk about an iPod for books that’s going to come along for this generation of people who aren’t buying newspapers anymore, who don’t buy CDs or records because they download everything. You don’t think it will happen?
I don’t. I think there are a lot of uses for digital publishing, in almost a marketing way. “Here’s a sample chapter.” But when it comes down to reading the entire book, I really think people are going to stick with the object. Reference books are a different matter. You’re just trying to look something up and you’re not spending hours and hours with that little screen.
You mentioned your husband, Bill, who’s also an accomplished editor. What’s it like to be married to another editor?
It’s absolutely marvelous, like a marriage made in heaven. Because we do the same thing. Who’s the woman…? Diana Athill. She wrote a book about being an editor called Stet. She said that she partly became an editor because she was an idle person. She was attracted to idleness. And of course you do have to stay in one spot. And my husband and I don’t mind, we don’t find it boring, one reading in one room and one reading in the next and meeting at the end of the night. That’s the way we’ve always done it. I think for those couples who want to go to the movies or something it would be very boring. But for us it’s wonderful. We can also talk about the business without boring our friends. And he’s much more well educated than I am about the actual business of publishing. He was a math major before he was an English major, so he knows a lot about that. And he’ll explain the digital things to me over and over, which I’ll tell you I do not quite understand. We’ve never competed for a book, which is interesting. But he’s more oriented toward topical nonfiction books and mine are a little softer. And we’ve always been discreet about what’s going on at the other person’s company, and that’s just the way it is, so it’s not a problem.
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Good reviews that make the writer happy. Because that’s the end of the process if best-sellerdom isn’t a prospect. That’s the most rewarding thing. But my daughter’s in medical school, and she said, “You know, when I tell my friends what you do, they say, ‘She reads for a living?’” It’s like a dream to them. And it is a dream. It’s a dream to read for a living. Of course, we do all of our reading in our free time, but still, that’s what we’d be doing anyway. I mean, there are some picnics missed on Sundays, and there are some sacrifices made, so you’d better really love to read, love to not move around too much. And if that’s the case, you’re all right.
What’s the most disappointing aspect of your job?
I think worse than poor sales is no reviews. I don’t normally have that situation. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen just two reviews. And that’s very, very disappointing. And, again, it’s mainly in empathizing with the writer. That he or she would spend several years on a book that was maybe too complicated for the review community to figure out what to do with—a brilliant book, but a book that wasn’t a natural for review. And it can happen.
Looking back on your career, are there any crucial turning points?
It’s just all such good fortune. I had such good fortune. It feels like it was handed to me. Starting at Farrar, Straus was very good fortune and definitely defined my future career. Because I was taught by people who knew it was an important profession, I had an apprenticeship that sort of guided me. And you never really give up that first impression. So I think the turning point was the starting point in some ways. I think the critical reception of the first novels I did established trust in my mentors, so I had some freedom. The success of the first novels was important. Unfortunately, I have never had a turning point that involved sales. Tom Wolfe was at the house anyway. Tom was a bestselling author—that didn’t have anything to do with me. And, frankly, I haven’t had that turning point, which would have made me a little bit more helpful to the houses I’ve worked for—something I acquired that really sold in huge numbers right away. So my career isn’t based on sales. Although Marilynne and Jamaica and Ian Frazier have gone on to great success without me. And Padgett Powell’s Edisto is still in print.
Do you have any regrets or disappointments?
Disappointments, I think—there is Alice Munro. I had found her Lives of Girls and Women at a street vendor, wrapped in plastic, and I liked the title and bought the book for fifty cents. This was probably the late ’70s. Then I found out she had just recently acquired an agent here, Ginger Barber—Virginia Barber, a marvelous woman. Ginger said, “Well, there’s a manuscript.” It was called “The Rose and Flo Stories,” though the title ultimately became The Beggar Maid. The Rose and Flo stories really, really affected me, and not just because my grandmother’s Canadian and I spent some time in Canada as a child. I gave them to Mr. Giroux. He agreed. Alice came into the office, a fairly young woman at that point, and we talked and I made an offer. I think Mr. Giroux had a few suggestions; I may have had a few. I think we offered sixty-five hundred dollars for the stories, which was a very nice advance at that time. And then, suddenly, Norton bids seventy-five hundred dollars. And Roger said, “Sorry, baby, sixty-five’s as far as we can go.” And that was fine, that was a lot of money for a book of stories. Then it gets a little fuzzy because the editor left Norton and the book was moved to Knopf, and Ann Close has been her editor ever since. I love Ann, I’m very happy for her, but that was something I found on the street! And I really felt I had discovered something in an unlikely and virtuous way.
Any memorable mistakes?
The mistake I remember most for some reason was reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin and, not really being a reader of travel literature, just being wowed by it, knocked out by it. It was on submission from Liz Calder at Jonathan Cape. But Roger said, “What do you think, baby? Do you think it will sell?” And I said, “I certainly don’t.” That was a mistake.
Why didn’t you think it would sell?
Remote place. Fancy stylistically. But I would have liked to have worked with him before he died. That book got brilliant reviews and sold very well, but it’s not like it sold a ton of copies. It didn’t make anybody’s career.
What do you still want to accomplish?
It just seems like a continuum to me. It really seems like it will never end because good stuff keeps coming up. I don’t remember if I already mentioned this vision I had of my old age when I was younger. This vision of [editor] Anne Freedgood, in her worn-out chair in the country. You’d be asked to dinner and see her through the window and there she was with the manuscripts, reading all day until it was time to slap the fish on the frying pan. And I thought, “Never, never, never.” Well, now I find that a very happy prospect—that it will still be my work in one capacity or another. To go along and find stuff. It’s very exciting to find stuff. Although it’s sort of dangerous to always want to find. It should be just as important to want to revive. To want to help writers that you admire find their readers is probably more virtuous than to discover, which gives you a lot of credit. I think reviewers like to discover, editors like to discover. Everybody likes to discover. But there’s a lot that’s already been discovered that could use a little boost.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Jonathan Galassi
If you're anything like the writers I meet at conferences and MFA programs, the word sweet probably isn't the first adjective that comes to mind when you think of the head of a major New York publishing house. I hear a lot of other words (many of them unprintable in a wholesome writer's magazine), but the takeaway is often the same: They are snakes in suits whose only loyalty is to the bottom line. While it's true that such creatures exist—I could tell you stories—they are far less common than you might think.
Take the case of Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who got where he is, in part, by being one of the most gentlemanly editors in the business. Born in Seattle and raised in small-town Massachusetts, Galassi grew up surrounded by books and was, by his own admission, a "typical geeky kid." At thirteen he went away to boarding school and fell in love with poetry and languages; he discovered the thrill of editing other people's work when he got the opportunity to publish a friend's short story in the school literary magazine. At Harvard he studied with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1973, after two years in England on a Marshall Scholarship, he moved back to the States and took an internship at Houghton Mifflin. Before long he earned a reputation as an adroit literary editor and was appointed head of the company's New York office. One early acquisition was Alice McDermott's debut novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, which he took with him when he moved to Random House in 1981. As it turned out, the publication of McDermott's novel was a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal tenure. At Random House, Galassi's books won critical acclaim but sold modestly, and in 1986, after five years with the company, he was fired.
Redemption was both swift and satisfying. Within months of accepting a job at FSG, an independent house that specialized in the kind of serious work he loved, Galassi surprised everyone by taking on a thriller by a Chicago attorney named Scott Turow. The novel, Presumed Innocent, became a runaway best-seller that propelled Galassi up the editorial ranks and ultimately positioned him as the heir to FSG's founder, Roger Straus. In his spare time, Galassi published two volumes of his own poetry, translated the work of Italian modernist Eugenio Montale, and spent a decade as poetry editor of the Paris Review. He also accumulated every major editing award in existence.
Today Galassi says his job is to ensure that FSG stays true to its mission of publishing important voices as effectively as possible. When I asked him what he'd change about his job if he could, he lamented that he doesn't have as much time to read as he used to; he also wishes he had "more of that immediate engagement with new authors." Note to readers: If you can find a way to make Galassi's wishes come true, yours might not be far behind either.
I don't want
to bore you with a lot of questions about your childhood but I am curious if
there were any books that had a big impact on you at an early age.
I was a big
reader as a kid. I used to go to the little library in the town where we lived
in Massachusetts and read voraciously. I read everything. I was in the Weekly
Reader children's book club and I remember loving The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain and books like that. My grandmother was a big
reader. She lived in Boston and would come down and bring books like The
Alexandria Quartet or The Fall or Passage to India. I remember the romance and the exotic quality of
those books. I remember what they looked like, what they felt like. Eventually
all of my grandparents' books ended up in our house, so there were a lot of old
books around. It wasn't that I would sit and read them all. It was more that I
would pore over them and feel the textures of them. My grandfather was Italian,
so there were all these books about Italy, and I would pore through them and
look at the pictures of the different places. I was just very absorbed by books
as a way of escape and as something to escape into.
But there was
no particular book that altered the direction of your life?
I don't think I
can point to any one book. But I was bookish. I was very unathletic. I had bad
eyesight. I was a typical geeky kid. I remember reading The Count of Monte
Cristo when I had the mumps or something
and just being overwhelmed by the romance of the story. I loved stories that
had a medieval or foreign feel. I loved The Golden Warrior and books about the ancient world. I loved all of
that stuff. And then I went away to school when I was thirteen and got very
interested in languages and poetry. In high school I got interested in
everything that I'm interested in now. That's where I started to write and
edit. I was an editor of the school literary magazine. I remember the
experience of working with my friends on their writing and how exciting that
was to me, and how rewarding it was, even more than my own writing. I felt a
real sense of connection to them, and a certain effectiveness. That was a
powerful experience. I remember that my best friend, who wasn't a particularly
literary guy—he was a jock, really—wrote a short story that ended up being
the best story published in the magazine in our time. I was blown away by the
intensity and the power of that story. I got a real thrill out of being present
at the creation of somebody else's work.
Do you think your work as a poet and translator informs your work as
an editor and publisher?
That has always been secondary to my work as an
editor. I mean, maybe it wasn't always secondary in my deepest heart, but when
I started to work in publishing I decided that I was going to put editing
first. And I've never had regrets about it. I guess I think of those things as
flowing into and out of each other.
When I started writing I didn't have much confidence in my own powers, but I think over time I've become more comfortable with what I can do as a writer. That came through working on translation. I was translating Montale, which was a deep interest that went on for many, many years. That taught me a lot about writing. And obviously I've also learned a lot from working with writers over the years. But I've never felt any ambivalence about being a publisher as opposed to being a writer.
But is there anything in your experience as a
poet and translator that informs how you go about the business of being an
editor?
Perhaps I don't think of authors as different
animals. I can give authors a sense of realism about what can be done in the
world with their work. I would never want to put myself on the same plane as
the writers I work with, but because I know what it is to write, I think I can
empathize with their desires and frustrations. There are some publishers who
think of the work as something for them to mold, and I don't think of it quite
that way. But I wouldn't want to convey the impression that I'm a writer who's
also a publisher. I'm a publisher who's also a writer. And as a rule I don't
talk about my own writing with my authors, unless they bring it up. Because I'm
here to work for them.
Did you teach
yourself how to edit?
I guess so. My
first job was as an intern in the editorial department at Houghton Mifflin in
Boston in 1973. They just sort of threw you into it. Nobody was sitting there
and teaching you how to do it. I think you learn it by watching how the people
around you work with authors, and it happens almost by osmosis. There are many
different styles of editing, too. It's an apprenticeship. There are courses you
can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but
I don't think they teach you how to edit. Editing is more by-the-hip. You look
at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. One thing I have noticed is
that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go
along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's.
You give the author your thoughts and it's up to him or her to decide what to
do. One time [Jonathan] Franzen made fun of me about that. He didn't take some
suggestion I had made and I said, "Well, it's your book," and he sort of mocked
me for that. [Laughter.] But that's what
I really believe. I believe it with poetry, too. The texts are so personal.
Yes, there are times when I've worked with poets to edit their work, but
usually you either buy into what they're doing or you don't. If you don't, you
shouldn't be working with them, and if you do, you realize that they know what
they're doing.
What were the hardest lessons for you to learn
when you were a younger editor?
One of the really hard lessons was realizing how
much of a crapshoot publishing is—how you can love something and do everything
you can for it, and yet fail at connecting it to an audience. Maybe you
misjudged it. Maybe it didn't get the right breaks. One of the hardest things
to come to grips with is how important the breaks are. There's luck in publishing, just like in
any human activity. And if you don't get the right luck—if Mitchi [Michiko
Kakutani of the New York Times] writes an uncomprehending review, or if you don't get
the right reviews, or if books aren't in stores when the reviews come, or
whatever the hell it is—it may not happen. That was one of the hardest
lessons: how difficult it is to actually be effective.
Another really hard thing is that, as a young editor, each book is like your baby. I remember wanting to publish Peter Schjeldahl's biography of Frank O'Hara so desperately. I lost it to some other editor who paid more money, and I was melancholy about it for months. Of course the book ended up never being written. [Laughter.] But at the time I felt like a piece of me had somehow been sawn off. I wanted to pour myself into that project so much, and it takes time for that sense of wanting, and identification—which is what publishers live on, really—to relax a little. I see my young editors going through that and I empathize so much. But you have to learn to let go of things. That was a very painful lesson.
But when I was young I had so much reverence for writing. Elizabeth Bishop was my teacher in college—she was my favorite teacher, and I revered her work, and I loved her as a person very, very much—and I remember that when she would invite us over for dinner I would get almost physically ill. It was this combination of conflicting feelings: excitement, discomfort, a sense of unworthiness. It mattered so deeply that it made me almost physically ill. Caring that much was painful. I don't know if that's a lesson but it was certainly something where the intensity of my devotion was overwhelming.
How did you
end up in New York?
I started in
Boston in 1973, and in 1975 they sent me down here. I wanted to be in New York.
After college I'd gone to England for a couple of years on a fellowship. I was
in Cambridge, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I realized that I wanted
to live in a metropolis. So I came down here. But I was working for Houghton
Mifflin, which was a Boston company that had very conflicted feelings about New
York. I was very interested in publishing young writers, and I felt that
Houghton was kind of stick-in-the-mud-ish and that a place like Knopf or Random
House would do that better. It was sort of callow of me because Houghton had
been very good to me. They had let me
start a poetry series, they had let me publish first novels. And I learned so
much there.
But I was a young man in a hurry and eventually I was offered a job at Random House. Jason [Epstein] was the one who hired me. And that didn't go well. There were a number of reasons, some of which were my fault. Jason had a sort of sink-or-swim approach, which was fine, but he was also not terribly interested in what other people were doing. I was used to being the kid who got to do what he wanted. But I wasn't a kid anymore and there was a lot of internal competition and I just didn't respond well to that. I didn't do well. And Random House had Knopf next door, where Bob Gottlieb was at the apogee of his effectiveness. He was a terrific publisher. Random House was always sort of vying to live up to that. The books I was doing were Knopf-y, within Random House, and I just didn't know how to make that work. Someone else could have, I think.
What did you
take away from those years at Random House?
I learned a huge
amount. Not all of it was pleasant. I learned a lot about competition and how
literary life really worked, because Houghton Mifflin was a little bit off to
the side. Random House had a kind of glossiness to it that wasn't really me,
even though they were a very effective publisher. In the Bennett Cerf days,
Random House had been in some ways an ideal publisher because they were what I
would call a "best of breed" publisher. They could publish Gertrude Stein, and
Faulkner, and O'Neill, but also a lot of very commercial books. And they all
sat next to each other comfortably. By the time I got there that had dissipated
and there were all sorts of other pressures. But they were a much more
confident publisher than Houghton Mifflin.
Knopf was also there, and you saw that it was about a sort of consistency of commitment. They knew how to publish literary books. They published one after another, and some of them would work and some of them wouldn't, and they had a system that was very well oiled. They had a place in the publishing universe, so a lot of their work was already done for them. If they committed to publishing an author, you knew that the Times Book Review was going to pay attention, and this, that, and the other thing were going to happen. That's what that little machine existed for, and they ran it very well.
I actually think that when Bob left publishing, to go to the New Yorker, everything changed in my business. Bob was such a dominant figure in literary publishing that he kind of controlled prices. A lot of people would go to him to be published without auctions because they wanted to be with him. He sort of set the prices in the sense that he wouldn't participate in auctions. It wasn't that he was unfair—he was fair and generous. But he was reasonable. When he left, that was over. Auctions became much more a part of how most books were sold, and the prices went up, and the whole game became more about money. This was in the mid-eighties, and it was a watershed moment in publishing.
I learned some other lessons that were not so nice. It wasn't a collegial place. People really didn't wish each other well, which I wasn't used to. But looking back on it I think it was a difficult situation that I could have responded to differently. I think I grew up a lot during that time.
How did you
get from there to FSG?
After I was
fired, Roger [Straus] gave me a job. FSG was pretty far down at that point.
Roger's son, Rog, had come back to the company and I think they were trying to
revivify it. Luckily, they hired me. And the minute I got there, things clicked
and I felt like I was totally at home.
This was a
real turning point for you.
It was.
Basically the first book I signed up was Presumed Innocent, which was a huge best-seller. It was a first for
FSG, and it was exactly the kind of book I was supposed to have been publishing
at Random House. Of course there was great joy in Mudville about that. [Laughter.] But you have to remember that when I was in
college, Lowell and Bishop were my teachers, and both of them were published by
FSG. So FSG books had an aura of sanctity. To come and work here was amazing. I
just felt like FSG was good at doing the kinds of books I wanted to do. It was
still the old days then—it was still a small independent publisher and that
was still a viable thing. But it had taken me a long time to get going as an editor.
I'd been in publishing for over ten years before I got to FSG and it all came
together.
Tell me a
little about the atmosphere of the place.
Did you ever
visit the old offices? When I came we were on the fourth floor of 19 Union
Square West. Calvin Trillin said it looked like a branch office of a failing
insurance company. It looked like something out of a porn magazine. It was
dirty linoleum and cockroaches and just really, really gross. When we moved up
to the old Atlantic Monthly Press office on the eleventh floor, my health
improved.
What about
the personalities?
In those days
Roger was there, of course. Pat [Strachan] was there. Bob Giroux was still
around. Michael di Capua. Aaron Asher was gone, but David Reiff was working
there as an editor. Rog was there. It was a very personality-filled company
with a lot of smart people who were very dedicated. But they never took
themselves too seriously. That's one thing I've always loved about FSG. With
Knopf I always felt that there was a snootiness—they would look down their
noses. That was never true at FSG. It was scrappy; it was irreverent. I mean,
they took literature extremely seriously, but they never took themselves
seriously. It was a very good-natured place where people wished each other well.
I think people felt like they were doing something good. The pay was terrible,
and the conditions were terrible, but everybody knew why they were there. And
we all felt like it was a privilege to work there. I think both Roger and Bob
were responsible for that in different ways. Roger loved the game of
publishing. He loved competing. He loved having enemies, being outrageous,
swearing, making nasty comments. That was fun for him. Bob was more bankerly
and serious, but literature had an unquestioned importance for him. It was a
part of life that really mattered. I wouldn't say that that doesn't exist in
publishing today, but it does feel different today. At that time books had a
cultural primacy that they don't quite have now. Books have been sort of moved
to the side by other media. It's not that people don't read books. But books
are one among a smorgasbord of options. Whereas in those days books were still
where cultural life was centered. People were decrying the influence of
television, but books were still more at the center.
A couple
years after that you became editor in chief. Was there any friction between you
and Roger?
Not a lot. I
think I was lucky that I came along at the moment in his life when I did. He
and Rog loved each other, but they were not natural business partners. I was
able to be a kind of business son in a way that his real son couldn't. We had
some set-tos, but not a lot. He was much mellower and less threatened in his
later years. There had been a time when a number of really talented editors
didn't survive at FSG.
What would
you and Roger argue about?
Well, he didn't
always like what I liked, but he was pretty tolerant. There would be issues
involving money and how much we could pay for things. Roger loved to fight with
people. I always thought that wasn't good business practice. I thought it was
better to get along with people so you could have another deal with them down
the line. I remember one time when I said, "Don't you think we should make up
with so-and-so?" He said, "Don't give me any of that Christian stuff, Galassi.
I'm a vindictive Jew." [Laughter.] He enjoyed having enemies. But all in all we had fun together,
and he was like a father to me in a lot of ways.
Tell me about
the transition from editor in chief to publisher.
That was a
little difficult in the sense that it had to do with Roger's mortality. When he
sold the company in 1994, the deal was that he would run it as long as he
could. He did, and he continued to act like an independent for many years. But
he slowed down eventually. One of the difficulties I had was that there was a
lot of deferred maintenance. In other words, things kept going in a certain way
longer than maybe they should have in some areas. The company remained a very
personal fiefdom of Roger's even after it had been owned by someone else for a
long time. And with that goes what I would call deferred maintenance. The
biggest and most significant change I made was bringing in Andrew Mandel to be
the deputy publisher. He helped organize and rationalize our practices in a lot
of ways. It's still an editorially driven house—the editors still decide what
we're going to publish—but the business aspects are a little less
seat-of-the-pants and a little more planned out and fiscally responsible. The
other thing is that I wasn't editor in chief anymore. I do fewer books and have
a lot of other responsibilities. I usually have another editor work with me on
projects. I've had to step back from some things. I can't edit these
thousand-page books with the kind of assiduity that I used to. I'm still
editing a lot of books, but there are just more other things I have to do. It's
like how I said earlier that the book is your baby—now the company becomes
your baby. You're thinking about ways to strategize for the future. You're
thinking about, "How is FSG going to continue to be a literary publisher?" It's
more about the organism as a whole and less about any single book. You're
asking yourself, "How can we maximize the lives of all the books we do, both in the current environment and
in the future?"
What are you
looking at when you're thinking about those things?
I'm thinking
about the proportions of what we publish, for example. Another one of the
things I've been excited about recently is bringing Mitzi Angel here to run
Faber. Stephen Page and I decided to take Faber and make it a bigger player in
the conspectus of American publishing. That's a really exciting thing and I
think Mitzi's doing a fabulous job. So we're trying to expand our bouquet. We
also have people like Lorin [Stein] and Courtney [Hodell] coming along who are
doing really fresh publishing, and we're trying to give them the support they
need. We're also trying to expand our nonfiction publishing to balance the
literary publishing because a lot of serious readers read nonfiction and we
want those readers too.
Tell me about some of the high moments in your
life as a publisher.
One of my happy moments has to do with Denis
Johnson. We published two books by Denis in the early nineties: Jesus' Son, which was one of the best
books I ever published, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, which was also a wonderful
book. But then Denis left. He went to Robert Jones at Harper. He was
dissatisfied. He didn't think that we were doing enough for his books. But he came
back to us for Tree of Smoke and it became a New York Times best-seller and won the
National Book Award. So there was a great sense of happiness and accomplishment
that we came back together and were able to help him achieve so much.
What are some other great moments like that?
When the manuscript of [Marilynne Robinson's] Gilead came in. This is a book that
had been under contract for so many years that...it wasn't that we forgot about
it, but we didn't know if or when it would appear. And then it came in. It was
perfect. Almost nothing was done to it. It was one of those experiences of
spiritual uplift. To come across a book that you knew was a great book? And you
were reading it first!
The second great moment is when it actually becomes a book—a physical thing. I always feel that when you put a book into proofs it gets better just by virtue of being set in print. I know a lot of writers feel that way too. It takes on a kind of permanence. And then it's even more satisfying when it becomes an actual book.
How did you
meet Alice McDermott?
Alice was sent
to me by Harriet Wasserman, who was a very important person in the beginning of
my publishing life. Her office at Russell & Volkening was in the same
building as Houghton Mifflin's New York office. I got to know her and
eventually became very close to her. We did a number of really interesting
projects together and Alice was one of the first. She gave me these pages from
this book about a young woman working at a vanity press, and that was the
beginning of A Bigamist's Daughter. She
was such an assured writer. She had such definition and wit and this very
subtle, cool, deadpan humor. She's one of the most amazing stylists I know. And
she's such a modest and well-spoken and well-behaved person. I took that
project with me from Houghton Mifflin to Random House, and I remember that,
after she turned it in, several weeks went by and somehow it came out that I
hadn't paid her the advance that was due on delivery. I said, "Why didn't you
tell me? Why didn't you ask for it?" She was too well-behaved to ask. [Laughter.] She's someone who didn't write just one wonderful
book—she's produced a lot of them. Her methods of writing are very original.
She's always writing two books at once, and she ends up choosing one. The other
one goes in a drawer somewhere. Which means there are all these incredible,
unrealized books by Alice McDermott somewhere. But she uses one to bring out
the other. I think it's a very interesting psychological thing. It's like she's
always having twins. One twin comes to life and the other twin is still
gestating somewhere.
One thing
that always fascinates me is how people view their jobs and their various
responsibilities. Give me a sense of how you view yours.
I think my
responsibility—my task and my joy—is to try to make FSG as effective an
instrument for publishing as possible. To make it strong and to help it make a
difference in the publishing business. FSG is a lot different than it was when
I came here. But what I don't think is different is the attitude about what's
important to publish. That is my biggest responsibility—to make sure that that
stays at the center of what we're doing. And that we believe literature is
important and that our mission is to enhance the dissemination of it. So while
everything has changed around the core of FSG, I don't think the core has
changed at all.
And if you
had to articulate that core and what's important to publish?
I think it's
about the voices of writers. FSG really became FSG when Bob [Giroux] came and
brought people like Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.
Those writers, who were all very distinctive and idiosyncratic, contributed to
the essence of American literature in their time. And our desire is to continue
to be a place where people like that feel at home and feel that we're doing the
best we can for their work—and the public feels that the books we publish have
value. It's a business, and I love the fact that it's a business. I really
think it's much better for publishing to be a commercial enterprise. But it's
not just a business. It's about selling
something that you believe in.
What houses
do you feel competitive with?
I feel very
competitive with Knopf. But I feel competitive—and when I say "competitive" I
also mean that I feel collegial—with people all over. You and Morgan
[Entrekin]. New Directions, who I love. Penguin Press, both in America and in
the UK, is a really fabulous publishing house. I think Cape is great. I think
Chatto is great.
Who do you
feel the most competitive with?
I guess we still
think of Knopf as the big giant. We're the we-try-harder. But we're not really
like Knopf. We're different. We're smaller. But I think they do a really good
job with a lot of great books.
When you
suspect you're going up against them for a book, what's your pitch?
My answer to
that is that it only makes sense for authors to be published here who want to
be published here. In other words, if they buy into our approach and feel that
we will do well by their work, that works. If it's about money alone we're not
going to tend to win those contests. Someone else can always come up with more
money. So what we have to offer is ourselves, and our approach, and what I
would do to compete is just tell the author what we think about the book, ask
him what he wants from a publisher, and show him how we've done other books in
the past. What else can I do?
What's the
biggest practical difference, in your mind, between FSG and Knopf?
We're smaller,
and that means we can give more attention to each project. We have a very good
publishing team. Jeff Seroy is a brilliant publicity and marketing guy. Spencer
Lee, our sales guy, is terrific. And there's a cohesiveness to what we do.
It can be
difficult to articulate what exactly you're looking for as an editor, but tell
me about something recently that captivated you for whatever reason, and talk
about why.
The book that
we're doing now that comes to mind is All the Living by C. E. Morgan. It's a first novel by a young woman
and it's about Kentucky. It was sent to me by Ellen Levine, who is Marilynne
Robinson's agent. We publish Marilynne, and this author admires her a lot. I
think it was offered to other publishers too, and I don't know if we offered
the most money, but we certainly paid a serious advance for it. What I felt was
so unusual about it was the voice and the consistency of her approach. She's
created a sort of small myth. It's concise. It's intense. It's very different
from most other fiction we see in that it's so much about the place. It's very
American in that way. It's not ironic. It's not disabused. It's very American
in its romance about place and about death and love. I found it very primal and
beautiful in a restrained way.
But right now we're also publishing John Wray's book, Lowboy, which Eric's doing. Courtney's doing the Wells Tower book [Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned]. Lorin's about to publish Clancy Martin's book, How to Sell. All of these books are different in terms of their angles of attack, but they're all very strong voices. And they don't sound like anyone else. I think the voice is the most important thing—and then the shape.
One thing that I don't see a lot of today, and that I used to be very taken with, is the bigger kind of novel. Social novels, even. I think of The Twenty-seventh City. That was a first novel that just blew me away. On the one hand there was The Twenty-seventh City and on the other hand was The Virgin Suicides.
Another book that I'm really excited about is Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, which is a social novel. It's a fictional account of the attempt to build the World Trade Center memorial. It's a fantastic book about politics, art, religion, and all the different issues there. I very seldom see novels that have that kind of social reach.
What else are you looking for when you're
evaluating a piece of fiction? Are you looking for a certain kind of
sensibility or anything like that?
I think that would fall under
voice. I remember when I read [Roberto] Bolaño's Savage Detectives. I read an Italian version
and just thought it had so much verve and humor. It was so sexy. It had a kind
of buoyancy and it was so alive. Voice is one way of looking at it but
aliveness is another way. And I think voice is kind of being killed in a lot of
writing today. When you look at the New Yorker, the voices are much less idiosyncratic than they
used to be. It's being edited in a different way than it used to be.
Why do you
think that is?
I don't know.
They used to publish a lot of long pieces and it may have something to do with
readers' attention spans being different. We published a very good book last
year, the autobiography of the composer John Adams. The New Yorker ran a piece of it and the author told me that they
tried to iron out the idiosyncrasies of his style. He gave them a fight. He was
very bemused by why they would try to change his little quirks.
One of the books that I was most proud of publishing last year was the Lowell-Bishop correspondence. The thing that makes that book so wonderful is the idiosyncrasy of the way they write.
I have a quote for you: "Most words put down on
paper are not interesting, or don't make sense, or are stilted. You can tell
within two pages that something is not going to work." That's you, twelve years
ago. I completely agree and I'm curious what common problems you notice in the
work of beginning writers.
I used to be kind of uptight about writing-school
writing—it can be hard to emerge with your own voice—but I'm less aware of
that now. I think a lot of people learn to write by imitating and that's
perfectly legitimate. That's how poets learn to write. I remember that
Elizabeth Bishop used to make us write imitations of other writers. But if you
want to publish your work, you better have moved beyond that. Only a few people
in the world are meant to be writers. And those are people who really can't say
things the way other people would. It's involuntary. Milosz had this great line
that poetry should only be written under unbearable pressure and in the hope
that good spirits, not evil, choose us for their instrument. The idea is that
the people who should write are the people who can't not write. I think there are a
lot of people who want to write, and who want to say something, but a lot of
them don't have anything to say.
What will make you want to throw a first novel
across the room?
Pretentiousness. When the writer is trying to be
cool, or ironic, or when the work just isn't genuine. It's like what [U.S.
Supreme Court Justice] Potter Stewart said about pornography: You know it when
you see it. You can tell when you're reading something genuine. You feel it.
There are writers whose voices are quite self-conscious and who I think are
great. André Aciman, for example. I'm working on his new novel right now. His
writing is about self-consciousness. It's about questioning what you just said, revising
what you just said. It's very Proustian in that way. And I love it. It's very
genuine. That's just the way his mind works.
What is it about the work of a debut poet that
will make it stand out from the others enough that you want to take it on? Is
it different than with fiction?
It's not really different. It's the voice and the
angle and the attitude. We don't take on very many debut poets because we have
so many ongoing writers. I miss that. I read that piece in the New Yorker about the Dickman brothers
and felt a little out of it.
Is there a debut poet you've taken on recently
who you could talk about?
Maureen McLane is an example. I knew Maureen as a
critic before I read her poetry. She's a brilliant critic of contemporary
poetry. And then I read her poems, which have a kind of freshness that takes
you back to the modernism of H. D. and Pound. It's very classical in its
directness. I thought, "This is totally outside the lingo of most poets." It's
pure and in touch with tradition in a very direct way. I felt the same way
about Eliza Griswold's book, which we did a couple of years ago and which won
the Rome Prize. Both of those poets write in ways that are outside of the lingo
of the various schools of poetry. They're different. You can't tell who their
teachers were.
You've lamented the blockbuster mentality
that's arisen in publishing, where it's become easier for a publisher to sell a
first novel and harder for an author to build a career over a number of books
that sell modestly. Can you speak to that for writers?
Suppose I had written a first novel that five
publishers wanted to publish and the range of offers was from fifty thousand
dollars to four hundred thousand. I probably wouldn't go with the
fifty-thousand-dollar offer, and I might well go with the
four-hundred-thousand-dollar offer. But I hope that I would think through how
the publisher was going to try to make that money back. What's the publisher's
idea of what to do with my book? Of course if you're a young person who has
never made a penny and all of a sudden somebody offers you a lot of money,
you're going to take it. You need it. But I don't think that's necessarily the
right thing to do.
Why?
Because if your book doesn't do well and earn that
money back, or make a credible showing, you're going to have a harder time the
next time. That's why I think the old system was better. Forty years ago, your
agent would likely have sent your book to editors one at a time, but even if it
was done as a multiple submission, the differential between the offers would
not have been as great. The choice would be made on other bases. I know that
this may sound self-serving, but I do think that real careers are built
stepwise. I still believe that. And I haven't seen a lot of careers built the
other way. I think a lot of agents, especially younger ones, feel that the
commitment the big advance represents is what's going to bring the author
success. But I don't think that's true.
That's the Andrew Wylie philosophy. You have
said that FSG is a living contradiction to that model, where more money is
perceived as meaning more oomph.
I think that a really good agent should be able to
get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much
money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the
amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do. They may
solicit a lot of action, but they know where they want to place the author.
They may use competition to jack up their preferred publisher as high as they
will go, and there may be times when the differential is so big that they
aren't going to be able to go with that target publisher, but I think that's
the right way to do it: for the agent to work the process so that the author
ends up with the right publisher paying as much as they comfortably can.
There's an edge of commitment that makes the publisher feel they have to be
alert, but they haven't gone beyond their zone of comfort for the book.
But Andrew
might say that they should be pushed beyond their comfort zone. Is there any
chance he's right?
I haven't seen
that here. We don't sit around and say, "Well, we paid x for this book so we'd better do something special."
Everyone knows what the situation is. But even if you'd better do it doesn't
mean that it's going to work.
But we know
that there are different levels of effort.
Sure.
That's why I
sometimes wonder if there's any chance he's right. I mean, I'm with you. I work
at Grove, for God's sake.
Part of what I'm
talking about is the agent using the process to push the publisher to the point
where it's costing them something to acquire the book. They're not just picking
up the book for nothing and throwing it against the wall and hoping it sticks.
They're going to have to think and be creative in publishing it. You can blame
Andrew all you want, but the people who are responsible for the overpayments in
publishing are publishers, not agents or authors. The publishers are the ones
who agree to do it, and they're the only ones who can be blamed for it. We walk
away from books that we'd like to publish every day because they're out of our
comfort zone—out of our rational calculation of what we think we should be
risking on them. Very good agents, who I have a lot of respect for, have said
to me, "If I were you I wouldn't be paying big advances." I think that if we
could inject some of that realism into the process we'd have a healthier
business.
They say that
to you kind of off the record?
Yeah. I'm not
going to say who they are, but yes, very good agents have said that to me.
Because I think they understand that if the publishers kill themselves off, the
agents aren't going to have people to publish their authors' work. It's not
that I don't want authors to make money. I do. I want them to get rich, because
then their publishers will be doing well too. But I don't want them to get rich
at the expense of the larger institution. That's no help to them. It will
weaken the publishers, and then we won't be effective.
Are there any other insights you can offer
writers about agents?
I think the ideal publishing experience is when the
agent and the publisher can work together to promote the career of the author.
Yes, the agent sometimes barks at the publisher about something, but basically
they all feel that they're on the same team. That's how really good agents
operate. Really good agents are also just as devoted to the work as you and I
are. It's the same profession from a different angle. As I said, authors should
want an agent who knows where to place them—not someone who's throwing a ball
up in the air and seeing who jumps highest.
But if you're a writer, and you don't work in
publishing, it can be hard to figure out which agents do that.
But what you can tell is how they react to your
work. You can listen to what they say about it editorially and aesthetically.
That's the first thing you would want: someone who understands what you're
doing and is not trying to make you into something you aren't.
But once the agent has cleared that hurdle in
your mind, as a writer, how do you figure out the other stuff? How do you know
how good they actually are at placing your work at the right house?
I think it's like picking a dentist—you go by
recommendation and word of mouth and looking at who else the agent represents.
What's happened to those other writers? I think that's how agents get their
clients.
With
nonfiction, agenting has evolved to the point where agents have become very
involved in the proposals.
Sometimes they
write them.
Exactly. Do
you think it's ethical for agents to work very heavily on a proposal without
disclosing that to prospective editors?
We often talk
about this. I think that a good agent is an editor, but at the same time it's
not ethical for an agent to write a proposal for an author. The author needs to
write it. The agent can criticize it and suggest improvements—and should—but
sometimes we wonder who actually wrote the proposal. You can usually get a feel
for that. But I don't think it's ethical for an agent to do more than make
suggestions to the author. They have to write it themselves.
How do you
feel about the new primacy that agents have assumed in the lives of writers?
Editors and publishers have been displaced to some extent. Are you okay with
that?
What I don't
like is when an agent tries to interpose his or her body between you and the
author—when the agent is proprietary and everything needs to be communicated
through them and they don't want you to have your own relationship with the
author. I find that very frustrating and alienating and counter to the idea I
was just talking about where it's a collaboration between the agent and the
publisher and the author. I think you're right in that over time the agent has
become more important in the author's life, partly because authors move around
more than they used to. But when you've worked with an author over many years,
you do develop a really close relationship. The agent has his or her own
relationship with the author, and a good agent wants you to be close with the author.
What do you
find most frustrating about agents?
I have a certain
sympathy for agents on the money thing. They're getting pressure from their
authors. Just the way that you and I feel like, "Well, if we don't come up with
x amount of money, Ann Godoff will,"
they feel that too. They may lose their author if they can't deliver what the
author needs. I empathize with that. But I think a strong agent is confident
enough and knowledgeable enough about the business, and about history, and
about how careers work in the long term, that she can say to her author, "Look,
this is what's in your interest. It may not seem to be in the short term, but
it is in the long term." And that's coming from the seat of experience. I'm
close to a number of agents, personally, and I have a lot of respect for their
contribution to our business. And yes, we argue. We don't always agree. I
sometimes feel that they're trying to take advantage. But all in all, it's just
like how I said it only makes sense for authors to be here who want to be here:
The agents who we work with best are the ones who get why FSG is good for their
authors. It's a collaborative process and doesn't need to be hostile. A really
good agent is your ally as well as your adversary at times.
On the flip
side of the world of huge advances is the midlist writer, who is really
struggling today because of the computer and the sales track. Put yourself in
that person's shoes and, knowing what you know, tell me what you'd do to try to
change your fate.
Most books have
to be midlist because only a few can be best-sellers. If you're a serious
writer, you should be writing the books you're going to write.
But what if
you have some ambition, as all writers do, and really want a readership and
think that you deserve one?
If they deserve
one, they'll get one. I believe that. I believe that eventually they will get
their readership. Now, I also think there are way more people writing books
than are going to get a readership. But I think that the books that really make
a difference are going to have a readership. It may not be immediate. There are
many examples of writers who have labored in relative obscurity for a long time
until their ship came in. Look at Bolaño. His great success is posthumous and
not even in his own country.
Writing is its own reward. It has to be. I really believe that. This is a part of publishing that's really hard to come to grips with. But publishers can't make culture happen the way they want it to happen. They can stand up for what they believe in, and they can work to have an impact, but in the end it's like the brilliant thing that Helen Vendler said about poets. She was asked, "What's the canon?" and she said something like, "The poets are going to decide what the canon is. The poets who poets read are the canon." I think that, in the end, that's true about all literature. The books that people read over time, and keep reading, are the books that matter. We can huff and puff and pay money and advertise and everything else, but in the end, if the readers don't come, we can't do anything about it.
Twenty years ago you called writing "a very
cruel sport." Has it gotten more or less cruel since then?
I think it's probably gotten more cruel because
there's more competition for people's time as readers. But all sports are
cruel. Golfing is a cruel sport because only a few people are going to play on
the PGA Tour. Poetry is a good bellwether because there are only a few poets
who matter in the end. Even a lot of the poets who win honors are going to be
filtered out in the end. It doesn't mean they aren't good. It is cruel. It's
Darwinian. So if you're going to be a writer, you'd better take rewards from it
over and above the public recognition. I remember something Montale said to the
effect that even being a minor poet is an honorable thing. Being a novelist or
a poet whose books aren't popular is a wonderful accomplishment.
In talking about book promotion you once said
something interesting about believing that authors should focus on their work
and leave the promotion to others. Some people would disagree with that.
Unfortunately publishers need authors to do some of
that. We need authors to be able to go on Charlie Rose and the Today show and All Things
Considered.
We're dying for them to do those things. We're selling authors, not books. We're
selling people the illusion of an experience with an author. They want to know
what the author looks like, what he smells like. They want the full experience.
In the old days it was "Read John Updike's new book." Now it's "Meet John
Updike" or "Listen to John Updike on the audio version" or "Watch John Updike
give a reading." All of that can be very distracting for writers. Certain
writers aren't any good at it. If you think about it, if a writer has forty
good writing years, and he publishes a book every two years, does he want to
spend a third year of that cycle on selling his book, in the United States and
in Europe and everywhere else? That's a big chunk out of his working life. Even
though it can make things hard for us, I'm very sympathetic to authors who
don't want to do that. It's not what they're best at. Their real talent is
writing.
What drives you crazy about authors?
It's hard for them to drive me crazy. I actually
really empathize with authors. Of course there are certain authors who are so
obsessive about every little thing, and sometimes I have to deal with those
things. But I can usually say to them, almost as a joke, "You're the most
obsessive person I've ever worked with!" But their perfectionism is what makes
them that way, and of course that's something I value in their work. And then
there are authors who are just very, very selfish—just like there are people
who are very selfish. You can't admire that. They can be mean, sometimes. I
don't like authors who aren't appreciative of the people who help them publish
their work. Some of our most famous authors are among our nicest, and then
there are others who have been among our most disliked. They can earn the love
or the contempt of the people who work for them. But by and large I feel that
their problems are very human problems. I think authors are heroic, so I tend
to think that their narcissism is justified. And let's face it: The authors you
are working with are ones who you've decided are important, so you've already
bought into them.
You have
lamented how the role of the editor has changed over the years—that it used to
be more about the text and now it's more about promotion.
I remember being
so impressed by something I was once told by Bob Loomis, who's still going
strong in his eighties and is one of the great editors at Random House. This is
someone who has published so many award winners and best-sellers of all
different kinds. He once said to me, "I really just work on getting the books
into the best shape possible and I don't worry that much about the selling and
so forth. That's other people's jobs." I thought, "Wow. That's the opposite of
what everyone says you should be doing." In a way, maybe he didn't have to
worry about it because he has such credibility—people believe what he says
about a book and go to work. I actually think that's how it works in
publishing: Once you've done it successfully a few times, it gets a lot easier.
People pull with you instead of you feeling that you have to pull them along.
It's true that the editor today should have ideas—he should be market-wise in
acquiring books and have ideas about how to sell them. But it all starts with
the book. I think the editor's principal job is to identify books and to help
them be the best they can, and then to work with the rest of the company to get
them across. I think Bob was absolutely right about the primary contribution an
editor can make.
But that is
changing, wouldn't you say?
I guess it is. I
hear a lot of stuff about how editors behave and how they're playing hopscotch
and how they don't really care how much they pay for books because they know
they won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. I just haven't seen
that. Maybe I'm working in a bit of a bubble because we're a little different
than some of the other houses. I hear stories about editors who are competitive
with other editors within their publishing house. I think that's very
counterproductive and kind of takes the fun out of it. It's a collegial
business. You're on a team together and not trying to best each other. But I
see people like you and Lorin and Eric coming along who have the same sort of idealism
about it that people in my generation had. I mean, why else would you do it? If
you wanted to make a killing, you wouldn't go into publishing. You have to be
doing it out of love.
Speaking of
Eric, would you take us inside the FSG editorial meeting? What's it like?
When I first got
here I wasn't very happy with the FSG editorial meeting. I remember Bob Giroux
saying, "The editorial meeting is a disaster. Roger has everyone report on what
they're doing, and Roger has to be in the meeting. He's too dominant." That was
very indicative of the struggles between them and their differences in
personalities. It was true, though. There was something about our editorial
meeting that didn't allow for the kind of free-flowing quality that you want,
where you bat around ideas and talk about the competition and so on. I don't
think I was ever very good at that—I hate meetings—but Eric runs the meeting
now and he is good at it. He's much more
relaxed. We go around and talk about various projects, but there's also some
general discussion. We don't use the editorial meeting to acquire books. We use
it to talk about what's being considered and what we might think about doing.
Even in a small house like this, we don't really know what's been submitted to
everyone else. There are ways of solving that but they're quite laborious.
Sometimes I hear about books that were sold and think, "Why didn't we get to
see that?" Of course we did get
to see it, but I didn't know about it. There are so many books out there that I
wish we could have published. But as one of my bosses once said, "Don't worry
about the ones that got away. Worry about the ones you're stuck with." [Laughter.] There's another line that was said by Ferris
Greenslet, who was a famous editor at Houghton Mifflin in the twenties. One of
his little nostrums that was quoted at us was "When in doubt, decline."
Talk to me a
little about publishing in translation, which is one of the things that FSG is
known for. This year you've had amazing success with Bolaño. Do you feel that
it's getting easier?
I think we're
getting better at it. I don't know if I've talked about my current little
buzzword that I'm thinking about a lot: essentialism. We should only be doing things that are essential.
I think that's a good way to approach doing translations. I myself have been
guilty of not always following that rule. But Bolaño is essential. And Gomorrah, by [Roberto] Saviano, is one of the most important
European books of the last five years. We're just being more selective. Another
book we just bought that I'm wild about is Roberto Calasso's La Folie
Baudelaire. It's about Baudelaire's Paris.
He's been published by Knopf until recently but for some reason they were in
doubt and declined, and we picked it up.
In a way, the market in translation is an interesting microcosm of publishing in general. You have to approach it in the same way that you do as a publisher, where you're out selling books to the world that you're saying are important. But you know that some of them will turn out to be important and a lot of them won't. You can't just go for the books that all of your foreign colleagues tell you are their important books—they have their reasons for telling you that—but the few books that are actually going to have an impact in your market. You have to look for exactly what you're looking for as a reader. And that's not always the big books. It's not always the books that are part of the big commerce of publishing and that you hear about on the fast track. Sometimes it's books that are published by small publishers and sort of come in from the side. On the other hand of that you have Gomorrah, which was the biggest book in Italian publishing in many years and which we did hear about on the fast track.
What's your
favorite way to hear about an international book?
From a friend. I
actually have a scout in Italy. It's the only country where we have a scout.
She's a really smart woman named Caterina Zaccaroni. I don't necessarily hear
about the books from her, but I'll say to her, "What about this one? What about
that one?" and she has opinions about them. She saves me a lot of work. And she
has books that she pushes on me herself—books that she has decided are
important. There's one book that she's been trying to get me to publish for
several years now, and I may just cave in and do it because she's so passionate
about it. But one of the ways that FSG became an important publisher was
because Roger had these people in Europe who would recommend books to him. He
published all of these books in translation that other people hadn't picked up.
Italian in particular was important for the early FSG. But it's hard to be
confronted with the number of so-called "important" foreign books and then to
figure out which few are right to publish.
Do you enjoy
the international book fairs?
I love
Frankfurt. Roger loved it and I inherited that love from him. I love the
rituals of Frankfurt. You basically have the same appointments every year. You
see the same people. You see them age and think, "Oh, if they're aging, I must
be aging." [Laughter.] It's more about
relationships than doing business. We try not to buy books at Frankfurt, but
renewing our ties is very important. And Frankfurt is one place where American
publishing doesn't dominate as much, which is nice to see. A lot of American
publishers don't really get Frankfurt, and don't enjoy it, because they don't
engage with the foreign publishers as much. But that's the fun part.
What disturbs
you most about the way the industry has changed?
What disturbs me
most about publishing today, or the reading world, is that readers aren't
loyal. You can't count on continuity. There's still a certain base of readers
for an author, but it's much lower than it used to be. Readers don't stick with
authors. I think that's partly because readers are more occasional now, and
they don't come to books on their own as much as they're told by somebody.
They're told by Oprah. They're told by their book club. So they may read
another book, but the next book is the next
book they're told they should read. It's not that they read Anna
Karenina and then go out and read War
and Peace. They're less informed and less
knowledgeable. They need help. I love book clubs, but I think they're
indicative of the fact that reading is now an occasional entertainment for a
lot of people and not the kind of obsessive devotion that it used to be. It
feels like a lot more people used to read every novel by John Updike, for
example, and I don't think those kind of readers are as present as they used to
be.
Should
publishers be doing anything to try to reverse that trend?
I don't know the
answer to that. I always feels sort of ham-fisted when the ABA or AAP does
those "Get caught reading" campaigns. That's not what's going to change
people's reading habits. I think what publishers should do is try to publish
books as well as possible and try to reach their readers in as innovative ways
as possible. We have these terrible problems—that book reviews don't matter
anymore, that there are fewer of them all the time. And what is taking their
place? How do you reach your readers? I guess you have to do it through the
Web, but I don't know if I'm buying any books because of Internet marketing. I
just wonder how we're going to find the readers. The readers are there. Look,
we've sold a hundred thousand copies of 2666. Somehow, people learned about that book and wanted to read it. That
shows you that the readers are there. It's just getting harder to get their
attention and to get them interested.
What is your take on the current retail landscape?
Bad. Actually, at our sales conference yesterday,
some of the salesmen were saying that neighborhood bookstores are doing better
in the economic crisis because people are more interested in buying locally and
supporting small businesses. I think this crisis could have a lot of good
effects for the culture. It's slowing things down—slowing down the pace of
change—and making people aware of what's important in life. It's not just
more, more, more. But I think all of the traditional bookstore chains are in
trouble. Amazon is very, very effective. But I think Amazon is a potential...it's
a frenemy. It's not just interested in being a bookstore. So I think we have to
sell our own books to people.
Are you guys doing that?
We do it. We don't want to muscle out the
retailers. But I think that in the conspectus of the different players in the
publishing business, the bookstores are the weakest link in the chain. It's
just like with music. There are always going to be bookstores, but I don't
think that's where the future of bookselling is.
page_5:
Where do you
think the future of bookselling is?
With the
publishers. I think the publishers will be selling the books directly.
Are you
talking about digitally or physical books?
Both. I think
there are always going to be people who want physical books, but I think the
digital part of the business is going to increase. One of the things that all
publishers are worried about now is this idea that a book on Kindle is worth
$9.99. If that establishes the price of what a book is worth, what does that
say? What if I want to sell Maureen McLane's book as a hardcover for
twenty-four dollars? I think that's a problem. Again, it's a lesson from the
music business. People have been used to the idea that intellectual
property—that a book, an artwork—is worth a certain amount of money. It's a
mark of respect, in a way. But if you turn it into a widget, where every book
is worth the same amount, it's not good. This is where the author, the agent, and
the publisher should be working together to protect their mutual interest. And
not have the business be decided by a seller.
By Amazon.
Yeah. We should
be deciding what a book is worth, not them. It's a problem.
Are you
envisioning bookstores going away the way that record stores did?
I think that
bookstores are going to be around, but I don't think they're going to be the
major channel. Especially if we go more and more digital.
It will be
like in music, where there's a nice little record store down the street that
nobody goes to.
They buy their
music on iTunes. I still buy CDs, but a lot of my friends don't bother. They
download it onto their iPods.
So how do we
protect our authors' interests and our interests in a situation like this where
it's very complicated and there are a lot of competing interests, including
bookstores?
Look, I don't want bookstores to go away. But I think they're
vulnerable. I just don't think we should be letting a retailer decide what a
book is worth.
What's the
bigger issue in your mind? Is it the digital stuff or is it the old issues like
returns? It's complicated because it's all happening at different speeds.
In a digital
world there would be no returns. Returns are a huge drag on our business. The
waste is just enormous, and once that is gone it will help our business
enormously.
Do you think
this digital stuff is going to happen that quickly?
Well, it seems
to be speeding up. It's still a very small part of the business, which is
something you have to keep in mind as you do your business. We're still selling
physical books, mainly, and mainly through bookstores. But everyone's obsessed
with change, and everyone's afraid that if they aren't on top of it, they're
going to be eaten. And they should be afraid. But in the meantime we have to
continue publishing the old fashioned way. That's the thing about these kinds
of changes: They're all add-ons. Yes, you're doing Internet marketing, but
you're still doing all of the old processes too. So that's a strain on our
systems—we have to do all of this R&D. But still, as I said earlier, when
the dust has cleared from this crisis we're in, I think we'll have a smaller
business but a healthier business.
How do you
feel about paperback originals?
I'm for them.
We're doing more of them. There's a practical problem with paperback originals,
which is that you can't pay that much for them. So you have to find an author
who understands that. People always say, "Why don't you do this book as a
paperback original?" Well, fine. But the advance available for that is going to
be about a quarter of what you might get if we did it in hardcover. We still
haven't solved that. But we're doing it more and I think it's the right way to
publish a lot of books. And if it works, it can launch an author and later they
can do a hardcover book.
You have
voiced concerns about the model of conglomerate publishing and its demands of
growth in a notoriously low-growth business. When you look toward the future
and think about what's best for authors—serious authors—what would be the
best publishing industry of the future look like?
I think small is
beautiful. I think small houses like yours and mine are very hospitable to
serious writers because they become part of the family. It's a family business
in many ways. When a relationship is good, and when the results are good, the
author becomes part of the family of the publishing house. There's a kind of
collaborative emotional component. The fact is, in the digital world where
everybody can do everything at his own desk, it's not like you have to go to a
Simon & Schuster to get your book published effectively. It can be done by
anybody who's a pro. What you get in the small house is a connection with
someone who understands you and can promote your work with a personal
commitment.
Do you feel
like the big, publicly traded media companies might give up on book publishing?
I actually think
there is going to be more consolidation. Look at something like Penguin. They
have a lot of little pods—that's their approach—and it works well for them. I
think it's possible that some of these companies will get spun off. But if I
were running one of these big companies I would try to have smaller entities
within them. I don't really know the answer. Look at what's happening to
Houghton Mifflin. It's so sad. The midsize companies have really been squeezed
worse than the small ones.
A few years
before FSG was sold, you said the company was doing well because it wasn't able
to play "the money game." Now that you are able to play the money game, and
sometimes do pay big advances, why would you say you're doing well?
I think we've
stayed pretty close to our mission. I think we've become more focused as a
publisher. With regard to big advances, I'll tell you a dirty little secret. I
think that very often the big advances you pay, at least for a company like
ours, don't end up having the result you want. Sometimes you just have to pay
them. But the real successes, which make the difference in our business, don't
come from the books for which we pay big money. When we pay a big advance our
job is to earn back what we gave the author so that we come out
clean—basically break even or make a small profit. Whereas a book where we
start much lower, and go a big distance, is much more mutually profitable. That
model is also much more what we ought to be about, I think.
So, no, there aren't books that we can't buy because of money. When Becky Saletan was here we had the chance to bid on Hillary Clinton's book. And we did. We bid a lot of money. I always knew we wouldn't get it because we were being used to bid up Simon & Schuster. We all knew that. We didn't offer as much as they did, but we offered a lot of money, and I suppose we would have made that money back. But we're a small house, and a big advance that doesn't work out can do a lot more damage to us, relatively speaking, than it does to a Simon & Schuster, which takes a lot of bets all the time. So yes, we do pay big advances sometimes, especially for our established authors, but the real lifeblood of our business is not in doing that.
Do you think
the proliferation of big advances will ever change?
I think it is
changing. Books that seem like a sure thing are always going to be worth a lot
of money, but I don't think they're worth quite as much as they were. And if
they don't work out? I think there's more realism, even on the part of the
really big authors.
When you find
yourself in a situation where you're bidding aggressively on a book, how do you
decide whether to go further or to stop?
We try to decide
beforehand what we think the book is worth—we do P&Ls and all of those
calculations—and stick to it. And most of the time we're pretty disciplined.
But when we stretch? It's because of belief in the author, the prospect of a
long-term relationship, and passion. But if you stretch beyond the prudent
level it can feel like, "Where's the morning-after pill? Sure, that was really
great sex, but...." I'd much rather have that experience when we publish the book.
Tell me about
the moments when you feel the burden of your office.
It's no fun to
tell an editor they can't do something they really want to do. It's no fun to
have an unpleasant conversation with an author or an agent. I like to make
people happy, if I can. But I've found that it's just like anything else: The
anticipation of those things is usually much worse than actually carrying them
out. I mean, I've been fired, so I know what it's like on both sides. This will
probably sound callow, but it's usually better for everyone. If it's happening,
it's happening because something isn't working. So it's better for both parties
to cut their losses and start anew.
So many
people in the industry admire you. I'm curious about some of the people who you
admire the most.
There are so
many of them. I'm not very good at pulling names out of hats so I'm sure I'll
wake up tomorrow and think, "Why didn't I mention this person or that person?"
When I was starting out I had a huge amount of admiration for Bob Gottlieb. He
was just one of many people I admired, but I thought that he was good at so
many different kinds of publishing. He sort of set the standard, in fiction
especially. These days I admire Sonny [Mehta] very much. I admire Pat
[Strachan] a great deal. I admire Morgan [Entrekin]. He's the last of the breed
that Roger was, as an independent publisher. He does it in a different way than
Roger because the competitive playing field is less even than it was when Roger
was doing it, but he's definitely a gent and a man of great integrity and a
wonderful publisher. He's really good for our business. I admire Graywolf
Press—I think Fiona McRae does a fantastic job. I admire Lynn Nesbit, among a
lot of other agents who have been great for our business.
What makes
you admire somebody?
I admire people
who are having fun doing what we do and who do it with passion and devotion and
integrity—and do it really well. I mean, you have to remember that I was a
very slow starter in this business. I slogged along for a long time until I had
some good fortune and found a place where I could do what I believed in. I
think the thing I really admire... Pat is a good example. She's just kept doing
what she believes in, very, very consistently, for a long time. Drenka [Willen]
is another editor I admire in the same way. I admire Norton—they've stuck to
what they do. I grieve for places like Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, whose
approach to publishing seemed very right and true. I just think that they were
eviscerated by their owners, and it's a terrible shame. Jonathan Burnham is a
very formidable competitor and someone I admire a lot.
How are you
feeling about Grand Central after losing Scott Turow to them?
I'm very fond of
them, actually. Jamie Raab called me and there are no hard feelings. I'm
absolutely sure that it wasn't a case of Grand Central going after him. I think
Scott decided that he needed to take a new tack in his career. I'm sure he
decided to go to them because they have his paperbacks. And their approach to
publishing is different than ours. In the days when we sold our paperback
rights, we sold more books to Warner [now Grand Central], at a certain point,
than anyone. They were very good. I also admire St. Martin's Press—they do a
fabulous job.
Did you read
the proposal for the book they just bought about the history of FSG?
I did read it.
It came into my hands. I actually thought that Boris [Kachka] got the story
really well. I mean, I don't know who's going to want to read it.... [Laughter.]
Did they come
to you and ask if they could buy it?
They asked if we
had any objections and I said no. I don't think we should be censoring things
like that. I don't think there are any dirty secrets to tell. I'm sure there
are juicy stories, but I don't think there's anything to hide.
Are there any books that you feel embarrassed
for not having read?
There are a lot of great books that I haven't
read. I've never read Bleak House, for example. I've never read The Brothers
Karamazov.
I haven't read Thomas Bernhard. How's that? [Laughter.]
Do you have any big regrets?
If I had been a different person, I might have
tried to be a writer instead of getting a job. My friend Jim Atlas went off and
wrote his Delmore Schwartz book after school. I've always thought that was a
very gutsy thing to do. I always admired his courage and craziness in doing
that, and he wrote a great book and it paid off. Or look at someone like
Jonathan Franzen, who went and sat in a room for five years and wrote The
Twenty-seventh City. I've always thought, "That's heroic." And I'm not heroic. So I don't know if
that's a regret but it's definitely a Walter Mittyish admiration for people who
do that.
I regret that I was too callow to make my time at Random House productive. I never learned how to operate in that system. I had been coddled at Houghton Mifflin, and I think I was cocky, and then I came up against the monolith of Random House. They weren't bending to do things my way and I should have tried to figure out how to do things their way. I think I could have learned more.
You grieve over relationships. We published Oscar Hijuelos's book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was another book I did with Harriet. It won the Pulitzer Prize and did wonderfully. We did one more book together, and it didn't go terribly well, and then he left. That was sad—we had been very close and we aren't any more. I'm regretful that my time working with Scott Turow is over and that we aren't going to be publishing the sequel to Presumed Innocent, which would have been a lot of fun. I'm regretful that Tom Wolfe had to leave FSG. I'm regretful that Pat Strachan left FSG all those years ago. It would have been fun to have worked together and it would have been enriching for us. I'm very regretful that Philip Roth left Farrar, Straus. I think that was unnecessary, and it was very sad. It was a real loss for us—he was a perfect FSG author. I regret that Joseph Brodsky died so young and that Thom Gunn is no longer with us.
The more I think about it, the more regrets I have. [Laughter.]
At the end of the day, what's the most
rewarding part of your job?
It's the intimacy with the author—the love affair
with the author. When you're reading the author's book, it's as intimate as any
love experience, really. And if you can give them the kind of unconditional
love and support that goes with that, and they feel that you're on their side,
and doing good things for them, they give that love back to you. The connection
with the author is very moving. And then a core of trust is built and you're
sort of bound together at the hip in this aspect of life. That's one of the
best feelings in the world. That's what it's all about for me.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: Jonathan Galassi
As part of his ongoing series of interviews with publishing professionals, Jofie Ferrari-Adler stopped by the office of Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of FSG, and asked him what he would change about his job if he could.
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents
In "Goodbye to All That," her 1967 essay about the years she spent in New York City as a young writer, Joan Didion recalls trying to coax a world-weary friend into attending a party by promising him "new faces." Her friend "laughed literally until he choked" before explaining that "the last time he had gone to a party where he'd been promised ‘new faces,' there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men."
Several decades later, the details may be different—casual sex? what's that?—but the literary world is every bit as small as it was in Didion's heyday. The agents who congregated at the offices of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for this conversation (and who were chosen, it should be noted, by the editors ofthis magazine) are not new faces—to one another or to me. During our talk, one of them said that she hopes to "grow old together" with her clients. The same might be said of us publishing people, who, unlike Didion's friend and especially in these tough times, are likely to view our shared history as a comfort rather than a curse. Some particulars:
MARIA MASSIE worked as an agent for twelve years before joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as a partner in 2004. A few years ago Maria broke hearts all over town (mine included) when she sold Nigerian priest Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them to Little, Brown for an ungodly advance. Her other clients include Peter Ho Davies and Tom Perrotta.
JIM RUTMAN, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic for the past ten years, is mild mannered until he steps onto a basketball court—we play on a publishing team called the Jackals—at which point he turns into a ferociously competitive shooting guard who sometimes scores half our points. His clients include Charles Bock, J. Robert Lennon, and Peter Rock.
ANNA STEIN worked at three other agencies before joining the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency in 2006. Once, after a writers conference in New Orleans, Anna took me and my wife to a second-line celebration (imagine a loud, roving bacchanal) in the Ninth Ward. We made our plane, but barely. Her clients include Chloe Aridjis, Yoko Ogawa, and Anya Ulinich.
PETER STEINBERG spent twelve years at other agencies before founding the Steinberg Agency in 2007. Peter is a kind of throwback to the golden age of publishing, when men did things like hold doors open for women and send handwritten thank-you notes—not to embarrass him or anything. His clients include Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue, and John Matteson.
Let us inside your heads a little and talk about what you're looking at and thinking about when you're evaluating a piece of fiction.
STEIN: It's really hard to talk about why a piece of writing is good, and moving—even if it's funny—and what makes us keep thinking about something after we've read it. And it's incredibly subjective. That's why it's hard for agents who represent fiction, especially literary fiction, to find it. It's so rare. We can all talk about the things we don't like. When I see clichés, for example, on the first page or in the first chapter of a book, that kind of kills it for me immediately. The romance and the chemistry is just over. That's just one example of the negative side of that question, and I'm sure you guys have a million others. If I knew how to describe in language what makes me fall in love with something, then I would be a writer. All I can say is that if I read the first few pages of a novel and think, "Jesus Christ! Who the fuck is this person? Why are they letting me read this?" then that person is onto something. And we don't have that feeling very often. But when we do see it, it's so exciting.
MASSIE: Anna's right. It's like you have this moment of clarity and you recognize something that you're so absorbed with. I read a lot of things that are beautifully written where I say to myself, "Oh, this is good," but I'm not bowled over or sucked right in. It's so subjective. I can read something and pass on it and I hear, two days later, that there was a bidding war and it sold for a ton of money, but it just wasn't the thing that I was going to fall in love with.
STEINBERG: And you're okay with that.
MASSIE: You have to be okay with it because it's so subjective. I'm not necessarily going to see what somebody else sees, or read a book the way somebody else reads it. That's one thing that writers who are looking for an agent should always remember: All agents are different. Everyone has different tastes. What I like to read might be different than Anna or Peter or Jim. That's a great thing about what we do—there's so much to choose from. And what you fall in love with is a very personal choice.
RUTMAN: And the reactions are necessarily self-contained. It's impossible to articulate what you hope to find as an agent. How could you explain to somebody what moves you? Because hopefully you're capable of being moved by things that you didn't anticipate being moved by. So you sit down with something, and all the preamble is basically pointless until the moment that you actually start searching around and rummaging for your feelings and response. It might happen on word four, or it might happen on sentence seven, but if it hasn't happened by page two, will it happen on page two hundred and fifty? I wish it did. But I don't know that it does.
Are there any specific things that can make you fall in love with a piece of writing?
STEIN: I would say that being able to make me think, especially in dialogue, "Oh, shit. This person has got me. This person has just seen into what we all feel every day but don't say. This person has looked into our souls, especially the worst sides of us, and sort of ripped them open and put them on the page." Psychology, to me, is one of the most exciting things to see work well in fiction—when it comes alive on the page and is totally devastating.
STEINBERG: When you read something and think, "I can't believe they just said what I've thought in my deepest thoughts but never articulated," that is always an eye-opener for me. And it's also about reading something that doesn't seem familiar. Writers should realize that agents have a ton of material to read, and when things seem familiar, it's an easy reason to pass. If it's something that's new, it really makes a huge difference. And I'm not talking about something being so wildly creative that it's ridiculous—not a talking plant falling in love with a turtle or something like that. I'm talking about, in a real sense, something that is genuinely new and also deeply felt. That's what we're all looking for. But at the same time, I do get things and think, "How is this like something else that has sold well?" It's a difficult balance. You have to have one foot in literature and one foot in what's going on in the marketplace.
RUTMAN: Writers probably shouldn't trouble themselves too much over that consideration. If they're aiming to hit some spot that's been working—trying to write toward the books that have made an impression—that just seems like a pretty pointless chase. You know, "I hear that circus animals are wildly appealing and I've had some thoughts about circus animals...." That doesn't seem like a very good way to go about it.
STEINBERG: A writer was just asking me about that and I said it's the agent's job to spin a book for the marketplace—to talk about it being a little like this book and a little like that book or whatever. Writers should put those kinds of thoughts out of their heads and just write.
RUTMAN: I don't know who to blame for trends. If a run of books comes out that are all set in a particular country—which happens all the time—to whom do we attribute that? To writers who are looking at things and saying, "Hmmm, I notice that fourteen years ago India was interesting to people. I think that's where I'm going to set my book"? You can't blame writers for asking what subjects are interesting these days, even when we're talking about fiction, and I wish I had a useful answer for them, but I just don't think it works that way.
STEINBERG: I would basically go with your passion. The subject matter can be very wide ranging, but if you go with your passion, even if it doesn't work, at least it's heartfelt.
STEIN: On some level, what else are you going to do? Are you going to write a novel because it's "commercially viable"? I mean, I guess people do that. But we're not going to represent them.
Because you hate money?
STEIN: We. Hate. Money. [Laughter.]
But seriously, I sometimes think that people in the business read in different ways than normal readers. Are there things that you're looking at—contextual things, like who the author is—beyond what's on the page?
STEINBERG: Those things very much take the backseat for me. It really is just what's on the page. All of that other stuff comes later. Maybe once I get a third of the way through a novel and I'm loving it, then I will look back and see who the author is and all that stuff. I think it's important to stress that the synopsis and the cover letter and all of those things are not really important. It's the work, the work, the work. You have to focus on the work. I think sometimes writers get lost in getting the cover letter and the synopsis and those kinds of professional things right because they're afraid of focusing on the work.
STEIN: I don't even read synopses. Do you guys?
STEINBERG: I skip right over them. I go to the first page.
STEIN: I hate synopses. They're terrible.
RUTMAN: It's hard to write a synopsis well. And when we're talking about literary fiction, it will probably not make or break an agent's interest going into page one. You're not like, "Oh, there's going to be an unexpected plot twist two-thirds of the way through. I'm going to hang in there long enough to find out how that goes."
STEIN: I'm still surprised when I call an editor to pitch a book and he says, "So what's the novel about?" I'm like, "You actually want me to tell you what happens in the plot? Are you serious? I mean, we can do that if you want." But that's not really the point. I don't want anyone to tell me the plot of a novel. It's so boring.
But are there any other things you're looking at beyond what's on the page? Things that maybe you can sense after years of experience.
MASSIE: Sometimes it's when you're reading a manuscript and you can see that the person is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice but the story is not quite there. But you see the potential. Sometimes you sign those people on because you think, "Okay, maybe this isn't going to be the big book, or maybe it won't even sell, but this person has a quality—they have the writing, they have the voice—and the potential is there. This writer is going to go far. And maybe the next book will be the one." I've taken people on under those circumstances.
RUTMAN: I mean, reading "professionally," if that's what we do, is a compromised process because you are reading a book with an eye toward asking somebody for money. You are reading in a different way than you are when that's not a consideration. So I think it's filtered into the experience from the beginning. You are reading to be moved, hopefully, if that's the kind of novel you work on, but at the same time it probably would be disingenuous to suggest that you're not taking in some superficial considerations. They are all distantly secondary to the work itself. Because if an agent is reading with an eye toward various recent trends that have worked, he's probably not going to succeed all that well either. The same thing is true of the reverse. Any categorical dismissal of some kind of novel feels bogus because there's got to be a counterexample for every single example. So if somebody comes along and has this long list of accolades and prizes, it doesn't damage your regard for them. And if somebody comes to you on novel fourteen, with twelve of them having done exceptionally well, and the last one maybe less well, you think about that, too. You're thinking about how difficult it could be given certain practical considerations. But it's still all pretty far receded from the work itself.
STEIN: There is the question, now more than ever, of whether or not a book is publishable. By publishable I don't mean, "Is there a great plot and is the writing amazing etcetera?" I mean that if we were in your shoes, as a publisher, how would we publish the book? What kind of jacket would we give it? How would we position it? I mean, we're talking about literary fiction? You can't publish literary fiction today. How do you do that? [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: Legally, you can, but...
STEIN: So, given that it's basically impossible, it's our responsibility as the first guard to begin to think about, "Is it possible?" And if we're so bowled over and we're so in love that we think somebody should publish it, how would we do it? This is something I really struggle with because I'm not very creative. I don't have the mind for it. I admire publishers all the more today because the ideas they come up with just amaze me. And I'm not trying to flatter them, at all, because I love to talk trash. But it really does amaze me. I'm thinking about a book right now, for example, that I want to sell. I think the author is fantastic and well positioned and that the novel is perfect—there's nothing wrong with it. But in a way it would be a funny book to publish. In a way, I don't exactly see how it fits and how it could break out. So I see the problem there, which maybe we didn't have five years ago as agents. And I see it becoming more and more of a problem as the market contracts. So I'm reading a little differently because of that. I might not be altering my habits about what I take on, but maybe I am.
STEINBERG: I think you're sort of unconsciously changing and adapting to the marketplace. I find myself doing that. I think when an agent says, "I was following my gut instinct," what that really means is accumulated wisdom and taking a lot of different variables into account. You spend your day reading Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch and you take these things into consideration. You're having lunch with editors who are saying, "Such-and-such is so hard" and you're processing all of this information. And when you open a manuscript, you're reading it with that eye. It's hard for us to say exactly how we're looking at material but I think we are taking a lot of different things into account.
Is the economy affecting how you're reading?
MASSIE: It's starting to.
STEINBERG: I would say yes too. It feels like things are tough.
MASSIE: Right before Black Wednesday I had a novel out that I was really excited about. I was getting great reads from a bunch of people who were all calling to say, "This is great. This is wonderful." And one by one they slowly disappeared on me, except for one editor, who actually ended up being the perfect editor. But I did see everything diminish. I had an idea of what the novel was going to sell for and it didn't quite get there. It was actually shocking, because it's a wonderful novel and the responses were amazing and I really did see people pull back. Her first novel had done okay but not great and all people could say was, "Her numbers are just not good enough." Her numbers were not bad for a literary novel. So that was my first moment of a little bit of fear. I haven't quite gotten to the point where I'm conscious that the economy is affecting my thinking, but I'm sure I will at some point.
RUTMAN: Especially with fiction, you're largely at the mercy of what comes in. Certainly you solicit your share, but when you're relying on the kindness of your acquaintances, or referrals, wherever they happen to come from, you can only adjust so much. But it's certainly nice to glimpse something behind the page whenever you can, whatever it may be. If a novel happens to have a nice, portable summation—if it's pitchable—that doesn't upset me.
MASSIE: If there's a hook.
STEIN: Or when the author has a platform.
MASSIE: When they've been published in the New Yorker or something.
RUTMAN: When you're reading something, one of the things you're trying to glimpse is whether you can imagine more than a few people warming up to it. But things that work in various ways...I mean, not to be indirectly nepotistic here, but on what planet should 2666 have worked commercially?
STEIN: I wasn't going to bring it up.
RUTMAN: That's why I did.
STEIN: Well, let's start with The Savage Detectives. I mean, why should anybody have finished that book, let alone have it be successful? [Laughter.] Now I'm going to say something nice about the publisher, but it really was a beautiful piece of publishing.
RUTMAN: It was exquisite. How did that work? Why did that work? I want somebody to explain it to me. Gut instincts are referred to retrospectively when they have worked—people don't really make much reference to their gut instincts when they're looking back regretfully. It's not like, "Ugh, my gut instincts. Son of a bitch." Gut instincts are wrong just as much as they're right. But there is such a thing as publishing something well, and resourcefully.
STEIN: And I find that inspiring—the fact that Lorin Stein is my brother aside—because we are in the position now where we're selling books for lowly five figures that we might have sold for six figures very recently. And I don't want to alter what I take on because of that.
RUTMAN: Do you think you would know how to alter it?
STEIN: I don't think I would.
RUTMAN: If I could see clearly enough and far enough to think, "If I just adjust my taste this much, I think I'll be a very successful person," I would think about trying it. [Laughter.] I just don't presume to know how that would work.
STEIN: But here's how I might alter. I might say, "Look, I can't take on an Icelandic writer right now." Or, "I can't afford to invest my time in editing the sample translation of this Icelandic writer right now. It's just not the time for that. Maybe when things are sunnier."
STEINBERG: I feel like I can adjust when there are natural inclinations a certain way. For instance, I was reading that young adult books are selling better than adult books. I have kids and I'm starting to read what they're reading, and I thought, "Oh, I'm sort of interested in this. Maybe I should do a little more young adult." So that's something that I've consciously done in terms of categories. I think I'll still look for the same type of material within the young adult category, but I'm definitely thinking about the category a little bit more because of the marketplace.
Where are you finding writers, aside from referrals? Are you reading literary magazines? Are you reading blogs?
MASSIE: No blogs.
RUTMAN: Not for fiction.
STEIN: Hell no.
RUTMAN: Referrals are about 75 percent of how I find writers.
MASSIE: A lot of my clients teach in MFA programs, so I get referrals from them. I get referrals from editors. I get referrals from other agents.
RUTMAN: There's a big range of where referrals come from.
STEIN: But every now and then there will be something in the slush—and I bet this is true for you guys, too—that's not just well written but is also well researched and shows that the person knows your list and is really appropriate for your list and also has published well.
MASSIE: And sometimes when I read a short story that I like I'll send an e-mail. "Are you represented?" Once in a blue moon someone's not represented.
RUTMAN: There are too many of us.
MASSIE: There are a lot of us.
STEIN: There are way too many of us.
STEINBERG: A lot of times, when people are in literary magazines, it's too late.
MASSIE: Exactly. Agents are submitting those short stories.
RUTMAN: And MFA students are going about things in an entirely different way.
STEINBERG: They're savvy.
MASSIE: They're so savvy.
STEIN: That's what they pay for.
MASSIE: I was amazed by going to MFA programs and talking to students. The first thing they want to know is, "Okay, what do I need for my query letter? What do I need for this thing or that thing?" It wasn't questions about the work. Their questions were really about the business side.
Do you think that's healthy?
MASSIE: No. I don't.
RUTMAN: Ultimately, no. If that is more of a priority than the work, it can't be all good. I mean, it's fine that they have a sort of professional track and that they're exposed to whatever realities they are ultimately going to encounter. But when they take a sort of sporting interest in it...
STEINBERG: It's a good way to eliminate potential people, for me at least. When they ask me, "What's the query letter consist of?" I usually think, "Well, that's probably not a potential client."
RUTMAN: It's true.
What do you wish beginning writers would do better?
MASSIE: Take chances. Don't worry about writing a perfect novel. Sometimes it's nice to have something that's a little bit raw and has a little bit of an edge to it. Something that's just perfect all the way through is sometimes a little boring.
STEIN: I wish they would get their friends, who may be writers or may not be writers, to read their work and tell them, "Don't say anything nice to me. I don't want to hear anything nice. I want to hear everything not nice that you have to say."
STEINBERG: And be smart about picking those people. Find your two or three friends who hate everything.
STEIN: Exactly. And have those people—those hateful friends—give you feedback before you even think about sending out your work.
STEINBERG: I would also say, once you think the work is done, work on it for another year.
STEIN: And never trust your spouse if your spouse says it's good. Your spouse has no idea. Neither do your mother or your father.
RUTMAN: Check your eagerness to share. A lot of professors may even encourage you, as a way to hasten the process along. You know, "I think it's time for the world to tell you what they think of this." It may well not be time for the world to pass judgment just yet. Hold on until you are absolutely certain that it's ready for broad, indiscriminate exposure. Don't hurry that.
STEIN: And this is a cliché for us but it seems worth saying that most writers' first novels aren't really their first novels. If you have to scrap your first novel, you'll live. Your first novel probably won't be the first novel you publish. Maybe your second one will be. But you'll live. And you'll be a better writer because of it.
What are some of the common mistakes you see in the submission process?
STEINBERG: Don't say, "If you don't like this novel, I have many other I could show you." Don't say, "This will make a great movie, too." Don't do that fake thing where you pretend you know all about the stuff I've agented. It's funny because I think that's a piece of advice that writers always gets—research the agent and talk about the other work they've sold. But it always comes off as very false to me unless you've really read something I've sold. And I don't want you to waste your time reading something of mine just to write a query letter.
STEIN: I would say to go the other way around. Write to agents whose books you're actually in love with.
STEINBERG: But what if those agents pass and you still want an agent?
STEIN: Then you should read more books. [Laughter.]
What else?
STEINBERG: Don't talk about a character sweating on the first page or two.
RUTMAN: Sweating?
STEINBERG: Yeah. It happens all the time. The writer's like, "He was sweating profusely...." It's supposed to denote tension, I think.
RUTMAN: Also don't write the phrase "sweating profusely."
STEINBERG: I have a joke in my office where if a character is sweating in the first two pages, I go, "Sweating!" [Laughter.] Also, people are always "clutching" steering wheels in the first few pages.
STEIN: That's the cliché thing.
STEINBERG: And don't wake up from a dream on the first page. No dreams on the first page.
STEIN: It's best to avoid dreams if possible.
But this is all craft stuff. Let's go back to the submission process.
STEIN: Don't write "Because of your interest in international fiction..." or whatever you think the agent's interest is. That means you've been trolling some Web site, and that freaks me out. Don't let me see that you've been trolling some Web site that says I like a certain kind of genre. If you know who I am, you should know who I am because you've done some kind of research that has to do with the specific books I represent. That should only be because you've fallen in love with one or two of those books. And that's pretty unlikely because those books haven't sold very many copies. So you probably shouldn't be writing to me to begin with. [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: "Just avoid me altogether. I haven't helped any of these people, really, and I'm not going to help you."
STEIN: Exactly. There shouldn't really be anybody writing to me at all.
STEINBERG: That's off the record, right? Can I say "Off the record" on your behalf?
STEIN: What can I say? I'm funny.
STEINBERG: And of course with the e-mail submissions, don't cc a hundred agents and say, "Dear Agent...."
STEIN: I got an e-mail query addressed to "Elizabeth" today.
MASSIE: I get those. Those are an instant delete.
STEIN: They are.
RUTMAN: Don't try to write eye-catching cover letters. It just isn't really going to enhance my anticipation going into the manuscript.
On the flip side of that, what do you want them to do? I think it can seem really hard to get an agent's attention when you live in a small town somewhere and you don't know anybody.
STEINBERG: Well, know somebody. [Laughter.] I'm serious. We're in the age of e-mail and the Internet. If you e-mail twenty of your friends and say, "Do you know anyone in publishing?" someone has to know somebody. Or somebody who knows somebody. You know what I mean? Find how you know somebody.
STEIN: But you know what? I've actually taken on several clients who didn't know anybody in publishing. I'll give you an example: Anya Ulinich, who's done pretty well for somebody who didn't know anybody. She did some research and asked herself, "Okay, I'm Russian, and my novel has something to do with Russia, so who represents Russian novels?" She did some research and targeted those agents and wrote a query letter that was just really straightforward. It was like, "Here's my deal. Here's why I'm writing to you." It was completely unpretentious and completely straightforward and well written, and because of all that and because there was nothing in it that made me think, "Oh, she's read some book that tells you how to write query letters"—it was just very natural—I asked to see pages. I don't think you have to know somebody.
STEINBERG: But it is one way of getting an agent's attention. I have a lot of clients who didn't know anyone either. But it is a good way to do it. Because when I get a query from a friend of a friend, it definitely goes in a different pile. I would also say to follow what the agent's Web site says. If it says, "Send the first twenty-five pages," do that. And don't send the thirty-third chapter of your novel. Send the first chapter.
MASSIE: And don't try too hard. Sometimes I get these queries that describe the book as a cross between this best-seller and that best-seller and ten different other things. I always find that really distracting and unhelpful.
STEIN: And don't compare the book only to movies.
RUTMAN: I feel like people have generally read something that tells them how to write, at the very least, an unobjectionable cover letter. I like it when they are fairly matter-of-fact. To me that suggests, whether it's well placed or not, a certain confidence that you're going to appreciate the pages rather than the letter. I don't have any sort of pointed advice about what people ought to do in a cover letter. It just doesn't matter that much. It's going to get read.
By your assistant. Just to play devil's advocate.
RUTMAN: Some of it, yes. But she has excellent taste. And if you're working with someone whose taste you really value and trust, they bring you the things you probably would have plucked out yourself.
MASSIE: And she's looking for certain things. Has the writer been published before? What are their credits?
RUTMAN: I think if anybody reads a certain number of cover letters they start to sense what is nice to have in a cover letter. But people generally seem to know. And if you've already published things, it suggests that you've been willing to subject yourself to some of the cruelties of the process and that you realize it's probably part of the deal.
STEIN: That's the thing. It's possible to get published in some good literary magazines without an agent. Very possible. In fact, in some places it's easier. And if you're writing fiction, and especially if you have the misfortune of being a short story writer, then you should spend a lot of time and energy getting published in those places before you start looking for an agent. Because it'll make everybody's job so much easier.
Does anybody have a success story about finding a writer in a literary magazine?
STEINBERG: I read a great short story in the Southern Review a few years ago and called the writer and eventually sold the novel-in-stories to Ann Patty at Harcourt, who's great and who unfortunately is no longer at Harcourt. It was called The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day. It's funny because I originally looked at the story because I liked the author's last name. I don't know if that means I'm superficial, but at the time I was interested in writers whose last names were words, and her last name was Day, so—
RUTMAN: This was a phase you went through?
STEINBERG: It was! I also went through a phase of looking for names with alliteration.
STEIN: Note to readers.
STEINBERG: For example, I represent a guy named Brad Barkley.
STEIN: What's your phase right now? What are you into?
STEINBERG: Now I'm in the supporting-my-three-children phase.
How's that going?
STEINBERG: It's going okay. [Laughter.]
How do you guys feel about short stories?
STEIN: If they're awesome, they're awesome. Even if we can't sell them, they're still awesome.
MASSIE: I'm with Anna. I love short stories.
And can you sell them?
MASSIE: On occasion. It's hard. It always helps if there's a novel coming. But if you've got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She's a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn't making a lot of money in the beginning, but she's going to have an amazing career.
STEIN: And here's another thing. A short story writer might end up just being a short story writer, which might be our nightmare, but what if he ends up being one of those—
MASSIE: Alice Munro or somebody.
RUTMAN: We don't really have much choice but to represent talent in whatever form it happens to come. And if it happens to come first in short story collection form, that does not make things easier, practically speaking, but it's not in itself a reason not to do it. The climate hardly encourages it, and it's not fun to call an editor and say, "What I have for you now—brace yourself—is a collection of short stories." I mean, that's like a meta-joke, I suppose, at this point. But you shouldn't just abandon it. You know it's going to be hard so you ask yourself, "How fired up am I about trying this?" With a story collection, that question is a good test of how intrinsically great you find it.
STEIN: It had better be super-duper-duper-duper good.
RUTMAN: Right. One of my colleagues gave me a collection not that long ago. It was sort of short, and the author had not really tried to publish any of them, and I took it home, sort of unhappily, and I ended up being like, "Oh. Okay. So this is a person who can do this." If you feel that way as an agent, what are you going to do, say no? It just doesn't really feel like a smart option.
STEIN: But novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it's like the novel is the new short story.
RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem...
STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story.... It's hard out there.
RUTMAN: If you're talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, "Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can't be far behind."
STEIN: There is no easy street.
RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn't exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.
STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.
STEIN: Did you make that number up?
STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.
STEIN: I think that's a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.
STEINBERG: I think all of my clients have day jobs. Writing is just not going to be a way to stop doing what you're doing for a living, probably. And I wouldn't advise it. I have clients who sometimes sell their books for a decent amount of money and are like, "Ooh, should I quit my job?" And I panic and say, "No!" It also affects your work because you start writing for the marketplace too much.
STEIN: And the money is never what the money looks like.
STEINBERG: Exactly. The money has to be gravy and not a base salary.
MASSIE: And you never know what the second book will do, versus the first one, and what the advance for the next book is going to look like.
You are all deep inside this world, but so many writers aren't. If you were a beginning writer who lived out in Wisconsin or somewhere and didn't know anybody and you were looking for an agent, how would you do it?
STEINBERG: I would not worry about looking for an agent. I would work on my writing for a long time. And then when I was finally ready, I would ask everyone I know what they thought I should do.
MASSIE: I agree with that. I would concentrate on getting published in well-regarded literary magazines and, chances are, agents will come to you.
RUTMAN: I wouldn't relish the prospect of looking for an agent if I had not come through a program, where a professor can often steer you in some helpful direction. I guess you'd start at the bookstore.
MASSIE: You pick up your favorite books and look at the acknowledgments and see who represented them and write those people a letter.
STEIN: I'm with Peter. I wouldn't worry so much about finding an agent. The thing is, there aren't that many great writers. Right? And there seem to be a lot of people trying to write novels and find agents. If you're looking for an agent, it means you want to sell your book. But if there are only a hundred people making money as writers—and I think that number sounds about right—and you're trying to sell your book to make money, then that doesn't really make sense. It's like playing the lottery. If I thought I'd written something brilliant, I would hope that, like Peter said, I would be continuing to work on my writing.
RUTMAN: But don't you think most people who are working on their writing feel kind of persuaded that they are brilliant and have something really unique and wonderful to say?
STEIN: I also think they feel this pressure to get published. With all the MFA programs, and with all the writing conferences and programs that they pay money for, there's this encouragement to get published.
RUTMAN: Sure. It's the stated goal.
STEIN: Right. That's the goal. But for 99 percent of people writing fiction, that shouldn't necessarily be the goal. Maybe writing should be the thing they work on for many years and then maybe they should think about getting published.
RUTMAN: I think being published has come to feel, for reasons I can't explain, too achievable. To take a step back, I think the idea of writing a book has come to seem too achievable. I don't know what to attribute that to. It may be the fact that famous people have access to people who can write a tolerable book for them, which might create the impression that most of us should be thinking about writing a book. I think it used to feel rightfully daunting to write a book. People should be daunted by the prospect of writing a book—and more than they may be at the moment. I'm not saying that writing can't be a hobby. But professionalizing it? That's a whole other step, and you then expose yourself to a whole other set of challenges and disappointments that you have to take into consideration. But at some point I feel like there was some kind of fundamental shift that made writing a book—and finishing it and publishing it—seem like not that big a deal. Or not a big enough deal.
STEINBERG: One thing we should convey is how rare it is that a great piece of fiction crosses our desks from someone new.
ALL: Yes.
STEINBERG: It happens maybe, what, once a year? Twice a year? That's it. It's so rare. So for people in Wisconsin who might be reading this and trying to figure out how to get published, they should keep that in mind. That's why stressing the work is so important—because it's so rare that something extraordinary crosses our desks. I like to think that all of our instincts are good enough, and we're well trained enough, and we've done this long enough, to recognize it when it arrives. But that aspect of it can't be stressed enough, which is why I say to work on it for a long time. You also only get one shot with an agent. There are no do-overs. When we get letters that say, "I know you passed on this six months ago but I've rewritten it," it's difficult to look at it again. You really do only get one shot.
Do you guys feel competitive with other agents?
RUTMAN: I'm not sure I feel that competitive. I'm definitely envious of other agents. [Laughter.] But that's not the same thing.
STEIN: I know Jim's not competitive because we were competing for a client once and both of us are so uncompetitive that he was like, "No, no, Anna's so great," and I was like, "No, no, Jim's so great."
Who won?
STEIN: Jim.
RUTMAN: Competitive just feels like the wrong word. I can apply competitiveness to all kinds of other arenas but I have trouble, for some reason, doing it here. Because even competing for a client feels...I mean, maybe if I was a huge rock star I would just sit back and point at my shelf and say, "That's why you should be represented by me." When that's not really an option it becomes a charm expedition. You're trying to persuade somebody that you care enough, or that you see enough in what they've done, to suggest to them that you would be the right person for the job.
Tell me a little about how you view your jobs. How do you think about your obligations and responsibilities to your clients?
RUTMAN: The responsibilities are so amorphous and encompassing that it's hard to sum up. I've never done it very successfully. I guess the boundaries are fairly few. You're trying to find books that you believe in and feel like you'd be doing the author and yourself a favor by involving yourself with, and then you're advising them about its readiness to be exposed to these calculating strangers, and then you choose the strangers you're going to share it with, and then, if you're lucky enough to have options among those strangers, you're telling them which one is best. And then the book gets published and the landscape changes to a whole new level of abstraction about what constitutes a good publication experience and what doesn't. And how many people wind up being published without feeling aggrieved or getting less than what they could have from the experience? A lot of people are disappointed by it. It's a pretty boundary-less relationship. It extends into all kinds of areas that are personal, that involve editorial work, that involve.... The editorial part's nice because at least it's a place to stop. It's also, for my money, the most interesting part of the process. You're talking about something that, presumably, has moved you enough to want to think and discuss.
STEIN: It sounds so cheesy to say, and everyone will agree with it, but the job is about finding books that you feel should exist in the world, and should for a long time. I mean, this summer I read Anna Karenina, and it made it impossible for me to even think about taking on a book for months. It's really important for us to read published books that we don't represent while we're reading our own clients' books. It's important for us to stay current, but also to read classics. And it reminded me of why I really do what I do. It's because I want the books I represent to be important, and for a long time. I don't want to sell a book just to sell a book. I want each one to matter. I mean, that's a little heavy, and none of your books is ever going to be Anna Karenina—Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina, let's not touch it—but that's the idea.
RUTMAN: That's why the job is interesting. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that that could happen. It won't necessarily be Anna Karenina, but you can find something that you didn't expect, and you can glimpse stuff in it that you couldn't anticipate, and the writer can change the way you think about something. That is, in a job, a pretty interesting thing, even if it remains largely in the realm of possibility. It's still a nice possibility to encounter on a daily basis. I mean, that's better than most jobs I've been able to conceive of as possibilities for myself.
MASSIE: It's terrific. It means that you learn something every day. You pick something up and you don't know what world it's going to take you to or what it will teach you, and that's an incredible thing. I think that's one of the wonderful things about what we do. If you find something that you're blown away by, you actually can help get it to a larger audience. It's amazing when people will say to you, "I read that book you represented. God, that was amazing. It really affected me." That's a great feeling.
How about your responsibilities?
MASSIE: I sometimes feel like a cross between a mother, a shrink, an accountant, a lawyer.... You wear so many different hats on a daily basis. You're juggling so many things, and the clients are so different. They all have different personalities and one person needs handholding or reassurance after every rejection letter and others just want to hear from you when there's news. It's different with everybody. I haven't ever seen myself as doing one thing. I mean, with one client you're going over royalty statements and with another you're hearing about her marriage or some trauma she's going through. It's a pretty intimate relationship.
STEINBERG: It's a friendship.
MASSIE: It's a relationship. You have your ups and downs, and the good and the bad, and it's the mark of a really great relationship with an author that you can weather the storms and get through the good publications and the bad publications, the good reviews and the bad reviews.
RUTMAN: We're like disappointment brokers.
STEIN: That's why trust is so important.
MASSIE: Trust is key.
STEIN: That's why, from the very beginning of the relationship, the more up-front you are, the better. The way you approach an agent says so much about your personality and your character. So if you're very straightforward in your query letter and cover letter, that shows us something. And if we're going to have a long-term and trusting relationship, that's important. Let's say you have several agents interested in you. Let's say you go with one agent and you don't tell the other agents, or you're somehow a little dishonest about the process. Things might not work out with that agent—that agent might move to Wisconsin for some reason and decide to leave publishing—and you're going to have to face those other agents. It's just really important to have integrity and to be honest and to be gracious from the very beginning.
STEINBERG: I think we've all done this long enough that we can sort of suss out when someone's being false or fake or dishonest. So you really shouldn't even try.
RUTMAN: Because if you start to get the sense, early enough in the process, that someone seems like trouble, those suspicions are rarely misleading or without some kind of foundation. One time I was in the rare position of dealing with a writer who was wildly and indisputably talented but came with some warning signs. Actually they weren't warning signs so much as actual warnings from people who knew the writer and said, "I'll be up-front with you. This writer is remarkable in the most important ways and a challenge in a great many other ways."
STEIN: "Totally insane" is what they probably said.
RUTMAN: Yeah, that's what they meant. So what do you do? Is it a measure of how heroic an agent you are if you take them on? Is it a good idea? I'm not so sure that it is.
STEIN: I tried that once. I took on somebody who was insanely talented but also insane. And I tried to be heroic. I tried my very, very best. And it ended, not only in tears, but in legal fees. I made a New Year's resolution: No more. No more crazy ones, ever again.
STEINBERG: It's not worth it. Life's too short.
MASSIE: There are also the clients who are blamers. They're always looking for somebody to blame. They're like, "That person didn't do this" or "You didn't do that."
STEIN: Those are agent-jumpers.
MASSIE: Exactly.
STEINBERG: That's another reason why writers should make sure it's the right match. You don't want to switch agents unless you have to. If you have to tell an agent, "Oh, I've had two agents and it hasn't worked out," the new agent will perceive that as a warning sign. Unless it's legitimate. Sometimes things don't work out or the personalities just aren't right.
STEIN: But in general, everybody wants the relationship to work. I mean, we're all pretty young and we're not naïve, but we are a little bit romantic or otherwise we wouldn't be in this industry—obviously there's no money in it. We go into the relationship thinking, "We want to grow old together." It's a real relationship. It's like a marriage. We want to grow old together. So if it doesn't work out it's usually for pretty serious reasons.
STEINBERG: My clients and I talk about growing old together. We sort of joke about it. "When we're old we'll do this or that."
MASSIE: Right. It always worries me when you're talking to a writer about representing them and they ask, "So, do you work on a book-by-book basis?" I'm like, "No. I do not work on a book-by-book basis." I'm not interested in working on a book-by-book basis. For me it's a long-term relationship.
STEINBERG: That's one of the reasons why you take on short story writers. You see the relationship in a long-term way—you're trying to see the forty-year arc. And when you work with storytelling so much, one thing you learn is that there's a story arc to the client-agent relationship, too. You have an arc of a story in the way that your relationship develops.
What are the hardest decisions you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it's books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.
STEIN: Or you take the preempt because you know it's the right house, or you take the lower offer because you know it's the right house. And you hope that you're right.
MASSIE: Another hard one is telling an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you're not happy with it, or you just don't see it or know what to do with it. That's a really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you've worked with for a long time. For me, at least, that's the hardest conversation I ever have.
STEIN: Firing a client.
STEINBERG: Or not being able to sell her work. That's one of the hardest things about the business. You take things on because you inherently love them. That's why you do it. You think you'll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to that end of the road where you've done your second round of submissions and wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass. That's a very difficult conversation.
STEIN: And that's the novel that haunts you for years. That's the novel you think is, in some ways, the best novel you've ever taken on.
But that's not a decision you have to make.
RUTMAN: We're just eager to get to the "What are the worst features of the job?" question. Can we skip right to that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though, deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn't guiding me very authoritatively and I can't decide whether I ought to be working with a book or not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each other enough to make it hard to decide.
When you guys find yourselves in that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it's something brand new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it's about the writer. If I have an editorial conversation with the writer, and I'm sort of feeling out the situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they're with me, and I feel like we'll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I feel like we won't work well together, for any number of reasons, then the decision becomes much easier.
MASSIE: If I'm on the fence for too long it's not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something, I'm jumping all over it. So if I'm on the fence it's probably not good for the writer and it's not good for me. If I can't imagine myself getting on the phone and calling ten editors and saying, "I love this. You should read this right now," then it's probably not right for me. It also wouldn't be fair to the author for me to take it on.
RUTMAN: You're right. It's not fair to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I'm just not sure what I think, and I'll react differently to a book on different days. I've certainly had the experience where I return to a manuscript and think, "I was wavering about this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on." And, less happily, the reverse. It's nice to have access, or confident access, to your feelings.
STEINBERG: It's also nice to know when you're not ready to make a decision. "I'll wait till tomorrow because I'm in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is." And I also use the phone call as a sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I'm not really on the fence that often. I think that's a good thing.
MASSIE: I just know from experience that if I take something on that I've been on the fence about, it won't necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I totally love it, that's at the top of my list all the time. If I've been on the fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, "Okay, I'm on the good side of the fence now," I've been there and I can sense that it won't take priority and I'm not going to give it as much as I should. It's just not fair to the author. It's not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours in the day.
STEINBERG: I think editors can sense it too.
MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.
STEINBERG: Just as we're good at sensing things, they're good at knowing when the agent isn't enthusiastic enough.
STEIN: And you will see all the doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it's something where you're really guns blazing—if you really love it—when you see the rejection letters you think, "You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. You're out of your mind!" And that's how you should feel all the time.
MASSIE: Exactly. You see the rejections and you think, "No. I don't agree at all. You don't know what you're talking about!"
RUTMAN: When you strenuously disagree with a rejection, that's a really reliable gauge. Because a fair number of times I think, "Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose I can see your point." When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.
STEINBERG: I think it's also the art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I'm cursed with is that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of that. Invariably, whenever I don't listen to my own instincts and fix that thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says the very thing that I should have fixed. It's like, "Damn. Listen to your instincts." That's a big part of the job these days, especially because editors are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think, "Oh, I figured it out. This is how I'm going to pass on this book." You can't give them that. You can't let them find their entry point to pass.
STEIN: Which is why we'll have that extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, "This is how you can publish this book. I've already thought it through and this is how you can publish it."
STEINBERG: It'll be like a marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.
MASSIE: Exactly. That's got to be the next thing, right?
STEINBERG: That's depressing.
Tell me a little about how you spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.
MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.
RUTMAN: Not reading.
MASSIE: I never read in the office.
STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel. Trains. Planes.
MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony Reader.
STEIN: I can't get mine to work. I can't get it to charge.
Sony's not going to be happy to hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag to make it up to me. [Laughter.]
MASSIE: I don't know about you guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.
RUTMAN: Sometimes I feel like a typist.
MASSIE: You're just dealing with whatever's in front of you. Answering questions. Sending things out.
RUTMAN: How many stray issues are floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable questions are hovering at any given moment?
STEIN: By the afternoon I can start returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is just an e-mail suck.
STEINBERG: It's reactive.
STEIN: Exactly. It's e-mail suck reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say "after lunch" I don't necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don't necessarily go to lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you're submitting a book, in which case it takes up the whole day.
What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.
MASSIE: Home to the kids.
RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]
STEIN: If I'm not going out, I work until nine. Not that I do that often, but that's what I do. And I'm not reading manuscripts. It's more of the same stuff.
So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I don't go into the office. I've tried that before and thought, "Okay, I'll do some work and then I'll read for a few hours." But it just doesn't work. You get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I'll go straight to Starbucks or somewhere that's not my office and read or work on some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.
STEIN: I won't take a manuscript into my bedroom.
MASSIE: I don't either.
STEIN: Only books.
MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.
STEIN: For me it's twenty-five. Not that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say twenty-five so that I make it to maybe eight.
MASSIE: I have to do that to clean my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every night.
STEINBERG: I love to read on airplanes. I get so excited. I'm like, "I'm going to read this whole thing!" That's a great feeling.
STEIN: As long as there aren't really good movies on the plane.
STEINBERG: I have a rule that I won't buy the headphones.
STEIN: I don't have a TV at home, so I get very excited when I'm in front of one. [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: I also have a rule that if I'm on a train or something, I'm not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I have to do work. But I'm allowed to look at other people's newspapers.
You mentioned before that editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I'm curious what else you see as changing about your jobs. Or what's getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that's changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I've made an adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material, they're sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don't know how that affects what I submit yet, but it's certainly something I'm thinking about.
STEIN: With nonfiction I think about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We also fall in love with nonfiction, but there's a measure of practicality that goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I'm particularly interested in politics but I haven't wanted to take on a political nonfiction book in several years. And I don't envision wanting to anytime soon. Well, aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?
What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn't he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or Reggie Love.
STEIN: But if I'm interested in something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether there's a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our times. That's not something that's different from ten years ago or five years ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more important. There just isn't room for books that are kind of interesting to some people anymore.
MASSIE: I think about the lack of book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review sections. I think about that in terms of "How is a book going to get out there? How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?" When you think about how overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many books they're working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, "Oh, God. What should we be doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?" Because there's no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.
So what should writers be doing? What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box. To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you'd have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a checklist you'd go down. "We're going to send it to the newspapers and the magazines and this, this, this, and this." That doesn't exist anymore. It's a whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really have to think, "Well, how do people find out about books? Where do they hear about them?"
And what are you learning about that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word of mouth. It seems like there's a critical mass that a book has to achieve in order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don't, how do you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what you have to do.
STEIN: I do think, with literary fiction, it's about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don't read. When I say that I'm joking, but I'm also not joking. I should say the bloggers who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking. Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that's not something you can tell your author to be. You can't tell your author, "When you do your readings, make the audience fall in love with you."
RUTMAN: "Be more charismatic." [Laughter.]
STEIN: That's something that just happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn't have sold as well as they do now. But they're just the right thing for the blogging atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There's something underground about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I think it's going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn't before, and that's why we have to think about how to publish each book individually in a way that we didn't have to before.
What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in making the book work. And they made it work.
But that sounds like an exception to me.
STEINBERG: That's my point. We have to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are stumped. That's why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more. Publicists are sort of like, "Well, no, we don't know what to do. We're not really sure." They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that's gone. One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn't put "I think this could be a great movie" in their query letter, is, "Could this novel become a movie?" I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk, and before the movie version of Fight Club came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred thousand copies in the first few months. So that's something I think about. I'm like, "Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients." If a book is made into a movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.
STEIN: This is kind of an abstract thing to say, and I don't know exactly what I mean because it hasn't happened yet, but I think the agent's relationship with publishers has to change a little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do their part so we don't have to be adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody.... Look, we're all in a sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there's a little bit of editors not wanting to tell agents what's really going on and agents feeling like they have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and ask for numbers, ask what's going on with publicity, ask about the marketing plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn't have to do that. We're partners in this thing, and we're all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn't have to feel that way, and the editors shouldn't have to feel like they have to keep secrets. I mean, if there's a secret, or if there's something to feel ashamed about, we should figure out what to do about it.
RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there's no such thing, really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply appreciated. I find that when a book works, it's almost always in that situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem and the editor is inclined to update you because they're pleased with the way everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—
STEINBERG: It feels like pulling teeth.
RUTMAN: Or there's just nothing planned.
STEIN: But Jim, let's say you do have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it's best that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the author—because it's the author's job too—can all save the day as much as possible. It's just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can't be all hands on deck if everybody doesn't know what's going on.
MASSIE: There's no transparency. You ask, "What's in the budget? What's in the marketing plan?" You're constantly asking and you think, "Why can't you just know what's in the budget for this book? Why can't you know what's being allocated for this book?" They're like, "We'll see, we'll see, we'll see." No.
RUTMAN: I think there's an assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—
MASSIE: But it's so much better to know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what else you can do. It's so frustrating to constantly.... Managing an author, especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out what you have to work with is so frustrating.
STEIN: They aren't used to this new wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: It's also this frustrating catch-22 where they don't throw money at a book until it does well.
MASSIE: Which means it's not going to do well. That kills me.
STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn't going to do well unless you're actively doing something for it. You can't just wait and see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.
I hope you know that that's frustrating to editors, too. We aren't the ones making those budgeting decisions.
STEIN: That's my point. If nobody else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with something that might work.
STEINBERG: It's hard. Sometimes you get to that conversation and you're like, "Let's think of those out-of-the-box things that no one usually does, and let's do them," and there's sort of silence on the phone.
MASSIE: Total silence. They're like, "Um..."
STEINBERG: You can hear the crickets. They're like, "Well, anyway, I've gotta go..."
MASSIE: "I'll think about that and get back to you!"
STEINBERG: "I'm going to brainstorm tonight and I'll get back to you tomorrow."
But what are the out-of-the-box things that are working?
MASSIE: I think it depends on the book. But I also think about, "Does John Grisham really need a full-page ad in the New York Times every time he has a new book. Really? Does he? Is he not going to sell those books?"
STEINBERG: His agent would say yes.
MASSIE: Fine. But do the authors who are so well established really need the biggest piece of the marketing budget? Their audience is there. They know when their books are coming out. They're there and waiting. Why not use that money for establishing an author?
STEIN: Think about when a really big band goes on tour. They always have a couple of opening bands, and those opening bands get exposure. So why isn't Grisham giving some exposure to a young writer or two? Why isn't he doing the same thing? Why isn't he going on tour and saying, "This is my opening act and I'm supporting them"?
MASSIE: That's a great idea.
STEINBERG: I think somebody like Stephen King has thought of that and is doing it in Entertainment Weekly.
MASSIE: Stephen King definitely does that.
STEIN: Absolutely.
RUTMAN: A book campaign gets interesting when it starts to look like another industry's campaign. I was lucky enough to work on a book where we did really cool tour posters, for example. And one day the author suggested, "Hey, it would be really nice if you guys would print up some guitar picks. I would throw them out to people at readings." The publicist said, "That's a great idea. Let's print up some guitar picks." That doesn't take a huge effort, and I don't know that it made the difference for the book, but swag is always appreciated. I'm not saying that that's a uniformly good approach, but thinking about a book as a potentially cool object—something you could covet in a way that you might covet some other cultural product—is, I suppose, the way it's going. Publishers probably don't need to be encouraged to treat books more like products, but at the same time, something basic is changing, isn't it? I mean, if book review outlets are as fleeting as they are.
STEINBERG: I think we're in an in-between time period. Reviews are going away but there's nothing there to take their place. It will be the Internet in some form, but nobody knows how, exactly.
STEIN: If those short-form book reviews that are just like, "This is the book, here is the plot, thumb up, thumb down, or thumb in-between," are the ones going away, so be it. If what's left behind are the book reviews that actually say something about books, great. Let's do something exciting with what used to be the space for those, frankly, boring synopses of books.
STEINBERG: I think we can also take a lesson from something I saw in a bookstore in Salt Lake City once. I was there for a writers conference. I went into the YA section and all of these teenage girls were talking about books as if they were cool. I was like, "That's what we have to do. We have to make books cool again." How do we do that? I don't know.
RUTMAN: Was there a time when books were cool? I guess there was.
STEINBERG: I don't know. But the vibe in that YA section? Those girls were all like, "Oooh, what did you read?" They were trying to one-up each other with what they'd read. It was amazing.
RUTMAN: Kids talk about books differently than adults do, and that's why a handful of YA books are such spectacular successes. There's this unself-conscious discussion and inclination to share. I don't know how we appropriate that and make it a possibility for adults. When we're considering a manuscript, one of the things that we're trying to glimpse is whether or not it might be adopted by book clubs. How often do you get something that you feel could become the subject of conversation among people who, you know, maybe their first inclination is not to evaluate the merits of a book. And the books that tend to get that far probably don't do it because of an especially successful campaign. The frustrating possibility we're always forced to consider is that it's not really within anyone's control, even if a publisher makes a really concerted effort. Part of our job, and certainly part of our responsibility, is to see that the publisher carries out its duty as fully and faithfully as possible. But they certainly do that and books still fail to reach more than a few souls. I don't know what makes people like books. There's a basic mystery.
STEIN: But I just saw Revolutionary Road this weekend and walked out of the movie and could hear everyone saying, "Have you read the book? Have you read the book?" I thought, "Thank God. Thank God people are saying that." And that book is on the best-seller list now.
I find that amazing. It's one of the bleakest books of all time and it's been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
STEIN: It's totally bleak, and it's brilliant, and it's so much better than the movie, not because the actors didn't give it their best shot but because Sam Mendes was a terrible director.
STEIN: But that's the thing. People want to read that book. That's exciting. It's cool and it's hot and it's depressing all at the same time. And maybe after they read Revolutionary Road they'll want to read another depressing novel. It's cool to read depressing novels.
RUTMAN: There's little that I find cooler.
You guys work on commission. How does that affect the decisions you make when it comes to selling a book where maybe you have multiple offers?
STEINBERG: It's always a combination of the money and the right place. What that combination is varies, but you have to take both into account. I've taken less money a lot of times to have the right publisher—probably not a lot less money—but a little less money to be published in the right place.
MASSIE: The right place for a little less money, over time, could be more money. It can't just be about the money. There are so many different factors.
STEINBERG: An advance is an advance against royalties, and royalties are an aspect of it.
MASSIE: Right. And if you don't earn out that advance, your next one may not be as big.
STEIN: And to clarify, when we say "the right place" we mean the place we think will be just as enthusiastic, or even grow more enthusiastic, from the moment they buy the book until it's published, and make it a best-seller if possible. And the place where the book won't disappear if, you know, Alan Greenspan or Hillary Clinton or Obama happens to pop up on their list.
STEINBERG: Stability is also important these days. I was selling a book recently and there were a few publishers that I'd heard weren't doing so well. I definitely took that into account. Because it can take a year or two for a book to be published after you sell it. Will that place be around in two years? Will the editor be around? Stability is so important to writers, which is why this time period is even tougher than you may think.
RUTMAN: What we do is really hard, readers. We just need you to know that.
STEIN: We have to think a lot. [Laughter.]
You're joking but my wife is an agent and I know that it is really hard. Especially when you're less established than some people. How do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I thought you were going to ask, "How do you pay your rent?" [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: If you want to talk about what's at the forefront of our minds....
But seriously, how do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I don't. I don't think that I compete with people who are more established. I think they throw me a bone every now and then, if they're too busy. People who are really established? If they want a writer? I don't think I'm going to compete with somebody who's been in the business for twenty-five years. I think that's unreasonable. Why would I compete with somebody who's been in the business for twenty-five years? Unless it's a perfect match, for some reason. I just can't see a competitive situation unless, for example, a writer is recommended to an agent who's been in the business for a long time and some younger agents and there's very good chemistry and a good match. I think that experience in this industry is really invaluable, and I respect experience a lot. So if I were in the shoes of a writer who was choosing between good chemistry with somebody with a lot of experience and good chemistry with somebody who was young, I would probably go with the person with a lot of experience.
RUTMAN: The only thing at your disposal in that situation—if you're at an experience and success quotient disadvantage—is the quality of the attention that you can offer the writer.
STEIN: That's true.
RUTMAN: And that's what you're presenting to them. It's like, "Look, I will talk to you more often."
MASSIE: "And I won't pass you off to my assistant."
RUTMAN: And we're probably going to be more engaged in things that they want to be engaged in. You know, talking about what's wrong with the material in a closer way than somebody else. What else can you really offer? And that's something.
STEIN: "I'll edit your book."
RUTMAN: All you can really do is try to work up superior chemistry to the chemistry you think they may be working up with somebody who just doesn't have the time or inclination for them in the way that you might. I also don't like to know—I don't need or want to know—who I'm competing with.
MASSIE: I don't either. I never want to know.
And they should never tell you, either.
MASSIE: Some people do, though.
But they shouldn't.
MASSIE: You're right.
RUTMAN: They shouldn't. You want to say, "Really? Oh, she's really good. She likes this? Congratulations!"
STEIN: But how do you guys feel about this. If there's an agent who you really respect—who's been in the industry for a long time and who you may even think of as a mentor—and if you were a writer, wouldn't you go with somebody like that, even if you knew they were busy, over you? Or would you go with you?
RUTMAN: I'm supposed to be me in this scenario?
STEIN: You would give them more attention and more of your time, and that person might have them dealing with their assistant more often, but that person is a mentor to you for a reason. They have so much experience and knowledge that you couldn't even begin to have.
STEINBERG: In my experience it's so rare that you compete with other agents. I don't really think about it too often. It's not like being an editor, where one agent submits to twelve editors and you know you're competing with other editors. As an agent, usually it's a single submission, just to you, because you know the person somehow. Or you get to the material so much faster than everyone else because you're immediately drawn to it off the slush pile and you know that other agents aren't involved. In my experience it's very rare.
RUTMAN: You don't find that with referrals? Where maybe some thoughtful referree has given the writer three or four names?
MASSIE: Of course. I always assume that.
STEIN: I assume that too.
RUTMAN: And then you think, "Oh, crap. This is really good. Agent so-and-so is probably going to see this too." And then they do.
So what do you do? That's what I want to know.
MASSIE: You fight as hard as you can and you argue why you're the best person for that project and that author and you hope that they agree.
RUTMAN: Or why Anna is, depending on the situation. [Laughter.]
STEIN: Exactly. I try not to get clients as much as possible. Can you tell?
STEINBERG: Speed is a great help in those situations. You can be like, "I'm going to read this tonight and call you tomorrow."
MASSIE: That is so hard, though. I have two small children so I just can't do speed.
STEIN: I don't like to tell writers that they need to make a decision right away if the book is still out with other agents. I think it's important for them to have a choice, in the same way that we want a choice between editors. We like to be able, if we can, to shop an offer. We like to be able to make a decision between editors. I think authors are entitled to that decision between agents, too.
RUTMAN: You also don't want them to go with you if they have doubts in their mind. Because that will affect the relationship down the line. There have been instances when I've been like, "Oh, go with the other person," because I could just tell that they wanted to. That's fine. Sometimes the other agent is a friend and I'm happy for them. Until it hits the best-seller list. [Laughter.]
Talk to me about what editors do that makes you the most frustrated.
STEINBERG: The bandwagon mentality. When I submit a book to them and they call and say, "What's going on?" They're not supposed to say, "What's going on?" They're supposed to either say "I hate this" or "I love this" or "It's okay" or whatever. It's their job to tell me what's going on at that point. I've done the work, I've submitted to you, and you're supposed to tell me what's going on. If you're calling me and saying "What's going on?" then you're just wondering what you might miss out on because other editors might be interested and you're not going with your passion.
RUTMAN: Or perhaps don't call and ask what's going on without having some intention of your own to offer.
STEINBERG: That's very frustrating.
MASSIE: Or flip-floppers. Someone who disappears on you. Somebody who sends you an e-mail like, "Don't do anything without me. I'm loving this and getting other reads," and you never hear from them again. You're like, "What happened?"
STEIN: And we all know what happened.
MASSIE: But call and tell me. We need closure. The author's like, "What did they say? What's going on?"
STEIN: Show your confidence in your taste. And if you lose in the house...
MASSIE: Just say so. It's so much easier. And then you trust that editor. They loved it and for whatever reason the other readers didn't. But be transparent about it. It's so much easier to know what they're thinking than to wonder.
STEIN: And you'll go back to them because you understand their taste.
MASSIE: Yes. And if they don't tell you, you won't go back to them. There are editors who I won't go back to. And I'm sure all of you have your list of those editors.
RUTMAN: Explaining yourself is really helpful. I want to know on what grounds you are saying no, or on what grounds you couldn't get something through. It's all useful because it rounds out your sense of who you're offering a book to.
MASSIE: And it's so important to an author to hear about how people are responding to their work. When people don't get back to you, or they disappear, it's so frustrating because you're the person stuck in the middle trying to manage your author's fears and hopes and expectations. If it's a no, it's a no. It's easy.
STEINBERG: I also don't like when the editor has his assistant write the pass letter. I'm not submitting to the assistant—I'm submitting to you. I didn't have my assistant work up this submission for you. Because you can tell when the assistant's doing the form rejection. Agents should not get form rejections. You just don't do that.
STEIN: It's also frustrating when editors disappear after they've acquired a book. If, for some reason, things aren't going as well in-house as they'd like, they sometimes hide. Or if they're just really busy. Look, everybody's busy. Just say, "I'm busy." The disappearing act is just unattractive behavior.
Do you resent how collaborative the acquisitions process has become?
STEINBERG: I try to submit to places that aren't like that. I go out of my way to try to find the few remaining places where people can make decisions because they want to.
RUTMAN: Is that a matter of place or editor selection? Finding an editor whose opinion doesn't need—
STEINBERG: I guess it's the person.
STEIN: But I also see it—buying by committee—as something that has become pretty necessary. If an editor is really passionate, and everybody else isn't so passionate, it's going to be pretty hard to publish that book. I see it as something that's more and more necessary these days. If you sell a book to an editor who doesn't need all of that back-up, it's kind of tricky. Let's say you end up with sales and marketing people who just aren't that psyched about it. That's not so great for the book. I don't have so much of a problem with the committee as I do with the taste that the committee is coming up with. Which has just been really mediocre over the past few years.
RUTMAN: Good distinction.
STEIN: I don't think that the individuals have bad taste. I think it's just been a taste of fear over the past few years, and I hope that the committees will somehow—and this is just hope—become more courageous over the next few years. That somehow, with the market contracting, instead of thinking, "We need to be more mediocre," they will be thinking, "If we're actually going to be publishing literary fiction, it has to be really fucking good." And that means that some people in the house will kind of hate a book, but see what's amazing about it, and other people in the house will really, really love it. There wouldn't have to be consensus within the committee for the committee to get behind it. It would be a little different kind of committee, if that makes sense.
RUTMAN: And I guess this applies more to nonfiction than fiction, but please acknowledge comp titles as the limited and specious resource that they are, at least as the basis for making your decision.
But in the publisher's defense, it seems like sometimes that's how the accounts are making their decisions. At least to some extent.
RUTMAN: True. But I feel like a house has to have enough consequence, built in, to persuade a buyer. It's not like the house can't anticipate the reluctance that the buyer may ultimately express, and there's got to be a way to overwhelm that reluctance with the fact that they give a shit.
STEIN: But I think that also comes back to us, and to what we advise our authors to do in our nonfiction proposals now. The comp titles shouldn't necessarily be limited to the subject they're writing about. We have to broaden the spectrum to the kinds of books that could possibly work. We have to think about the moment when the sales reps have to face those guys. We have to think, "Jesus, what kind of comp titles could possibly relate to this in a way that could work?" I mean, it's so boring to have to think about that. But we can't rely on them to do that job for us anymore, unfortunately. That's another way that our jobs have changed.
RUTMAN: The anticipation of just about every possible objection. I mean, there are always a lot of possible objections. The list is long. And you try to speak to them as much as possible, even in the introductory conversation. I think we all appreciate how many rounds of approval the editor is responsible for securing, and that they have to create some kind of consensus with a really disparate group of tastes and responsibilities. When you think about all of those different barriers, it's kind of a wonder that as many books get bought as they do. How do you get this much approval from that many people this often? So it's kind of amazing when you hear how many books a certain group within Random House or something is going to publish. You guys are going to publish twelve hundred books this year? This one group found enough to agree on twelve hundred times?
Do you guys think the industry is healthy? Just give me a yes or no around the table.
STEINBERG: No.
MASSIE: No.
RUTMAN: I don't think so.
STEIN: No.
RUTMAN: But I do wonder if there's ever been a point when you could get four people to say yes.
STEIN: But here's the silver lining: It's unhealthy enough that it's an exciting time. It's broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they're doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.
RUTMAN: Part of me craves that. If we're near a precipice, we might as well actually be on it. Let's get to the moment when some basic model really gives way to whatever other model that really smart people are going to help conceive of. Is this what Jason Epstein's been talking about for a long time? Maybe. Is the big company going to acknowledge, "Is this business for us, ultimately? We tried this. We kind of gave it a look. Eh, it's okay. Synergy's overrated. It's a stupid word. We're going to abandon that." Is it going to become a business for the fewer? Is it going to return to the financial interest of a select few wealthy people who are prepared to collect a really modest profit, if any? And does that make for more interesting publishing? Possibly. Maybe.
STEINBERG: Or will it go the other way, like you were saying before? Will we start making concert posters and guitar picks for publicity and using other industries' models to promote books? It could go that way and become more like the movie business.
RUTMAN: And those industries are claiming a state of serious unhealthiness as well. So if every single culture industry is ill at the same time, what do we have to look to?
STEINBERG: And maybe we also shouldn't feel so bad.
MASSIE: It's an interesting time, if you think about it. Look at how the music industry got hit so hard by iTunes and iPods. They had no time to react. But the book publishing industry actually has a little time to think about things and explore possibilities and try to figure out what the next thing is going to be without being hit so hard.
What are the big problems in your opinions, and who are you looking to—Jim said Jason Epstein—for the solutions? Is it Bob Miller? Is it Jon Karp? Who is it?
STEIN: Those are the first two people I would have mentioned. The big problems are too many books, inflated advances for—
RUTMAN: The few.
MASSIE: Marketing budgets going to big, established authors.
STEINBERG: No one ever hearing about great books that are published.
STEIN: Returns.
RUTMAN: Trend-hunting.
STEINBERG: Barnes & Noble making many decisions for publishers.
STEIN: Inflexible models across the board. For example, it's time for us to be reasonable as agents. We shouldn't ask for unreasonable advances. But in exchange, shouldn't we be able to ask for paperback escalators? Publishers will say, "It's our company policy not to give paperback escalators." But we're going to give a little bit, so publishers should give a little bit.
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So who are you looking to?
MASSIE: I don't know who to look to yet.
STEIN: Nobody's really stepped up yet except for Bob Miller. He's really the only one. Jon Karp had a great idea ahead of everybody else but he hasn't done anything that's quite like what Bob Miller is doing.
I feel like paperback originals might be one place to look in the short term. What if some established publisher said, "Hardcover books are the eight-track of the publishing industry. They don't make sense anymore—in this culture, in this economy—and we just aren't going to do them anymore"? Would you all continue to sell them books?
ALL: Yes.
RUTMAN: Because every house with a serious line of original trade paperbacks is usually publishing some really interesting books. Think about a handful of years ago when Vintage was making a concerted effort and publishing what I guess they were designating as more "difficult" books. One of the most beautiful trade paperbacks they did—it had French flaps—was Notable American Women by Ben Marcus. That thing was just too cool. It was the perfect trade paperback. I thought, "Okay! Maybe this is a kind of turning point." Not because it was a book that was ever going to sell Jhumpa Lahiri numbers. But that turned out to be a small little experiment that seems all but discontinued.
STEINBERG: I think it's always attractive to agents when publishers have a vision. If they said, "We're just going to do trade paperbacks, and we're going to make it work," that would be immediately attractive. Because they have a vision. It's not just like, "Oh, let's publish this and see what happens. Good luck to us all! Bye!" [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: But if you sell a book and it's acquired with the intention of making it a trade paperback, and three or four months later the publisher comes back to you and says, "We've reconsidered. We're going to make this a hardcover," it's not even implied—it's basically stated—that "we thought we were acquiring nothing, and we've actually had a change of heart. We think we have something. Congratulations to us all." If you were ever under the delusion that there was no hierarchical relationship between the two, it's dismissed pretty thoroughly. And what's going to change that? The Great Depression II might go some way.
STEIN: It used to be about reviews. There was this idea that you couldn't get reviews for trade paperbacks. But there aren't reviews anymore so we don't have to worry about that.
STEINBERG: Silver lining.
MASSIE: Grove's had a couple of original trade paperbacks on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So that's not the story anymore.
STEIN: Grove does wonderful trade paperbacks.
Stop it, you're going to make Morgan blush. But seriously, I wish the whole economics of advances would change so that we could do more.
RUTMAN: And if e-books are costing about what trade paperbacks cost, maybe we can have a more uniform price for books. So you wouldn't have this disparity.
STEINBERG: But one of the goals of agents is to get a good advance, and the way that publishers get to higher numbers is by doing hardcovers.
STEIN: But that could change a little bit. If there wasn't the sort of hardcover-paperback hierarchy, and if we started doing a lot more trade paperbacks, the price of paperbacks could rise a little bit. And there's no reason we should have such low royalties for paperbacks.
STEINBERG: Someone in publishing told me that that's why publishing still exists—because publishers held agents off from having escalators on paperbacks. That's where the money is made.
STEIN: But we need a little of that money if we're not going to ask for high advances.
What are you most worried about with regard to the industry?
STEINBERG: I think if Barnes & Noble folds, or something like that, it might be so devastating that we can't get around it. If Barnes & Noble were to fold, what would happen to all of us? I mean, there's no way that publishing could really continue. We've put too many eggs in one basket.
STEIN: Publishing could continue.
STEINBERG: It could continue, but it would be at a much different scale.
STEIN: Agents would just sell the books to Amazon. It would be the publishers that would be out of business.
STEINBERG: Isn't Barnes & Noble like 50 percent of the market?
RUTMAN: But there is also a pretty astounding percentage of books that are sold in non-book-retailing locations. Which is problematic at least for the likes of most of us because we don't do so many of those books.
MASSIE: They tend to take a certain kind of book.
STEIN: Which is why, although we're very grateful to Amazon, we need to keep our bookstores in business. So if you're going to buy a book, buy it from an actual bookstore.
MASSIE: Look at Harry Schwartz.
It's really sad.
MASSIE: That was really devastating. And it's like a new one every day.
STEIN: If you buy a book from Amazon, you're killing us.
RUTMAN: There, she said it.
STEIN: And you're killing yourself. Thank you. [Laughter.]
What are the other things you're most worried about?
RUTMAN: That the balkanization of commercial publishing will be so complete that an even smaller number of books that claim all of the available resources will take up even more available resources and the ghetto for everyone else will end up being vast. That the midlist will come to encompass everything that isn't a couple of titles.
STEIN: That the midlist, and the kinds of books we do, really will become the new short stories or the new poetry.
RUTMAN: The assumption is that you can still anticipate something that will work commercially. Which I guess sometimes you can, but not often enough to justify that as a prevailing strategy. I mean, can we stop paying senators and politicians—sorry, Flip [Brophy, a colleague at Sterling Lord]—and various other famous people tons of money for stories that are—and I apologize, readers everywhere—insubstantial in the extreme?
With one exception, right?
RUTMAN: Obama. [Laughter.]
He's a great writer.
RUTMAN: Exactly. If they write their own books and they write them well, then we have a crucial exception. But generally speaking, this thing of giving somebody, on the basis solely of name recognition, disproportionate resources that could be so much better spent elsewhere? Why do we do that?
STEIN: Imagine a world where books would have to be submitted without the author's name. Obviously there would be no platform. So if the proposal was really shitty, and the writing was really shitty, there would be no sale.
Anna wants a meritocracy in publishing.
RUTMAN: Aw, that's sweet. [Laughter.]
But that raises an interesting point. Why do you all focus on serious literary work when it's so obvious that the real money is elsewhere?
MASSIE: It's what I like to read.
STEINBERG: I like going to work every day and the feeling of liking what I do. I think if someone said to me, "You can do only fiction, and no nonfiction, forever. Will you do that?" I would say, "I don't think I'll like that very much, because I still like nonfiction, but I'll do it." But if somebody said to me, "You can do only nonfiction. No fiction," I'd be like, "I'm just going to quit." There wouldn't be any point.
RUTMAN: I just don't feel equipped to make judgments about anything other than what I like. I feel like my capacity to gauge commercial prospects is kind of restricted. The only thing I can really respond to is what I think works in some way that means something to me.
STEIN: I'm a hopeless optimist, and I think somehow, someday...well, look, Revolutionary Road is on the best-seller list right now. I'm an optimist, and because it can happen, I think it will happen, and I want to be on the front lines when it does.
Are you encouraged by anything you're seeing on the front lines?
STEIN: Our president is a writer. We have a president who loves books and who's all about promoting the arts. That's amazing.
STEINBERG: I like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. I think they're a step forward and sort of address the cool factor. I think it's cool that with the Kindle you can think of a book you want and have it at your fingertips a minute later.
RUTMAN: It's also nice because it means that books are eligible to be included in the world of new technology.
STEINBERG: When you're on the subway, people are intrigued by it. They're like, "What's that?" And that intrigue factor is important.
STEIN: Except they can't see what you're reading.
MASSIE: It also feels like the YA world has really taken off in the last few years and kids are really excited about reading. It feels like there's a whole new generation of readers out there, doesn't it? And it's not just Harry Potter. There are all these authors, people like Cornelia Funke, and all of my nieces and nephews have their favorites. They've all discovered their own different authors who they're so excited about. It's great. I feel like there was a generation that sort of skipped that.
RUTMAN: I'm also encouraged by the things that succeed, for the most part. Look at something like A Series of Unfortunate Events. You have this very self-conscious, writerly line of books that kind of flatter kids' ability to appreciate a certain context in which the books have been written. And kids seem to live in a text-filled world in a way that even we didn't. I don't know if it's the right kind of text, but it might function as the basis for some broader appreciation of written communication.
MASSIE: And look at the YA books that are doing well—they're doorstops. Look at The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Brian Selznick book. It's huge.
STEINBERG: My daughter loves that book.
MASSIE: My son loved it too.
STEIN: Is it good? Have you guys read it?
MASSIE: It's great. I loved it.
RUTMAN: I think the girth of a fat children's book is a factor in its success. Kids must feel like they're being entrusted with something enormous. It's like, "I don't care that you're only eight. You're going to read 960 pages of epic...." And now that they wheel their backpacks, it's okay. It's safe.
At the end of the day, what's the best part of your job?
MASSIE: Working with great authors. Discovering new voices. When an author's book arrives for the first time—when you get that messengered package and rip it open and there's the book. That's the best feeling. Getting the book in your hands is better than getting the deal.
RUTMAN: Having some part in the creation of a book that you feel strongly about. However incidental your role may be. I mean, I haven't written any books and it's really nice to have helped bring some of them about. That's more than I expected from a workday.
STEIN: I agree with all of those things and, for me, it's also just about making the author happy—making the author's hard work pay off in a way that you just know their endorphin rush is going to go on for a week. That's what makes your endorphin rush happen. It's not the deal. It's their scream.
STEINBERG: I love dealing with creative people on a daily basis and just seeing how their minds work. It just makes me so happy. I think that's probably why I do what I do. I just love what they come up with. Great twists in plot. Things that are unexpected but extraordinary. That's always the best part. I'm really sad when I'm not reading some great piece of fiction for work.
RUTMAN: Constant access to people who are smarter than you is a really nice part of the job.
STEIN: Smarter. More creative.
STEINBERG: More disciplined.
RUTMAN: Better. Just better.
AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of our conversation, with a few bottles of wine sloshing around in their brains, the agents agreed to speak anonymously on a variety of topics that would be difficult to discuss for attribution. Any number of verbal tics have been altered in order to disguise the identities of the speakers.
What would you say to writers if you could be anonymous?
Work harder. Be gracious.
Don't be so needy. Don't need constant affirmation.
Once you make a decision to go with an agent, trust that agent.
When authors leave their agent to go to a "better" agent, it is almost always the author's fault. I don't blame agents for poaching. I blame authors for allowing themselves to be poached.
And nine times out of ten it's the wrong decision.
Tell me about some overrated publishers, in your opinion.
Little Random. I think the reputation they built in the era before we came into the industry has gone out the window in the past five years. I can't think of one book of theirs that I've read in the past five years that I've admired. They have no vision. There used to be some good literary editors there—Dan Menaker, Ann Godoff—who had some vision. I think the house publishes schlock now, for the most part.
Spiegel & Grau. They just care about the celebrity-type books. Even if the writer is not an actual celebrity, they only want to buy big books by the sort of literary celebrities. They pretend they're in it for the art but in my view they're not.
Scribner. It's kind of strange because they have this great literary reputation, and I've always thought of them as a great literary house, but I just can't think of anything of theirs that I've admired in a long time. Maybe a little bit of their nonfiction, but not much of it. I can't figure out why that is because, you know, it's Nan Graham and that shouldn't be the case.
Riverhead, these days—after Cindy [Spiegel] and Julie [Grau] left—has not found its footing yet. I mean, the books that have done well for Riverhead lately were under contract already. Junot Díaz. Khaled Hosseini. Aleksandar Hemon, but Sean [McDonald, his editor] was there before the new regime. We'll see what Becky [Saletan] does.
What about on the flip side of that? Which houses do you think are underrated?
Algonquin. They do a great job and they have integrity. They know the right amount to pay but they don't overpay. And they do great publicity.
I wish more houses were like Norton. They have a pretty big list but they also acquire carefully, for the most part, and there's a nice range of serious editors. Their acquisition process is rigorous and they don't often go nuts to overpay for something. They're an employee-owned company and everybody is invested in what goes on. Their offices are really crappy, which is kind of reassuring. And they take chances on books that are ultra-literary while doing unapologetically commercial stuff too.
I feel like Algonquin uses them almost as a model. They're similar in a lot of ways.
They're the last of a dying breed. How many independent houses of that size exist anymore? And there's a reason we haven't heard about any cutbacks or financial issues at Norton. They operate responsibly.
Tell me about some editors you really like to work with.
I'm working with an editor I've never worked with before, Tom Mayer at Norton. He's tireless and will do anything for this book. The author wasn't happy with the cover, and Tom went and got them to hire somebody else. I mean, that never happens. Usually editors are trying to say, "We all love this and the author should too." I've never seen such an advocate for a book.
I would say Kathy Pories at Algonquin. She has amazing taste and she's also a fantastic editor. She makes novels the 25-percent better that they need to be. She's such a straight shooter, she's fun to talk to on the phone... [Laughter.] That can't be discounted! It's a joy to call her. And it lets me be a straight shooter myself and not need to spin anything. That's a nice feeling.
It's only been one instance, but if somebody's had a better experience with an editor than I was lucky enough to have with David Ebershoff, I would wish it on all of you. The level of attentiveness and awareness of the whole process from beginning to end was just incredibly heartening, from securing a publicist to being honest about certain potential impediments. His advocacy was inexhaustible.
Molly Barton is the same way. She will not let a book die. She's still there after publication. She's still there after paperback publication. She just keeps a book alive and does absolutely everything possible. She does things for her books that I didn't even know were possible. She came up in a slightly different way and has a sort of big-picture publishing knowledge that a lot of editors don't have.
Anybody have any horror stories from lunch?
I once had lunch with an editor at HarperCollins, and this was so long ago that I don't even remember his name or if he's still there, but he talked the whole time—very excitably, kind of spitting his food—about television shows and action movies. It's kind of a cliché to talk about going to the bathroom and seeing if you can figure out a way to slip out. But I actually went to the bathroom and thought, "I can't go back. I can't get through this lunch. This has got to be Candid Camera. I can't do it." But I went back and finished the lunch. I thought the whole thing had to be some sort of joke. But it wasn't. It was real and he was real.
I had one lunch where the editor called me by the wrong name the entire lunch. He didn't even know my name! And I didn't correct him because I was so angry. After lunch I went back to the office and wrote him an e-mail so he'd see my name and know.
Of all the people and places who write about the industry—newspapers, Web sites, blogs—who are the smartest and who are the dumbest?
I feel like Publishers Weekly has really gone downhill. I know it's a trade magazine so it's supposed to be boring, but I think it's really boring. I also don't trust the reviews. I kind of liked Sara Nelson's column, though. Just as a barometer of things.
I always feel like when I'm reading Michael Cader he might say something intelligent. Publishers Lunch is one of the better ones.
I thought Boris [Kachka] got a little too much shit for his New York magazine piece. I don't think it was a dumb article. I felt more sympathetic to what he was trying to do than I think most people did.
I think that guy Leon [Neyfakh] at the Observer is really good at digging in and getting scoops. He really keeps going.
It's his first job.
And he knows how to become friends with you and get stuff out of you. He's very good in that way. And he treats publishing like it's something to care about, which is nice. It's like he's always looking for some secret that will be amazing. The things he finds are usually kind of silly, but at least he's trying.
Which is different than Motoko [Rich, of the New York Times], who approaches it like it's a business. A business that doesn't make any money.
Don't you always feel a little surprised that the Times will cover a publishing development as prominently as they sometimes do? They're like, "Layoffs at Doubleday!" and you're like, "That warrants coverage in the New York Times? Really?"
Anything else that you want to get off your chests?
I think book jackets are incredibly important but they're one of the weakest parts of the business. We need to pay jacket designers more money. We need to attract better people. It's one thing that we can control.
We should steal all of the indie-rock designers and bring them into books. Because that shit is great. Walk through any record store. They are so consistently good, and they get paid nothing.
I emphatically second that idea. And I think raiding another industry could be the way to do it.
There are so few things you can control, and the jacket is so important. It's what people look at. Women's legs are not inherently interesting as cover subjects.
Or shoes.
Or the face of an adolescent girl who is blowing bubbles.
Oh, I disagree with you there. I'd love to support you, but I can't. [Laughter.]
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors
If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it's that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn't getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to "restructuring,""integration," and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn't pretty out there.
While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one's heart can't help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won't be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.
But difficult times don't have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.
It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:
LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.
ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.
ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.
RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]
Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I'm curious if you've given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't know if there's a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it's the book I want to fall in love with. And that's the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won't fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you're just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn't quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you've had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it's different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don't get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there's that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who's writing it is because there's a real sensibility in the writing. It's not just that the writing is good—there's a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, "Who is this person who's able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?" I think that's one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they're different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can't tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, "Who is this person?" You just wonder, "Who's coming up with this?"
BOUDREAUX: I think there's always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, "Wow, I didn't see that coming. That was perfect." The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you're committed to...a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you're going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you're reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn't it feel like it's not even just talent? It's the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don't work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn't use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It's about dying and suffering children—you can't imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there's a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that's the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that's what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it's also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you're talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don't actually know what the hell it is, but that's one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It's one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don't like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that's when I feel like a writer has a voice. That's when I'll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don't actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there's always one of these writers who isn't writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that's what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer...I mean, I can't honestly believe that everybody who's buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn't going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn't going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don't know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn't going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That's right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they're asking. Even if they're writing very different novels from book to book, they're haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who's only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That's another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That's what's exciting about reading certain fiction writers.
Aside from what's on the page, and somebody's skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that's happening in the moment. I'm editing a book right now that's set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it's really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I've been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I'm hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You're always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be published, but as an editor you can't work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that's hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what's actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it's not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It's got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, "Is this something that really fires me up? What's going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?" Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It's almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it's got to go through from there. If it's lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You're like, "Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles." And the book is only going to do so much.
When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, "Oh, it's a little book, but it's my job to make it work, and I'm going to." I feel less like that now. Because you can't work on everything, and you can't do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You've got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it's not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. "We tried! We'll do better with the paperback!" The number of times you hear that! You know you're lying and they know you're lying and everyone's just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.
It's got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It's an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you've got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They're going to believe me when I say it's good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You're never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: "Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?" With fiction it's all sort of amorphous, and you've just got to feel like you're picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We're all just proxies for the reader. But we're going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that's going to get one person to tell another person that they've got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that's going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?
Are there any other things, besides what's on the page, that you're looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn't want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, "Where have they published?" You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It's always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I'm looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he's somebody who has an MFA, he's a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he's in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There's an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It's exciting to me to feel like it's being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It's a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I've never been able to say what my books have in common. I'll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don't care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it's like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. "Where am I? What am I doing?" That's what I want. I'm not looking for any particular kind of book, I'm just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn't matter what agent it comes from. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. It doesn't matter if it's a young voice or something that's more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don't even need it to happen in the first sentence. I'll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I'm seven months pregnant so I'm feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I'll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.
On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren't really a book. They're not a cohesive whole. There's no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals...anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I'm sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It's well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don't really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage "write what you know." I'd kind of rather somebody write what they don't know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they're doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I've always wanted to give people that advice too. "Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I've already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don't. Care." The crudest way to put it is the "Who cares?" factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the "Who cares?" factor, but it's basically the same thing. "What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?"
CHINSKI: I'd rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That's more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: "Have courage"?
NASH: Don't try to be perfect. Don't be boring.
CHINSKI: That's really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it's the hardest thing to turn down because you think, "This is good. But it doesn't do anything for me."
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. You're like, "There's nothing wrong with this. I've got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It's just...there."
CHINSKI: And that's a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it's not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn't move you in any way. It doesn't feel necessary.
Do you think it's too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's hard but not too hard. I don't know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint's launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints' launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn't seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can't get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—"If you liked this, you'll like that"—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn't been completely solved, but it's been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I'm imposing my own question on the question you asked—"Is it too hard to get published?"—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, "Are there too many books?" I personally don't feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it's hell having so much supply. But we didn't exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we're enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that's healthy. I don't think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we're going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that's perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, "What's the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?" It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let's say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.
I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it's harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn't gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the "This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we're ordering this time." And you're stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can't do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven't had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It's because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they're going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they're not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they've received before, but it doesn't mean we're giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it's important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, "We publish authors, not books." That's more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it's still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn't sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.
But aren't you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it's really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there's always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don't even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there's always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don't think it's very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You're sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You're fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There's only so much you can do.
NASH: If you're going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don't stare at your Amazon ranking and don't stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don't have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It's not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It's sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we're sitting there behind our cushy desks. There's just no one in publishing who couldn't have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone's career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there's a stigma that it's a negative thing. It's really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It's about being really passionate about your book. It's a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it's helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it's about them. It's actually about the book. It's about the writing. It's not about you personally.
NASH: It's about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I've never been able to afford to use her, but I'm friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, "Here are twenty blogs that you should read." And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they're in a community, and that participating in that community is what we're talking about when we say "self-promotion." It isn't this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I'll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they're going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It's this amazing little story of obsession. It's exciting. The author is very involved online. He's happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He's just really present, and that makes all the difference.
I'm interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I'm curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don't feel like I'm thinking very differently about what I'm signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That's what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I'm the first reader, and I'm there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I'm its best advocate. I'm its advocate to people in the company because often they're not going to read it—they're only going to get my take on it—and then I'm its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I'm constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I'm the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I'm the one who's responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That's what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things...but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That's when you get excited. Like, "I'm a real editor!" But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I've never worked with an editor who doesn't edit all weekend long, every single night. That's the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that's important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don't edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don't know who they're talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it's helpful if a book is not a dog's dinner when you're showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn't look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn't have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it's subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.
Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That's why I'm an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.
But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don't have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that's true. Wouldn't that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn't leave because I didn't like working at an agency. It just wasn't working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It's partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I'd rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it's not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn't know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn't know anything. I was like, "I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors." I just didn't know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they're not the final word on it. I also don't do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who's got any sense learns to do. But I just don't have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.
What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you're in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It's really difficult. I also find that I know what I don't like, but I don't have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it's not the only thing that's being done for a book, it's still got to be one of the most important things. You've got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you've just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it's so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of "It's a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a..." People do that! They think it's a marketing-savvy way to go about it. "We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn't be able to see the person's face. It has to be from behind!"
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That's one thing that's changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what's going to happen.
What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they're related. One of them is when I love a book but I don't actually think that we're going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you've already been publishing someone, and it's the question of what's best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That's a hard thing to figure out.
I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that's all I've ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, "How do you connect writers and readers?" Those are the two masters for me. Recently I've been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you're accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you're being asked to use your own instincts, and that's what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it's sticky. When you're dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don't you find that sometimes people don't behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn't happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don't edit...there's just this assumption that the publisher isn't doing enough. Sometimes agents don't quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I'm not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you're being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't care.
GARGAGLIANO: I've been very lucky with my authors. I haven't had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you're taking care of them. But there is a point when it's out of the editor's hands. And if they've trusted you that far, most of the time they'll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It's like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what's going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren't going to actually help anything. It's more just for show. You know, "Emboss this part of the jacket" for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn't have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that's the agent. I'm more worried about my author's happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I'm thinking more about the agent. I don't want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We're not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we're working on.
What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don't?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don't realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they're not doing that in the office. That in the office they're advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don't even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I'm continuing to advocate. I haven't been able to read at all recently. I've really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I'm both at once! It depends on the street I'm walking down.
What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's important for writers to remember that we're not their enemy. We love books and we're looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we're working nights and weekends and ads don't sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It's like having your business card published in the New York Times.
Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, "Just remember, when you're all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake." And I do think that's worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, "If you're going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level."
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don't want to just buy something blindly.
What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It's better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is soobvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what's going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they've created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you'll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I've never had that happen. Where it's like, "Oooooh, we'd better hope that nobody notices that."
How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.
Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don't have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.
But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.
I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don't we?
That's what I'm trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that's what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that's really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it's more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It's feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that's what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it's better in publishing?
NASH: It's immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don't want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I'll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. "That'll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!" [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I've said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can't believe I forgot that earlier. That's probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it's three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That's why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It's about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, "Okay, this is it. Now I'm kind of happy. This is all I could ever want." Where you actually slept well for one night?
I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I'm just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I'm curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I'm trying to come up with something that won't sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that's actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, "What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?" Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, "You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor." I had this little glimmering moment of, "Yeah! I came here, I didn't even know what publishing was, barely, and now..." Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn't have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... That's actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn't know anything about anything and I thought I'd go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe I'll try New York for one year. I'm sure I'll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about." You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, "Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I'm really going to get to do." I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It's so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It's a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that's always been hard to crack. I'd bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I've never been happier about the work I've seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he'd been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I'd gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, "I should acquire something." We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn't know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn't get any prepubs because I probably didn't send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you're up against it.
The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I'd look at my distributor's website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, "You're not an idiot." I don't think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the secondTimes review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.
But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it's about survival. I wasn't being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they've been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, "A publisher's first duty to his authors is to remain solvent." Which was instructive because if you don't, it's not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, "All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we'll all move on." It was like, "Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this."
Let's talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They're playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they're happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they're sending and who they're sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it's the cover, or an ending that still doesn't work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they're talking about with a "This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It's not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it." An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who's willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it's the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who's able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It's much better than getting a phone call from an agent who's just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent's job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn't always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn't win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It's human nature. We don't like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who's appreciative. That doesn't mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We've all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don't agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It's just complete bullshit. It doesn't work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there's a way to express your convictions without being...
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you're out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, "Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him." Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, "Look how hard this author is working." It's amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, "Why aren't my books in Third Place?" it accomplishes nothing.
We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven't looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they're thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they're submitting to and why and so on.
But what if the author doesn't know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It's their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There's no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor's name is in the acknowledgments. It's very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don't charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it's mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.
I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author's relationship to their editor. It's a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that's in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor's conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called "A+" and "B+" agents, when I've seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that's what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they're the right agent for you. I mean, there's not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there's not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I've always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it's not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It's not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let's say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that's true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.
We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it's going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that's not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it's just the money they need or if they need something else. And it's hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn't earn out and so on—but you can't really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we've often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that's just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that's not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it's financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.
How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don't mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don't mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It's insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? "Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how 'bout we do a book together." I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don't get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that's horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren't allowed to talk to the author unless you'd ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There's an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn't happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let's hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.
I hear what you're saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You're not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.
Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn't to be negated entirely. As long as you don't overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we've all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn't happen in a negative way, which we've obviously seen happen. But if that's the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We'll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There's a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There's a huge spectrum there. But if you're in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.
Do you guys think you feel the money you're spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don't know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely...One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I'll tell you what's easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, "I believe!" But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a "Boy do I need to make sure I don't make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I've got to have blurbs early. We've got to get the cover right. I've got to write those hand-written notes to people." You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don't have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you're trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there's a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it's worth three hundred or we think it's worth eight hundred—I don't sweat that if we're making a decision beforehand. It's when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book...You're paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that's fine and dandy. But it's not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don't want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and "We should get in on that, too." So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it's fine. It's when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.
But it seems like that's how it works now. You're getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don't you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don't feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it's so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it's twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent's like, "I've got interest! I've got interest!" Well, "I've got a ‘No!'" I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that's how it ends up working sometimes. "You've got to get back to me quickly!""Okay, well I guess I won't be deliberating over this very long. I've read ten pages and we can be done, then." If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I've heard so many agents say that it's becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There's so much resistance now—everybody's trying to find a reason why they shouldn't buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say "There's a lot of interest" just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, "Congratulations. I'm thrilled for the author. Next time." I just can't play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It's a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That's one thing I don't ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren't accountable anymore. Not that you aren't accountable—but there's a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn't stopping entirely with you. Whereas there's an in-between spot where it's large enough that you're exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn't finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn't finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, "We've heard that somebody else is going to preempt." The publisher said, "Okay, go offer" several hundred thousand dollars. "Okay!" So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, "So what happens at the end?" I still hadn't finished it! I was like, "They all...leave...and go home." I didn't know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like "This one is all on me"—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn't even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, "I hope that's what happens at the end...." Otherwise the author's going to be like, "Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?" I'd have to be like, "I just think it's important that everything works out that way."
When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they're all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That's something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don't have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn't translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn't necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There's just so much information out there now that people don't know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that's the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that's the big barrier we're all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?
So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it's a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It's amazing. It's actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean "scene" in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It's a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like "Sony" or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That's another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That's a big challenge, and there's no easy solution to it.
What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you're publishing that doesn't seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That's what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don't think anybody's quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we've never really relied much on cultural authority, although we've certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we've been successful, it's been through the things that you're asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it's Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I'm doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I'm glad you're doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, "You should do that! That's brilliant!"
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that's already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren't that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It's that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call "trust" today is the remnants of authority. People "trust" the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you're just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn't care about book reviews when I wasn't in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don't do that anymore. People aren't interested in the community of books. So it's finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It's a novel about the author's grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It's amazing. And we've gotten IndieBound, we've gotten lots of things for it, and it's gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren't going to happen on that alone. So I've been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I'm trying to find the niche market. I think that's the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you're more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren't set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day and there isn't enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That's where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That's one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That's great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It's not hugely difficult, and it's kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it's not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don't think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it's something to consider. I just think that line—"This book is going to appeal to everybody because it's about love or family or whatever"—doesn't work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you'd probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That's the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we're companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren't necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They'll think we're advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it's a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it's a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let's get together. And it's not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You're putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm's website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners' and associates' photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can't be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don't want authors bugging us too much. But I think that's part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.
Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that's come about in the industry?
NASH: It's technology. It's been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that's been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it's all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It's destroying cultural authority but it's enhancing one's ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It's lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, "We only need two months' worth of inventory; we don't need four months of inventory," is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it's good in that I can actually see Ingram's demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, "I'm going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred." So it's fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I'm always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we're at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We're just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don't understand because I don't read that way. But it's our job to figure out how they're reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It's the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I'm still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it's great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it's hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It's really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you're actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it's great, and we're seeing sales of books.... I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it's different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's so exciting.
CHINSKI: That's what I mean. It's also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It's still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we've all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It's going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.
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I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don't understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't understand it.
NASH: It's because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you're right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, "Why will the print book survive?"
No, I'm literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I'm looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.
But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there's still that idea. Also, there's still the hangover of thinking that critics won't pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that's not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven't been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don't care whether it's fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it's written by. But that's not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here's an interesting case: Bolaño's 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They're priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they're priced the same it's not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it's the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don't think it's just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It's also readers still thinking that that's the way they discover new books.
Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don't really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It's been proven over and over again. If you're at Barneys and there's an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it's worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we're not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.
But who's going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That's the model. It's just a question of "How do we get there in a way that doesn't involve complete chaos?" But it seems like that's where we're going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we'll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.
What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.
Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that's spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.
Anybody else? Come on, there's got to be something that's encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It's like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that's something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That's pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn't be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn't get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren't interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It's six hundred pages long—there's a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn't expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what's selling in a bookstore. I thought we'd have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.
Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.
It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn't seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you're on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it's kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there's sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we've talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who've only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That's when I realized what we've lost. As you were saying, it's hard to know because it's the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don't quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that's just because I'm not making the decisions, I'm sure.
BOUDREAUX: You've also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we've all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that's least like a corporate structure. I mean, that's the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, "But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we've been doing it." So you get to pretend you're this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody's figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we've also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.
And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I'd go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it's true: Who doesn't want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn't going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn't actually mean that writers have less choice, I don't think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It's become an easy straw man to point the finger at. "Oh, these big corporate publishers that don't understand what books are." There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it's really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can't control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn't changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there's a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don't think, for the author, it's a major difference. But I wasn't around when it wasn't like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.
Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we've become really dependent on social media is that it's a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn't completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren't paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I'm sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They're not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don't you think they understand the crisis they're in, to a certain degree, too? That's why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody's trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you're right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don't. Half the time they're trying to sell on price—they're doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they're trying to go intimate. I think they're kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that's part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren't actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, "Okay, you pick from these five hundred books." But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark's and Prairie Lights and the rest. They're doing a great job of being retailers. But you're exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they'll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it's really easy to point your finger at the chains. I'm not saying they don't present a certain set of problems. But it's interesting that, in a way, they're wrestling with the same kind of issues that we're wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It's a kind of funny crisis all around.
At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.
That's funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn't have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people's lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That's right! The lives of children! I don't think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We're doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don't we make that, "We're doing it for our children, and our children's children."
EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.
Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can't concentrate in the office so it's just the way it is. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that sometimes you don't feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.
Yeah, it's always just before Christmas, just before New Year's, just before the Fourth of July. The book's might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.
Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it's been going on for so many years, that you've got to be given some time to do it that isn't just every Saturday of your life.
Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what's being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you're passionate about on all of those topics—but I don't really have time to do that.
That's my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.
And it's a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you've got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors' backlists to read and what your house is doing that's working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you're not reading to learn something about your job.
What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.
Submit the next book when you haven't even published the first book and you don't even know how many you're printing.
Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.
And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don't think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.
"Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" I want to be like, "Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?" They don't realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I'm being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it's "Have you read it?""No, I'm actually editing your author who's under contract."
There's also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?
And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, "Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend..." Or over Labor Day weekend! It's like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I'm like, "Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn't have shit to read."
What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.
I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn't want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.
Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we're not their therapists, we're not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can't fix your whole life.
What about when an author calls because there aren't enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That's happened!
Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He's both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.
I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.
Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I've ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I've never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.
There's also Anna Stein, who's wonderful. She's got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she's also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don't necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg's former foreign rights person.
You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He's really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.
What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don't love their book. Or when it's been a battle to get them attention on the list.
I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it's a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I've never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.
Do you send them all of their bad reviews?
I leave that up to the author.
I've started telling debut authors, "A lot of writers who have been through this don't want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?"
When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don't go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it's great news and I can say, "We did this and we did that and we did this," I give it to them all the time. But I don't go out of my way to say, "You're holding steady. Nothing's happening."
What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there's a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don't know how the finances look. But just as books, they're incredibly consistent.
I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.
I've been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I'm impressed is their own tagline: "They make more noise than a two-dollar radio."
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors
If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it's that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn't getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to "restructuring,""integration," and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn't pretty out there.
While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one's heart can't help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won't be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.
But difficult times don't have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.
It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:
LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.
ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.
ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.
RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]
Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I'm curious if you've given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't know if there's a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it's the book I want to fall in love with. And that's the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won't fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you're just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn't quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you've had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it's different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don't get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there's that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who's writing it is because there's a real sensibility in the writing. It's not just that the writing is good—there's a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, "Who is this person who's able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?" I think that's one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they're different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can't tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, "Who is this person?" You just wonder, "Who's coming up with this?"
BOUDREAUX: I think there's always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, "Wow, I didn't see that coming. That was perfect." The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you're committed to...a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you're going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you're reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn't it feel like it's not even just talent? It's the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don't work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn't use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It's about dying and suffering children—you can't imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there's a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that's the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that's what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it's also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you're talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don't actually know what the hell it is, but that's one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It's one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don't like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that's when I feel like a writer has a voice. That's when I'll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don't actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there's always one of these writers who isn't writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that's what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer...I mean, I can't honestly believe that everybody who's buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn't going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn't going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don't know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn't going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That's right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they're asking. Even if they're writing very different novels from book to book, they're haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who's only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That's another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That's what's exciting about reading certain fiction writers.
Aside from what's on the page, and somebody's skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that's happening in the moment. I'm editing a book right now that's set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it's really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I've been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I'm hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You're always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be published, but as an editor you can't work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that's hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what's actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it's not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It's got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, "Is this something that really fires me up? What's going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?" Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It's almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it's got to go through from there. If it's lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You're like, "Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles." And the book is only going to do so much.
When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, "Oh, it's a little book, but it's my job to make it work, and I'm going to." I feel less like that now. Because you can't work on everything, and you can't do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You've got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it's not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. "We tried! We'll do better with the paperback!" The number of times you hear that! You know you're lying and they know you're lying and everyone's just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.
It's got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It's an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you've got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They're going to believe me when I say it's good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You're never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: "Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?" With fiction it's all sort of amorphous, and you've just got to feel like you're picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We're all just proxies for the reader. But we're going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that's going to get one person to tell another person that they've got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that's going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?
Are there any other things, besides what's on the page, that you're looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn't want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, "Where have they published?" You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It's always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I'm looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he's somebody who has an MFA, he's a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he's in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There's an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It's exciting to me to feel like it's being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It's a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I've never been able to say what my books have in common. I'll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don't care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it's like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. "Where am I? What am I doing?" That's what I want. I'm not looking for any particular kind of book, I'm just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn't matter what agent it comes from. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. It doesn't matter if it's a young voice or something that's more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don't even need it to happen in the first sentence. I'll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I'm seven months pregnant so I'm feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I'll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.
On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren't really a book. They're not a cohesive whole. There's no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals...anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I'm sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It's well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don't really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage "write what you know." I'd kind of rather somebody write what they don't know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they're doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I've always wanted to give people that advice too. "Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I've already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don't. Care." The crudest way to put it is the "Who cares?" factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the "Who cares?" factor, but it's basically the same thing. "What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?"
CHINSKI: I'd rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That's more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: "Have courage"?
NASH: Don't try to be perfect. Don't be boring.
CHINSKI: That's really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it's the hardest thing to turn down because you think, "This is good. But it doesn't do anything for me."
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. You're like, "There's nothing wrong with this. I've got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It's just...there."
CHINSKI: And that's a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it's not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn't move you in any way. It doesn't feel necessary.
Do you think it's too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's hard but not too hard. I don't know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint's launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints' launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn't seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can't get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—"If you liked this, you'll like that"—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn't been completely solved, but it's been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I'm imposing my own question on the question you asked—"Is it too hard to get published?"—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, "Are there too many books?" I personally don't feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it's hell having so much supply. But we didn't exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we're enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that's healthy. I don't think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we're going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that's perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, "What's the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?" It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let's say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.
I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it's harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn't gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the "This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we're ordering this time." And you're stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can't do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven't had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It's because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they're going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they're not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they've received before, but it doesn't mean we're giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it's important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, "We publish authors, not books." That's more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it's still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn't sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.
But aren't you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it's really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there's always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don't even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there's always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don't think it's very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You're sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You're fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There's only so much you can do.
NASH: If you're going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don't stare at your Amazon ranking and don't stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don't have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It's not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It's sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we're sitting there behind our cushy desks. There's just no one in publishing who couldn't have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone's career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there's a stigma that it's a negative thing. It's really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It's about being really passionate about your book. It's a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it's helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it's about them. It's actually about the book. It's about the writing. It's not about you personally.
NASH: It's about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I've never been able to afford to use her, but I'm friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, "Here are twenty blogs that you should read." And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they're in a community, and that participating in that community is what we're talking about when we say "self-promotion." It isn't this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I'll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they're going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It's this amazing little story of obsession. It's exciting. The author is very involved online. He's happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He's just really present, and that makes all the difference.
I'm interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I'm curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don't feel like I'm thinking very differently about what I'm signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That's what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I'm the first reader, and I'm there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I'm its best advocate. I'm its advocate to people in the company because often they're not going to read it—they're only going to get my take on it—and then I'm its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I'm constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I'm the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I'm the one who's responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That's what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things...but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That's when you get excited. Like, "I'm a real editor!" But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I've never worked with an editor who doesn't edit all weekend long, every single night. That's the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that's important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don't edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don't know who they're talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it's helpful if a book is not a dog's dinner when you're showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn't look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn't have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it's subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.
Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That's why I'm an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.
But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don't have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that's true. Wouldn't that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn't leave because I didn't like working at an agency. It just wasn't working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It's partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I'd rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it's not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn't know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn't know anything. I was like, "I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors." I just didn't know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they're not the final word on it. I also don't do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who's got any sense learns to do. But I just don't have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.
What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you're in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It's really difficult. I also find that I know what I don't like, but I don't have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it's not the only thing that's being done for a book, it's still got to be one of the most important things. You've got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you've just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it's so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of "It's a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a..." People do that! They think it's a marketing-savvy way to go about it. "We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn't be able to see the person's face. It has to be from behind!"
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That's one thing that's changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what's going to happen.
What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they're related. One of them is when I love a book but I don't actually think that we're going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you've already been publishing someone, and it's the question of what's best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That's a hard thing to figure out.
I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that's all I've ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, "How do you connect writers and readers?" Those are the two masters for me. Recently I've been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you're accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you're being asked to use your own instincts, and that's what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it's sticky. When you're dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don't you find that sometimes people don't behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn't happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don't edit...there's just this assumption that the publisher isn't doing enough. Sometimes agents don't quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I'm not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you're being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't care.
GARGAGLIANO: I've been very lucky with my authors. I haven't had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you're taking care of them. But there is a point when it's out of the editor's hands. And if they've trusted you that far, most of the time they'll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It's like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what's going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren't going to actually help anything. It's more just for show. You know, "Emboss this part of the jacket" for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn't have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that's the agent. I'm more worried about my author's happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I'm thinking more about the agent. I don't want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We're not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we're working on.
What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don't?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don't realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they're not doing that in the office. That in the office they're advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don't even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I'm continuing to advocate. I haven't been able to read at all recently. I've really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I'm both at once! It depends on the street I'm walking down.
What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's important for writers to remember that we're not their enemy. We love books and we're looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we're working nights and weekends and ads don't sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It's like having your business card published in the New York Times.
Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, "Just remember, when you're all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake." And I do think that's worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, "If you're going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level."
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don't want to just buy something blindly.
What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It's better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is soobvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what's going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they've created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you'll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I've never had that happen. Where it's like, "Oooooh, we'd better hope that nobody notices that."
How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.
Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don't have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.
But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.
I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don't we?
That's what I'm trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that's what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that's really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it's more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It's feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that's what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it's better in publishing?
NASH: It's immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don't want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I'll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. "That'll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!" [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I've said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can't believe I forgot that earlier. That's probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it's three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That's why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It's about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, "Okay, this is it. Now I'm kind of happy. This is all I could ever want." Where you actually slept well for one night?
I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I'm just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I'm curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I'm trying to come up with something that won't sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that's actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, "What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?" Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, "You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor." I had this little glimmering moment of, "Yeah! I came here, I didn't even know what publishing was, barely, and now..." Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn't have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... That's actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn't know anything about anything and I thought I'd go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe I'll try New York for one year. I'm sure I'll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about." You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, "Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I'm really going to get to do." I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It's so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It's a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that's always been hard to crack. I'd bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I've never been happier about the work I've seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he'd been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I'd gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, "I should acquire something." We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn't know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn't get any prepubs because I probably didn't send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you're up against it.
The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I'd look at my distributor's website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, "You're not an idiot." I don't think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the secondTimes review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.
But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it's about survival. I wasn't being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they've been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, "A publisher's first duty to his authors is to remain solvent." Which was instructive because if you don't, it's not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, "All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we'll all move on." It was like, "Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this."
Let's talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They're playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they're happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they're sending and who they're sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it's the cover, or an ending that still doesn't work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they're talking about with a "This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It's not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it." An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who's willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it's the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who's able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It's much better than getting a phone call from an agent who's just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent's job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn't always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn't win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It's human nature. We don't like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who's appreciative. That doesn't mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We've all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don't agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It's just complete bullshit. It doesn't work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there's a way to express your convictions without being...
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you're out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, "Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him." Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, "Look how hard this author is working." It's amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, "Why aren't my books in Third Place?" it accomplishes nothing.
We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven't looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they're thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they're submitting to and why and so on.
But what if the author doesn't know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It's their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There's no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor's name is in the acknowledgments. It's very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don't charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it's mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.
I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author's relationship to their editor. It's a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that's in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor's conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called "A+" and "B+" agents, when I've seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that's what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they're the right agent for you. I mean, there's not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there's not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I've always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it's not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It's not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let's say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that's true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.
We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it's going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that's not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it's just the money they need or if they need something else. And it's hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn't earn out and so on—but you can't really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we've often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that's just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that's not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it's financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.
How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don't mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don't mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It's insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? "Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how 'bout we do a book together." I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don't get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that's horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren't allowed to talk to the author unless you'd ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There's an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn't happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let's hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.
I hear what you're saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You're not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.
Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn't to be negated entirely. As long as you don't overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we've all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn't happen in a negative way, which we've obviously seen happen. But if that's the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We'll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There's a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There's a huge spectrum there. But if you're in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.
Do you guys think you feel the money you're spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don't know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely...One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I'll tell you what's easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, "I believe!" But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a "Boy do I need to make sure I don't make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I've got to have blurbs early. We've got to get the cover right. I've got to write those hand-written notes to people." You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don't have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you're trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there's a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it's worth three hundred or we think it's worth eight hundred—I don't sweat that if we're making a decision beforehand. It's when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book...You're paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that's fine and dandy. But it's not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don't want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and "We should get in on that, too." So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it's fine. It's when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.
But it seems like that's how it works now. You're getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don't you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don't feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it's so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it's twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent's like, "I've got interest! I've got interest!" Well, "I've got a ‘No!'" I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that's how it ends up working sometimes. "You've got to get back to me quickly!""Okay, well I guess I won't be deliberating over this very long. I've read ten pages and we can be done, then." If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I've heard so many agents say that it's becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There's so much resistance now—everybody's trying to find a reason why they shouldn't buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say "There's a lot of interest" just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, "Congratulations. I'm thrilled for the author. Next time." I just can't play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It's a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That's one thing I don't ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren't accountable anymore. Not that you aren't accountable—but there's a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn't stopping entirely with you. Whereas there's an in-between spot where it's large enough that you're exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn't finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn't finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, "We've heard that somebody else is going to preempt." The publisher said, "Okay, go offer" several hundred thousand dollars. "Okay!" So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, "So what happens at the end?" I still hadn't finished it! I was like, "They all...leave...and go home." I didn't know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like "This one is all on me"—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn't even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, "I hope that's what happens at the end...." Otherwise the author's going to be like, "Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?" I'd have to be like, "I just think it's important that everything works out that way."
When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they're all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That's something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don't have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn't translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn't necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There's just so much information out there now that people don't know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that's the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that's the big barrier we're all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?
So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it's a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It's amazing. It's actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean "scene" in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It's a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like "Sony" or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That's another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That's a big challenge, and there's no easy solution to it.
What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you're publishing that doesn't seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That's what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don't think anybody's quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we've never really relied much on cultural authority, although we've certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we've been successful, it's been through the things that you're asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it's Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I'm doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I'm glad you're doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, "You should do that! That's brilliant!"
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that's already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren't that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It's that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call "trust" today is the remnants of authority. People "trust" the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you're just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn't care about book reviews when I wasn't in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don't do that anymore. People aren't interested in the community of books. So it's finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It's a novel about the author's grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It's amazing. And we've gotten IndieBound, we've gotten lots of things for it, and it's gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren't going to happen on that alone. So I've been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I'm trying to find the niche market. I think that's the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you're more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren't set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day and there isn't enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That's where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That's one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That's great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It's not hugely difficult, and it's kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it's not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don't think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it's something to consider. I just think that line—"This book is going to appeal to everybody because it's about love or family or whatever"—doesn't work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you'd probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That's the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we're companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren't necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They'll think we're advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it's a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it's a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let's get together. And it's not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You're putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm's website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners' and associates' photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can't be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don't want authors bugging us too much. But I think that's part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.
Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that's come about in the industry?
NASH: It's technology. It's been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that's been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it's all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It's destroying cultural authority but it's enhancing one's ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It's lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, "We only need two months' worth of inventory; we don't need four months of inventory," is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it's good in that I can actually see Ingram's demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, "I'm going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred." So it's fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I'm always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we're at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We're just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don't understand because I don't read that way. But it's our job to figure out how they're reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It's the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I'm still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it's great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it's hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It's really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you're actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it's great, and we're seeing sales of books.... I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it's different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's so exciting.
CHINSKI: That's what I mean. It's also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It's still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we've all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It's going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.
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I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don't understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't understand it.
NASH: It's because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you're right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, "Why will the print book survive?"
No, I'm literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I'm looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.
But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there's still that idea. Also, there's still the hangover of thinking that critics won't pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that's not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven't been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don't care whether it's fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it's written by. But that's not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here's an interesting case: Bolaño's 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They're priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they're priced the same it's not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it's the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don't think it's just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It's also readers still thinking that that's the way they discover new books.
Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don't really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It's been proven over and over again. If you're at Barneys and there's an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it's worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we're not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.
But who's going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That's the model. It's just a question of "How do we get there in a way that doesn't involve complete chaos?" But it seems like that's where we're going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we'll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.
What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.
Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that's spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.
Anybody else? Come on, there's got to be something that's encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It's like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that's something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That's pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn't be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn't get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren't interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It's six hundred pages long—there's a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn't expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what's selling in a bookstore. I thought we'd have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.
Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.
It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn't seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you're on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it's kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there's sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we've talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who've only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That's when I realized what we've lost. As you were saying, it's hard to know because it's the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don't quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that's just because I'm not making the decisions, I'm sure.
BOUDREAUX: You've also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we've all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that's least like a corporate structure. I mean, that's the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, "But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we've been doing it." So you get to pretend you're this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody's figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we've also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.
And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I'd go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it's true: Who doesn't want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn't going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn't actually mean that writers have less choice, I don't think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It's become an easy straw man to point the finger at. "Oh, these big corporate publishers that don't understand what books are." There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it's really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can't control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn't changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there's a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don't think, for the author, it's a major difference. But I wasn't around when it wasn't like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.
Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we've become really dependent on social media is that it's a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn't completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren't paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I'm sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They're not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don't you think they understand the crisis they're in, to a certain degree, too? That's why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody's trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you're right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don't. Half the time they're trying to sell on price—they're doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they're trying to go intimate. I think they're kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that's part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren't actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, "Okay, you pick from these five hundred books." But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark's and Prairie Lights and the rest. They're doing a great job of being retailers. But you're exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they'll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it's really easy to point your finger at the chains. I'm not saying they don't present a certain set of problems. But it's interesting that, in a way, they're wrestling with the same kind of issues that we're wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It's a kind of funny crisis all around.
At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.
That's funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn't have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people's lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That's right! The lives of children! I don't think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We're doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don't we make that, "We're doing it for our children, and our children's children."
EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.
Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can't concentrate in the office so it's just the way it is. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that sometimes you don't feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.
Yeah, it's always just before Christmas, just before New Year's, just before the Fourth of July. The book's might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.
Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it's been going on for so many years, that you've got to be given some time to do it that isn't just every Saturday of your life.
Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what's being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you're passionate about on all of those topics—but I don't really have time to do that.
That's my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.
And it's a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you've got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors' backlists to read and what your house is doing that's working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you're not reading to learn something about your job.
What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.
Submit the next book when you haven't even published the first book and you don't even know how many you're printing.
Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.
And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don't think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.
"Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" I want to be like, "Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?" They don't realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I'm being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it's "Have you read it?""No, I'm actually editing your author who's under contract."
There's also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?
And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, "Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend..." Or over Labor Day weekend! It's like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I'm like, "Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn't have shit to read."
What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.
I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn't want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.
Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we're not their therapists, we're not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can't fix your whole life.
What about when an author calls because there aren't enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That's happened!
Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He's both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.
I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.
Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I've ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I've never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.
There's also Anna Stein, who's wonderful. She's got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she's also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don't necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg's former foreign rights person.
You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He's really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.
What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don't love their book. Or when it's been a battle to get them attention on the list.
I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it's a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I've never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.
Do you send them all of their bad reviews?
I leave that up to the author.
I've started telling debut authors, "A lot of writers who have been through this don't want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?"
When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don't go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it's great news and I can say, "We did this and we did that and we did this," I give it to them all the time. But I don't go out of my way to say, "You're holding steady. Nothing's happening."
What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there's a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don't know how the finances look. But just as books, they're incredibly consistent.
I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.
I've been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I'm impressed is their own tagline: "They make more noise than a two-dollar radio."
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Literary Agents
In "Goodbye to All That," her 1967 essay about the years she spent in New York City as a young writer, Joan Didion recalls trying to coax a world-weary friend into attending a party by promising him "new faces." Her friend "laughed literally until he choked" before explaining that "the last time he had gone to a party where he'd been promised ‘new faces,' there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men."
Several decades later, the details may be different—casual sex? what's that?—but the literary world is every bit as small as it was in Didion's heyday. The agents who congregated at the offices of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for this conversation (and who were chosen, it should be noted, by the editors ofthis magazine) are not new faces—to one another or to me. During our talk, one of them said that she hopes to "grow old together" with her clients. The same might be said of us publishing people, who, unlike Didion's friend and especially in these tough times, are likely to view our shared history as a comfort rather than a curse. Some particulars:
MARIA MASSIE worked as an agent for twelve years before joining Lippincott Massie McQuilkin as a partner in 2004. A few years ago Maria broke hearts all over town (mine included) when she sold Nigerian priest Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them to Little, Brown for an ungodly advance. Her other clients include Peter Ho Davies and Tom Perrotta.
JIM RUTMAN, an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic for the past ten years, is mild mannered until he steps onto a basketball court—we play on a publishing team called the Jackals—at which point he turns into a ferociously competitive shooting guard who sometimes scores half our points. His clients include Charles Bock, J. Robert Lennon, and Peter Rock.
ANNA STEIN worked at three other agencies before joining the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency in 2006. Once, after a writers conference in New Orleans, Anna took me and my wife to a second-line celebration (imagine a loud, roving bacchanal) in the Ninth Ward. We made our plane, but barely. Her clients include Chloe Aridjis, Yoko Ogawa, and Anya Ulinich.
PETER STEINBERG spent twelve years at other agencies before founding the Steinberg Agency in 2007. Peter is a kind of throwback to the golden age of publishing, when men did things like hold doors open for women and send handwritten thank-you notes—not to embarrass him or anything. His clients include Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue, and John Matteson.
Let us inside your heads a little and talk about what you're looking at and thinking about when you're evaluating a piece of fiction.
STEIN: It's really hard to talk about why a piece of writing is good, and moving—even if it's funny—and what makes us keep thinking about something after we've read it. And it's incredibly subjective. That's why it's hard for agents who represent fiction, especially literary fiction, to find it. It's so rare. We can all talk about the things we don't like. When I see clichés, for example, on the first page or in the first chapter of a book, that kind of kills it for me immediately. The romance and the chemistry is just over. That's just one example of the negative side of that question, and I'm sure you guys have a million others. If I knew how to describe in language what makes me fall in love with something, then I would be a writer. All I can say is that if I read the first few pages of a novel and think, "Jesus Christ! Who the fuck is this person? Why are they letting me read this?" then that person is onto something. And we don't have that feeling very often. But when we do see it, it's so exciting.
MASSIE: Anna's right. It's like you have this moment of clarity and you recognize something that you're so absorbed with. I read a lot of things that are beautifully written where I say to myself, "Oh, this is good," but I'm not bowled over or sucked right in. It's so subjective. I can read something and pass on it and I hear, two days later, that there was a bidding war and it sold for a ton of money, but it just wasn't the thing that I was going to fall in love with.
STEINBERG: And you're okay with that.
MASSIE: You have to be okay with it because it's so subjective. I'm not necessarily going to see what somebody else sees, or read a book the way somebody else reads it. That's one thing that writers who are looking for an agent should always remember: All agents are different. Everyone has different tastes. What I like to read might be different than Anna or Peter or Jim. That's a great thing about what we do—there's so much to choose from. And what you fall in love with is a very personal choice.
RUTMAN: And the reactions are necessarily self-contained. It's impossible to articulate what you hope to find as an agent. How could you explain to somebody what moves you? Because hopefully you're capable of being moved by things that you didn't anticipate being moved by. So you sit down with something, and all the preamble is basically pointless until the moment that you actually start searching around and rummaging for your feelings and response. It might happen on word four, or it might happen on sentence seven, but if it hasn't happened by page two, will it happen on page two hundred and fifty? I wish it did. But I don't know that it does.
Are there any specific things that can make you fall in love with a piece of writing?
STEIN: I would say that being able to make me think, especially in dialogue, "Oh, shit. This person has got me. This person has just seen into what we all feel every day but don't say. This person has looked into our souls, especially the worst sides of us, and sort of ripped them open and put them on the page." Psychology, to me, is one of the most exciting things to see work well in fiction—when it comes alive on the page and is totally devastating.
STEINBERG: When you read something and think, "I can't believe they just said what I've thought in my deepest thoughts but never articulated," that is always an eye-opener for me. And it's also about reading something that doesn't seem familiar. Writers should realize that agents have a ton of material to read, and when things seem familiar, it's an easy reason to pass. If it's something that's new, it really makes a huge difference. And I'm not talking about something being so wildly creative that it's ridiculous—not a talking plant falling in love with a turtle or something like that. I'm talking about, in a real sense, something that is genuinely new and also deeply felt. That's what we're all looking for. But at the same time, I do get things and think, "How is this like something else that has sold well?" It's a difficult balance. You have to have one foot in literature and one foot in what's going on in the marketplace.
RUTMAN: Writers probably shouldn't trouble themselves too much over that consideration. If they're aiming to hit some spot that's been working—trying to write toward the books that have made an impression—that just seems like a pretty pointless chase. You know, "I hear that circus animals are wildly appealing and I've had some thoughts about circus animals...." That doesn't seem like a very good way to go about it.
STEINBERG: A writer was just asking me about that and I said it's the agent's job to spin a book for the marketplace—to talk about it being a little like this book and a little like that book or whatever. Writers should put those kinds of thoughts out of their heads and just write.
RUTMAN: I don't know who to blame for trends. If a run of books comes out that are all set in a particular country—which happens all the time—to whom do we attribute that? To writers who are looking at things and saying, "Hmmm, I notice that fourteen years ago India was interesting to people. I think that's where I'm going to set my book"? You can't blame writers for asking what subjects are interesting these days, even when we're talking about fiction, and I wish I had a useful answer for them, but I just don't think it works that way.
STEINBERG: I would basically go with your passion. The subject matter can be very wide ranging, but if you go with your passion, even if it doesn't work, at least it's heartfelt.
STEIN: On some level, what else are you going to do? Are you going to write a novel because it's "commercially viable"? I mean, I guess people do that. But we're not going to represent them.
Because you hate money?
STEIN: We. Hate. Money. [Laughter.]
But seriously, I sometimes think that people in the business read in different ways than normal readers. Are there things that you're looking at—contextual things, like who the author is—beyond what's on the page?
STEINBERG: Those things very much take the backseat for me. It really is just what's on the page. All of that other stuff comes later. Maybe once I get a third of the way through a novel and I'm loving it, then I will look back and see who the author is and all that stuff. I think it's important to stress that the synopsis and the cover letter and all of those things are not really important. It's the work, the work, the work. You have to focus on the work. I think sometimes writers get lost in getting the cover letter and the synopsis and those kinds of professional things right because they're afraid of focusing on the work.
STEIN: I don't even read synopses. Do you guys?
STEINBERG: I skip right over them. I go to the first page.
STEIN: I hate synopses. They're terrible.
RUTMAN: It's hard to write a synopsis well. And when we're talking about literary fiction, it will probably not make or break an agent's interest going into page one. You're not like, "Oh, there's going to be an unexpected plot twist two-thirds of the way through. I'm going to hang in there long enough to find out how that goes."
STEIN: I'm still surprised when I call an editor to pitch a book and he says, "So what's the novel about?" I'm like, "You actually want me to tell you what happens in the plot? Are you serious? I mean, we can do that if you want." But that's not really the point. I don't want anyone to tell me the plot of a novel. It's so boring.
But are there any other things you're looking at beyond what's on the page? Things that maybe you can sense after years of experience.
MASSIE: Sometimes it's when you're reading a manuscript and you can see that the person is a really talented writer with a beautiful voice but the story is not quite there. But you see the potential. Sometimes you sign those people on because you think, "Okay, maybe this isn't going to be the big book, or maybe it won't even sell, but this person has a quality—they have the writing, they have the voice—and the potential is there. This writer is going to go far. And maybe the next book will be the one." I've taken people on under those circumstances.
RUTMAN: I mean, reading "professionally," if that's what we do, is a compromised process because you are reading a book with an eye toward asking somebody for money. You are reading in a different way than you are when that's not a consideration. So I think it's filtered into the experience from the beginning. You are reading to be moved, hopefully, if that's the kind of novel you work on, but at the same time it probably would be disingenuous to suggest that you're not taking in some superficial considerations. They are all distantly secondary to the work itself. Because if an agent is reading with an eye toward various recent trends that have worked, he's probably not going to succeed all that well either. The same thing is true of the reverse. Any categorical dismissal of some kind of novel feels bogus because there's got to be a counterexample for every single example. So if somebody comes along and has this long list of accolades and prizes, it doesn't damage your regard for them. And if somebody comes to you on novel fourteen, with twelve of them having done exceptionally well, and the last one maybe less well, you think about that, too. You're thinking about how difficult it could be given certain practical considerations. But it's still all pretty far receded from the work itself.
STEIN: There is the question, now more than ever, of whether or not a book is publishable. By publishable I don't mean, "Is there a great plot and is the writing amazing etcetera?" I mean that if we were in your shoes, as a publisher, how would we publish the book? What kind of jacket would we give it? How would we position it? I mean, we're talking about literary fiction? You can't publish literary fiction today. How do you do that? [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: Legally, you can, but...
STEIN: So, given that it's basically impossible, it's our responsibility as the first guard to begin to think about, "Is it possible?" And if we're so bowled over and we're so in love that we think somebody should publish it, how would we do it? This is something I really struggle with because I'm not very creative. I don't have the mind for it. I admire publishers all the more today because the ideas they come up with just amaze me. And I'm not trying to flatter them, at all, because I love to talk trash. But it really does amaze me. I'm thinking about a book right now, for example, that I want to sell. I think the author is fantastic and well positioned and that the novel is perfect—there's nothing wrong with it. But in a way it would be a funny book to publish. In a way, I don't exactly see how it fits and how it could break out. So I see the problem there, which maybe we didn't have five years ago as agents. And I see it becoming more and more of a problem as the market contracts. So I'm reading a little differently because of that. I might not be altering my habits about what I take on, but maybe I am.
STEINBERG: I think you're sort of unconsciously changing and adapting to the marketplace. I find myself doing that. I think when an agent says, "I was following my gut instinct," what that really means is accumulated wisdom and taking a lot of different variables into account. You spend your day reading Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch and you take these things into consideration. You're having lunch with editors who are saying, "Such-and-such is so hard" and you're processing all of this information. And when you open a manuscript, you're reading it with that eye. It's hard for us to say exactly how we're looking at material but I think we are taking a lot of different things into account.
Is the economy affecting how you're reading?
MASSIE: It's starting to.
STEINBERG: I would say yes too. It feels like things are tough.
MASSIE: Right before Black Wednesday I had a novel out that I was really excited about. I was getting great reads from a bunch of people who were all calling to say, "This is great. This is wonderful." And one by one they slowly disappeared on me, except for one editor, who actually ended up being the perfect editor. But I did see everything diminish. I had an idea of what the novel was going to sell for and it didn't quite get there. It was actually shocking, because it's a wonderful novel and the responses were amazing and I really did see people pull back. Her first novel had done okay but not great and all people could say was, "Her numbers are just not good enough." Her numbers were not bad for a literary novel. So that was my first moment of a little bit of fear. I haven't quite gotten to the point where I'm conscious that the economy is affecting my thinking, but I'm sure I will at some point.
RUTMAN: Especially with fiction, you're largely at the mercy of what comes in. Certainly you solicit your share, but when you're relying on the kindness of your acquaintances, or referrals, wherever they happen to come from, you can only adjust so much. But it's certainly nice to glimpse something behind the page whenever you can, whatever it may be. If a novel happens to have a nice, portable summation—if it's pitchable—that doesn't upset me.
MASSIE: If there's a hook.
STEIN: Or when the author has a platform.
MASSIE: When they've been published in the New Yorker or something.
RUTMAN: When you're reading something, one of the things you're trying to glimpse is whether you can imagine more than a few people warming up to it. But things that work in various ways...I mean, not to be indirectly nepotistic here, but on what planet should 2666 have worked commercially?
STEIN: I wasn't going to bring it up.
RUTMAN: That's why I did.
STEIN: Well, let's start with The Savage Detectives. I mean, why should anybody have finished that book, let alone have it be successful? [Laughter.] Now I'm going to say something nice about the publisher, but it really was a beautiful piece of publishing.
RUTMAN: It was exquisite. How did that work? Why did that work? I want somebody to explain it to me. Gut instincts are referred to retrospectively when they have worked—people don't really make much reference to their gut instincts when they're looking back regretfully. It's not like, "Ugh, my gut instincts. Son of a bitch." Gut instincts are wrong just as much as they're right. But there is such a thing as publishing something well, and resourcefully.
STEIN: And I find that inspiring—the fact that Lorin Stein is my brother aside—because we are in the position now where we're selling books for lowly five figures that we might have sold for six figures very recently. And I don't want to alter what I take on because of that.
RUTMAN: Do you think you would know how to alter it?
STEIN: I don't think I would.
RUTMAN: If I could see clearly enough and far enough to think, "If I just adjust my taste this much, I think I'll be a very successful person," I would think about trying it. [Laughter.] I just don't presume to know how that would work.
STEIN: But here's how I might alter. I might say, "Look, I can't take on an Icelandic writer right now." Or, "I can't afford to invest my time in editing the sample translation of this Icelandic writer right now. It's just not the time for that. Maybe when things are sunnier."
STEINBERG: I feel like I can adjust when there are natural inclinations a certain way. For instance, I was reading that young adult books are selling better than adult books. I have kids and I'm starting to read what they're reading, and I thought, "Oh, I'm sort of interested in this. Maybe I should do a little more young adult." So that's something that I've consciously done in terms of categories. I think I'll still look for the same type of material within the young adult category, but I'm definitely thinking about the category a little bit more because of the marketplace.
Where are you finding writers, aside from referrals? Are you reading literary magazines? Are you reading blogs?
MASSIE: No blogs.
RUTMAN: Not for fiction.
STEIN: Hell no.
RUTMAN: Referrals are about 75 percent of how I find writers.
MASSIE: A lot of my clients teach in MFA programs, so I get referrals from them. I get referrals from editors. I get referrals from other agents.
RUTMAN: There's a big range of where referrals come from.
STEIN: But every now and then there will be something in the slush—and I bet this is true for you guys, too—that's not just well written but is also well researched and shows that the person knows your list and is really appropriate for your list and also has published well.
MASSIE: And sometimes when I read a short story that I like I'll send an e-mail. "Are you represented?" Once in a blue moon someone's not represented.
RUTMAN: There are too many of us.
MASSIE: There are a lot of us.
STEIN: There are way too many of us.
STEINBERG: A lot of times, when people are in literary magazines, it's too late.
MASSIE: Exactly. Agents are submitting those short stories.
RUTMAN: And MFA students are going about things in an entirely different way.
STEINBERG: They're savvy.
MASSIE: They're so savvy.
STEIN: That's what they pay for.
MASSIE: I was amazed by going to MFA programs and talking to students. The first thing they want to know is, "Okay, what do I need for my query letter? What do I need for this thing or that thing?" It wasn't questions about the work. Their questions were really about the business side.
Do you think that's healthy?
MASSIE: No. I don't.
RUTMAN: Ultimately, no. If that is more of a priority than the work, it can't be all good. I mean, it's fine that they have a sort of professional track and that they're exposed to whatever realities they are ultimately going to encounter. But when they take a sort of sporting interest in it...
STEINBERG: It's a good way to eliminate potential people, for me at least. When they ask me, "What's the query letter consist of?" I usually think, "Well, that's probably not a potential client."
RUTMAN: It's true.
What do you wish beginning writers would do better?
MASSIE: Take chances. Don't worry about writing a perfect novel. Sometimes it's nice to have something that's a little bit raw and has a little bit of an edge to it. Something that's just perfect all the way through is sometimes a little boring.
STEIN: I wish they would get their friends, who may be writers or may not be writers, to read their work and tell them, "Don't say anything nice to me. I don't want to hear anything nice. I want to hear everything not nice that you have to say."
STEINBERG: And be smart about picking those people. Find your two or three friends who hate everything.
STEIN: Exactly. And have those people—those hateful friends—give you feedback before you even think about sending out your work.
STEINBERG: I would also say, once you think the work is done, work on it for another year.
STEIN: And never trust your spouse if your spouse says it's good. Your spouse has no idea. Neither do your mother or your father.
RUTMAN: Check your eagerness to share. A lot of professors may even encourage you, as a way to hasten the process along. You know, "I think it's time for the world to tell you what they think of this." It may well not be time for the world to pass judgment just yet. Hold on until you are absolutely certain that it's ready for broad, indiscriminate exposure. Don't hurry that.
STEIN: And this is a cliché for us but it seems worth saying that most writers' first novels aren't really their first novels. If you have to scrap your first novel, you'll live. Your first novel probably won't be the first novel you publish. Maybe your second one will be. But you'll live. And you'll be a better writer because of it.
What are some of the common mistakes you see in the submission process?
STEINBERG: Don't say, "If you don't like this novel, I have many other I could show you." Don't say, "This will make a great movie, too." Don't do that fake thing where you pretend you know all about the stuff I've agented. It's funny because I think that's a piece of advice that writers always gets—research the agent and talk about the other work they've sold. But it always comes off as very false to me unless you've really read something I've sold. And I don't want you to waste your time reading something of mine just to write a query letter.
STEIN: I would say to go the other way around. Write to agents whose books you're actually in love with.
STEINBERG: But what if those agents pass and you still want an agent?
STEIN: Then you should read more books. [Laughter.]
What else?
STEINBERG: Don't talk about a character sweating on the first page or two.
RUTMAN: Sweating?
STEINBERG: Yeah. It happens all the time. The writer's like, "He was sweating profusely...." It's supposed to denote tension, I think.
RUTMAN: Also don't write the phrase "sweating profusely."
STEINBERG: I have a joke in my office where if a character is sweating in the first two pages, I go, "Sweating!" [Laughter.] Also, people are always "clutching" steering wheels in the first few pages.
STEIN: That's the cliché thing.
STEINBERG: And don't wake up from a dream on the first page. No dreams on the first page.
STEIN: It's best to avoid dreams if possible.
But this is all craft stuff. Let's go back to the submission process.
STEIN: Don't write "Because of your interest in international fiction..." or whatever you think the agent's interest is. That means you've been trolling some Web site, and that freaks me out. Don't let me see that you've been trolling some Web site that says I like a certain kind of genre. If you know who I am, you should know who I am because you've done some kind of research that has to do with the specific books I represent. That should only be because you've fallen in love with one or two of those books. And that's pretty unlikely because those books haven't sold very many copies. So you probably shouldn't be writing to me to begin with. [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: "Just avoid me altogether. I haven't helped any of these people, really, and I'm not going to help you."
STEIN: Exactly. There shouldn't really be anybody writing to me at all.
STEINBERG: That's off the record, right? Can I say "Off the record" on your behalf?
STEIN: What can I say? I'm funny.
STEINBERG: And of course with the e-mail submissions, don't cc a hundred agents and say, "Dear Agent...."
STEIN: I got an e-mail query addressed to "Elizabeth" today.
MASSIE: I get those. Those are an instant delete.
STEIN: They are.
RUTMAN: Don't try to write eye-catching cover letters. It just isn't really going to enhance my anticipation going into the manuscript.
On the flip side of that, what do you want them to do? I think it can seem really hard to get an agent's attention when you live in a small town somewhere and you don't know anybody.
STEINBERG: Well, know somebody. [Laughter.] I'm serious. We're in the age of e-mail and the Internet. If you e-mail twenty of your friends and say, "Do you know anyone in publishing?" someone has to know somebody. Or somebody who knows somebody. You know what I mean? Find how you know somebody.
STEIN: But you know what? I've actually taken on several clients who didn't know anybody in publishing. I'll give you an example: Anya Ulinich, who's done pretty well for somebody who didn't know anybody. She did some research and asked herself, "Okay, I'm Russian, and my novel has something to do with Russia, so who represents Russian novels?" She did some research and targeted those agents and wrote a query letter that was just really straightforward. It was like, "Here's my deal. Here's why I'm writing to you." It was completely unpretentious and completely straightforward and well written, and because of all that and because there was nothing in it that made me think, "Oh, she's read some book that tells you how to write query letters"—it was just very natural—I asked to see pages. I don't think you have to know somebody.
STEINBERG: But it is one way of getting an agent's attention. I have a lot of clients who didn't know anyone either. But it is a good way to do it. Because when I get a query from a friend of a friend, it definitely goes in a different pile. I would also say to follow what the agent's Web site says. If it says, "Send the first twenty-five pages," do that. And don't send the thirty-third chapter of your novel. Send the first chapter.
MASSIE: And don't try too hard. Sometimes I get these queries that describe the book as a cross between this best-seller and that best-seller and ten different other things. I always find that really distracting and unhelpful.
STEIN: And don't compare the book only to movies.
RUTMAN: I feel like people have generally read something that tells them how to write, at the very least, an unobjectionable cover letter. I like it when they are fairly matter-of-fact. To me that suggests, whether it's well placed or not, a certain confidence that you're going to appreciate the pages rather than the letter. I don't have any sort of pointed advice about what people ought to do in a cover letter. It just doesn't matter that much. It's going to get read.
By your assistant. Just to play devil's advocate.
RUTMAN: Some of it, yes. But she has excellent taste. And if you're working with someone whose taste you really value and trust, they bring you the things you probably would have plucked out yourself.
MASSIE: And she's looking for certain things. Has the writer been published before? What are their credits?
RUTMAN: I think if anybody reads a certain number of cover letters they start to sense what is nice to have in a cover letter. But people generally seem to know. And if you've already published things, it suggests that you've been willing to subject yourself to some of the cruelties of the process and that you realize it's probably part of the deal.
STEIN: That's the thing. It's possible to get published in some good literary magazines without an agent. Very possible. In fact, in some places it's easier. And if you're writing fiction, and especially if you have the misfortune of being a short story writer, then you should spend a lot of time and energy getting published in those places before you start looking for an agent. Because it'll make everybody's job so much easier.
Does anybody have a success story about finding a writer in a literary magazine?
STEINBERG: I read a great short story in the Southern Review a few years ago and called the writer and eventually sold the novel-in-stories to Ann Patty at Harcourt, who's great and who unfortunately is no longer at Harcourt. It was called The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day. It's funny because I originally looked at the story because I liked the author's last name. I don't know if that means I'm superficial, but at the time I was interested in writers whose last names were words, and her last name was Day, so—
RUTMAN: This was a phase you went through?
STEINBERG: It was! I also went through a phase of looking for names with alliteration.
STEIN: Note to readers.
STEINBERG: For example, I represent a guy named Brad Barkley.
STEIN: What's your phase right now? What are you into?
STEINBERG: Now I'm in the supporting-my-three-children phase.
How's that going?
STEINBERG: It's going okay. [Laughter.]
How do you guys feel about short stories?
STEIN: If they're awesome, they're awesome. Even if we can't sell them, they're still awesome.
MASSIE: I'm with Anna. I love short stories.
And can you sell them?
MASSIE: On occasion. It's hard. It always helps if there's a novel coming. But if you've got a great short story collection, it will stand out. I represent a writer who was referred to me by an editor at a literary magazine. I read it and it blew me away. I sold it, it was published, it got great reviews, but it did not sell very many copies. But then the writer, Robin Romm, went on to write an amazing memoir that was just reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. She's a fantastic writer and you never know where a short story writer is going to go or what stories they have left to tell. So, you know, she wasn't making a lot of money in the beginning, but she's going to have an amazing career.
STEIN: And here's another thing. A short story writer might end up just being a short story writer, which might be our nightmare, but what if he ends up being one of those—
MASSIE: Alice Munro or somebody.
RUTMAN: We don't really have much choice but to represent talent in whatever form it happens to come. And if it happens to come first in short story collection form, that does not make things easier, practically speaking, but it's not in itself a reason not to do it. The climate hardly encourages it, and it's not fun to call an editor and say, "What I have for you now—brace yourself—is a collection of short stories." I mean, that's like a meta-joke, I suppose, at this point. But you shouldn't just abandon it. You know it's going to be hard so you ask yourself, "How fired up am I about trying this?" With a story collection, that question is a good test of how intrinsically great you find it.
STEIN: It had better be super-duper-duper-duper good.
RUTMAN: Right. One of my colleagues gave me a collection not that long ago. It was sort of short, and the author had not really tried to publish any of them, and I took it home, sort of unhappily, and I ended up being like, "Oh. Okay. So this is a person who can do this." If you feel that way as an agent, what are you going to do, say no? It just doesn't really feel like a smart option.
STEIN: But novels are beginning to feel that way too. I mean, really—it's like the novel is the new short story.
RUTMAN: The short story is the new poem...
STEIN: Yeah, the short story is the new poem, novels are the new short story.... It's hard out there.
RUTMAN: If you're talking to a certain audience, say an MFA audience, you hear the sentiment of, "Ugh, if only I could get past the short story collection and get on to the novel, easy street can't be far behind."
STEIN: There is no easy street.
RUTMAN: Exactly. It doesn't exist. But there is this unhelpful assumption that you just need to get to a novel, at which point your publishing fortunes will brighten.
STEINBERG: There are probably only a hundred people in the United States who make a living off novel writing.
STEIN: Did you make that number up?
STEINBERG: Yeah, I just made it up.
STEIN: I think that's a really great point and that number sounds about right to me.
STEINBERG: I think all of my clients have day jobs. Writing is just not going to be a way to stop doing what you're doing for a living, probably. And I wouldn't advise it. I have clients who sometimes sell their books for a decent amount of money and are like, "Ooh, should I quit my job?" And I panic and say, "No!" It also affects your work because you start writing for the marketplace too much.
STEIN: And the money is never what the money looks like.
STEINBERG: Exactly. The money has to be gravy and not a base salary.
MASSIE: And you never know what the second book will do, versus the first one, and what the advance for the next book is going to look like.
You are all deep inside this world, but so many writers aren't. If you were a beginning writer who lived out in Wisconsin or somewhere and didn't know anybody and you were looking for an agent, how would you do it?
STEINBERG: I would not worry about looking for an agent. I would work on my writing for a long time. And then when I was finally ready, I would ask everyone I know what they thought I should do.
MASSIE: I agree with that. I would concentrate on getting published in well-regarded literary magazines and, chances are, agents will come to you.
RUTMAN: I wouldn't relish the prospect of looking for an agent if I had not come through a program, where a professor can often steer you in some helpful direction. I guess you'd start at the bookstore.
MASSIE: You pick up your favorite books and look at the acknowledgments and see who represented them and write those people a letter.
STEIN: I'm with Peter. I wouldn't worry so much about finding an agent. The thing is, there aren't that many great writers. Right? And there seem to be a lot of people trying to write novels and find agents. If you're looking for an agent, it means you want to sell your book. But if there are only a hundred people making money as writers—and I think that number sounds about right—and you're trying to sell your book to make money, then that doesn't really make sense. It's like playing the lottery. If I thought I'd written something brilliant, I would hope that, like Peter said, I would be continuing to work on my writing.
RUTMAN: But don't you think most people who are working on their writing feel kind of persuaded that they are brilliant and have something really unique and wonderful to say?
STEIN: I also think they feel this pressure to get published. With all the MFA programs, and with all the writing conferences and programs that they pay money for, there's this encouragement to get published.
RUTMAN: Sure. It's the stated goal.
STEIN: Right. That's the goal. But for 99 percent of people writing fiction, that shouldn't necessarily be the goal. Maybe writing should be the thing they work on for many years and then maybe they should think about getting published.
RUTMAN: I think being published has come to feel, for reasons I can't explain, too achievable. To take a step back, I think the idea of writing a book has come to seem too achievable. I don't know what to attribute that to. It may be the fact that famous people have access to people who can write a tolerable book for them, which might create the impression that most of us should be thinking about writing a book. I think it used to feel rightfully daunting to write a book. People should be daunted by the prospect of writing a book—and more than they may be at the moment. I'm not saying that writing can't be a hobby. But professionalizing it? That's a whole other step, and you then expose yourself to a whole other set of challenges and disappointments that you have to take into consideration. But at some point I feel like there was some kind of fundamental shift that made writing a book—and finishing it and publishing it—seem like not that big a deal. Or not a big enough deal.
STEINBERG: One thing we should convey is how rare it is that a great piece of fiction crosses our desks from someone new.
ALL: Yes.
STEINBERG: It happens maybe, what, once a year? Twice a year? That's it. It's so rare. So for people in Wisconsin who might be reading this and trying to figure out how to get published, they should keep that in mind. That's why stressing the work is so important—because it's so rare that something extraordinary crosses our desks. I like to think that all of our instincts are good enough, and we're well trained enough, and we've done this long enough, to recognize it when it arrives. But that aspect of it can't be stressed enough, which is why I say to work on it for a long time. You also only get one shot with an agent. There are no do-overs. When we get letters that say, "I know you passed on this six months ago but I've rewritten it," it's difficult to look at it again. You really do only get one shot.
Do you guys feel competitive with other agents?
RUTMAN: I'm not sure I feel that competitive. I'm definitely envious of other agents. [Laughter.] But that's not the same thing.
STEIN: I know Jim's not competitive because we were competing for a client once and both of us are so uncompetitive that he was like, "No, no, Anna's so great," and I was like, "No, no, Jim's so great."
Who won?
STEIN: Jim.
RUTMAN: Competitive just feels like the wrong word. I can apply competitiveness to all kinds of other arenas but I have trouble, for some reason, doing it here. Because even competing for a client feels...I mean, maybe if I was a huge rock star I would just sit back and point at my shelf and say, "That's why you should be represented by me." When that's not really an option it becomes a charm expedition. You're trying to persuade somebody that you care enough, or that you see enough in what they've done, to suggest to them that you would be the right person for the job.
Tell me a little about how you view your jobs. How do you think about your obligations and responsibilities to your clients?
RUTMAN: The responsibilities are so amorphous and encompassing that it's hard to sum up. I've never done it very successfully. I guess the boundaries are fairly few. You're trying to find books that you believe in and feel like you'd be doing the author and yourself a favor by involving yourself with, and then you're advising them about its readiness to be exposed to these calculating strangers, and then you choose the strangers you're going to share it with, and then, if you're lucky enough to have options among those strangers, you're telling them which one is best. And then the book gets published and the landscape changes to a whole new level of abstraction about what constitutes a good publication experience and what doesn't. And how many people wind up being published without feeling aggrieved or getting less than what they could have from the experience? A lot of people are disappointed by it. It's a pretty boundary-less relationship. It extends into all kinds of areas that are personal, that involve editorial work, that involve.... The editorial part's nice because at least it's a place to stop. It's also, for my money, the most interesting part of the process. You're talking about something that, presumably, has moved you enough to want to think and discuss.
STEIN: It sounds so cheesy to say, and everyone will agree with it, but the job is about finding books that you feel should exist in the world, and should for a long time. I mean, this summer I read Anna Karenina, and it made it impossible for me to even think about taking on a book for months. It's really important for us to read published books that we don't represent while we're reading our own clients' books. It's important for us to stay current, but also to read classics. And it reminded me of why I really do what I do. It's because I want the books I represent to be important, and for a long time. I don't want to sell a book just to sell a book. I want each one to matter. I mean, that's a little heavy, and none of your books is ever going to be Anna Karenina—Anna Karenina is Anna Karenina, let's not touch it—but that's the idea.
RUTMAN: That's why the job is interesting. There is always the chance, no matter how remote, that that could happen. It won't necessarily be Anna Karenina, but you can find something that you didn't expect, and you can glimpse stuff in it that you couldn't anticipate, and the writer can change the way you think about something. That is, in a job, a pretty interesting thing, even if it remains largely in the realm of possibility. It's still a nice possibility to encounter on a daily basis. I mean, that's better than most jobs I've been able to conceive of as possibilities for myself.
MASSIE: It's terrific. It means that you learn something every day. You pick something up and you don't know what world it's going to take you to or what it will teach you, and that's an incredible thing. I think that's one of the wonderful things about what we do. If you find something that you're blown away by, you actually can help get it to a larger audience. It's amazing when people will say to you, "I read that book you represented. God, that was amazing. It really affected me." That's a great feeling.
How about your responsibilities?
MASSIE: I sometimes feel like a cross between a mother, a shrink, an accountant, a lawyer.... You wear so many different hats on a daily basis. You're juggling so many things, and the clients are so different. They all have different personalities and one person needs handholding or reassurance after every rejection letter and others just want to hear from you when there's news. It's different with everybody. I haven't ever seen myself as doing one thing. I mean, with one client you're going over royalty statements and with another you're hearing about her marriage or some trauma she's going through. It's a pretty intimate relationship.
STEINBERG: It's a friendship.
MASSIE: It's a relationship. You have your ups and downs, and the good and the bad, and it's the mark of a really great relationship with an author that you can weather the storms and get through the good publications and the bad publications, the good reviews and the bad reviews.
RUTMAN: We're like disappointment brokers.
STEIN: That's why trust is so important.
MASSIE: Trust is key.
STEIN: That's why, from the very beginning of the relationship, the more up-front you are, the better. The way you approach an agent says so much about your personality and your character. So if you're very straightforward in your query letter and cover letter, that shows us something. And if we're going to have a long-term and trusting relationship, that's important. Let's say you have several agents interested in you. Let's say you go with one agent and you don't tell the other agents, or you're somehow a little dishonest about the process. Things might not work out with that agent—that agent might move to Wisconsin for some reason and decide to leave publishing—and you're going to have to face those other agents. It's just really important to have integrity and to be honest and to be gracious from the very beginning.
STEINBERG: I think we've all done this long enough that we can sort of suss out when someone's being false or fake or dishonest. So you really shouldn't even try.
RUTMAN: Because if you start to get the sense, early enough in the process, that someone seems like trouble, those suspicions are rarely misleading or without some kind of foundation. One time I was in the rare position of dealing with a writer who was wildly and indisputably talented but came with some warning signs. Actually they weren't warning signs so much as actual warnings from people who knew the writer and said, "I'll be up-front with you. This writer is remarkable in the most important ways and a challenge in a great many other ways."
STEIN: "Totally insane" is what they probably said.
RUTMAN: Yeah, that's what they meant. So what do you do? Is it a measure of how heroic an agent you are if you take them on? Is it a good idea? I'm not so sure that it is.
STEIN: I tried that once. I took on somebody who was insanely talented but also insane. And I tried to be heroic. I tried my very, very best. And it ended, not only in tears, but in legal fees. I made a New Year's resolution: No more. No more crazy ones, ever again.
STEINBERG: It's not worth it. Life's too short.
MASSIE: There are also the clients who are blamers. They're always looking for somebody to blame. They're like, "That person didn't do this" or "You didn't do that."
STEIN: Those are agent-jumpers.
MASSIE: Exactly.
STEINBERG: That's another reason why writers should make sure it's the right match. You don't want to switch agents unless you have to. If you have to tell an agent, "Oh, I've had two agents and it hasn't worked out," the new agent will perceive that as a warning sign. Unless it's legitimate. Sometimes things don't work out or the personalities just aren't right.
STEIN: But in general, everybody wants the relationship to work. I mean, we're all pretty young and we're not naïve, but we are a little bit romantic or otherwise we wouldn't be in this industry—obviously there's no money in it. We go into the relationship thinking, "We want to grow old together." It's a real relationship. It's like a marriage. We want to grow old together. So if it doesn't work out it's usually for pretty serious reasons.
STEINBERG: My clients and I talk about growing old together. We sort of joke about it. "When we're old we'll do this or that."
MASSIE: Right. It always worries me when you're talking to a writer about representing them and they ask, "So, do you work on a book-by-book basis?" I'm like, "No. I do not work on a book-by-book basis." I'm not interested in working on a book-by-book basis. For me it's a long-term relationship.
STEINBERG: That's one of the reasons why you take on short story writers. You see the relationship in a long-term way—you're trying to see the forty-year arc. And when you work with storytelling so much, one thing you learn is that there's a story arc to the client-agent relationship, too. You have an arc of a story in the way that your relationship develops.
What are the hardest decisions you have to make as an agent?
STEINBERG: A lot of times it's books that you know you could sell for a lot of money but you still say no.
STEIN: Or you take the preempt because you know it's the right house, or you take the lower offer because you know it's the right house. And you hope that you're right.
MASSIE: Another hard one is telling an author that his newest book is not there, or not the one, or you're not happy with it, or you just don't see it or know what to do with it. That's a really hard conversation to have, especially with someone you've worked with for a long time. For me, at least, that's the hardest conversation I ever have.
STEIN: Firing a client.
STEINBERG: Or not being able to sell her work. That's one of the hardest things about the business. You take things on because you inherently love them. That's why you do it. You think you'll sell them, and you think everyone will be happy, and then you come to that end of the road where you've done your second round of submissions and wracked your brain for the last three unlikely suspects and they all pass. That's a very difficult conversation.
STEIN: And that's the novel that haunts you for years. That's the novel you think is, in some ways, the best novel you've ever taken on.
But that's not a decision you have to make.
RUTMAN: We're just eager to get to the "What are the worst features of the job?" question. Can we skip right to that? [Laughter.] Seriously, though, deciding what to take on is probably the hardest decision. I find myself sitting on fences a lot more often than I would like. Sometimes I feel like I just run out of critical faculties. My discernment just isn't guiding me very authoritatively and I can't decide whether I ought to be working with a book or not. Because you see its virtues, or your hesitations kind of nullify each other enough to make it hard to decide.
When you guys find yourselves in that situation, how do you decide?
STEIN: If it's something brand new—if the author is not a client—sometimes it's about the writer. If I have an editorial conversation with the writer, and I'm sort of feeling out the situation, that will sometimes do it for me. Because if they're with me, and I feel like we'll have a good editorial relationship—we need to have a good editorial relationship, probably for a long time, before we send out the book—that will become clear. If we have those initial conversations, and I feel like we won't work well together, for any number of reasons, then the decision becomes much easier.
MASSIE: If I'm on the fence for too long it's not a good sign. My feeling is that usually, when I love something, I'm jumping all over it. So if I'm on the fence it's probably not good for the writer and it's not good for me. If I can't imagine myself getting on the phone and calling ten editors and saying, "I love this. You should read this right now," then it's probably not right for me. It also wouldn't be fair to the author for me to take it on.
RUTMAN: You're right. It's not fair to the author. But I also have the misfortune of having my enthusiasms located on some difficult-to-access frequency. Sometimes I'm just not sure what I think, and I'll react differently to a book on different days. I've certainly had the experience where I return to a manuscript and think, "I was wavering about this? This is obviously exceptional and I should take it on." And, less happily, the reverse. It's nice to have access, or confident access, to your feelings.
STEINBERG: It's also nice to know when you're not ready to make a decision. "I'll wait till tomorrow because I'm in a bad mood or tired or whatever it is." And I also use the phone call as a sort of determining factor. But, like Maria, I'm not really on the fence that often. I think that's a good thing.
MASSIE: I just know from experience that if I take something on that I've been on the fence about, it won't necessarily take priority. If I take on something with guns blazing, and I totally love it, that's at the top of my list all the time. If I've been on the fence about something and I decide to take it on thinking, "Okay, I'm on the good side of the fence now," I've been there and I can sense that it won't take priority and I'm not going to give it as much as I should. It's just not fair to the author. It's not fair to me, either, because I have only so many hours in the day.
STEINBERG: I think editors can sense it too.
MASSIE: Editors totally know. They absolutely know.
STEINBERG: Just as we're good at sensing things, they're good at knowing when the agent isn't enthusiastic enough.
STEIN: And you will see all the doubts you had about the book in the rejection letters. You can often gauge your true reaction to a book by the rejections. If it's something where you're really guns blazing—if you really love it—when you see the rejection letters you think, "You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind. You're out of your mind!" And that's how you should feel all the time.
MASSIE: Exactly. You see the rejections and you think, "No. I don't agree at all. You don't know what you're talking about!"
RUTMAN: When you strenuously disagree with a rejection, that's a really reliable gauge. Because a fair number of times I think, "Oh, well, yeah. I half anticipated that and I suppose I can see your point." When you sharply disagree, you were right to take it on.
STEINBERG: I think it's also the art of the agent to anticipate the rejections from the editors and try to fix the material before you get the rejections. One thing that I'm cursed with is that when I read the material I sort of see the rejections go across my eyes. I can see how people will reject it, and you work on the material in light of that. Invariably, whenever I don't listen to my own instincts and fix that thing that was nagging at the back of my mind, I will get a rejection that says the very thing that I should have fixed. It's like, "Damn. Listen to your instincts." That's a big part of the job these days, especially because editors are looking to pass. They have a billion things on their desks and they think, "Oh, I figured it out. This is how I'm going to pass on this book." You can't give them that. You can't let them find their entry point to pass.
STEIN: Which is why we'll have that extra paragraph in our pitch letters in a year that will basically say, "This is how you can publish this book. I've already thought it through and this is how you can publish it."
STEINBERG: It'll be like a marketing section for fiction, just like nonfiction proposals.
MASSIE: Exactly. That's got to be the next thing, right?
STEINBERG: That's depressing.
Tell me a little about how you spend your days.
STEIN: The morning is all e-mail.
MASSIE: E-mail, phone, contracts.
RUTMAN: Not reading.
MASSIE: I never read in the office.
STEIN: Manuscripts are for travel. Trains. Planes.
MASSIE: Thank God for the Sony Reader.
STEIN: I can't get mine to work. I can't get it to charge.
Sony's not going to be happy to hear that.
STEIN: Sony can send me some swag to make it up to me. [Laughter.]
MASSIE: I don't know about you guys, but I feel like I sit in front of my computer doing e-mail all day.
RUTMAN: Sometimes I feel like a typist.
MASSIE: You're just dealing with whatever's in front of you. Answering questions. Sending things out.
RUTMAN: How many stray issues are floating in front of you at any given moment? How many small but unignorable questions are hovering at any given moment?
STEIN: By the afternoon I can start returning phone calls and dealing with shit on my desk, whereas the morning is just an e-mail suck.
STEINBERG: It's reactive.
STEIN: Exactly. It's e-mail suck reactive. But sometime after lunch you can start—and when I say "after lunch" I don't necessarily mean going to lunch, because we don't necessarily go to lunch anymore—but in the afternoon you can start to look at the contracts and return the phone calls and whatever else. Unless you're submitting a book, in which case it takes up the whole day.
What about after the afternoon?
STEIN: Drinks.
MASSIE: Home to the kids.
RUTMAN: Roundtables, mostly. [Laughter.]
STEIN: If I'm not going out, I work until nine. Not that I do that often, but that's what I do. And I'm not reading manuscripts. It's more of the same stuff.
So when do you read?
STEINBERG: If I have to read, I don't go into the office. I've tried that before and thought, "Okay, I'll do some work and then I'll read for a few hours." But it just doesn't work. You get sucked into your e-mail and the other issues of the day. Sometimes in the morning, when my brain feels fresh and I can really concentrate, I'll go straight to Starbucks or somewhere that's not my office and read or work on some material. I try to read late at night but I always fall asleep. My wife finds me on the couch with the manuscript pages fallen off onto the floor.
STEIN: I won't take a manuscript into my bedroom.
MASSIE: I don't either.
STEIN: Only books.
MASSIE: Me too. I have to read at least ten pages of a book that I have nothing to do with.
STEIN: For me it's twenty-five. Not that I actually make it to twenty-five, but I try to set that as my goal. I say twenty-five so that I make it to maybe eight.
MASSIE: I have to do that to clean my head. I try to read for at least an hour after my kids go to bed every night.
STEINBERG: I love to read on airplanes. I get so excited. I'm like, "I'm going to read this whole thing!" That's a great feeling.
STEIN: As long as there aren't really good movies on the plane.
STEINBERG: I have a rule that I won't buy the headphones.
STEIN: I don't have a TV at home, so I get very excited when I'm in front of one. [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: I also have a rule that if I'm on a train or something, I'm not allowed to buy the newspaper. Because I have to do work. But I'm allowed to look at other people's newspapers.
You mentioned before that editors are looking for excuses to pass on projects. I'm curious what else you see as changing about your jobs. Or what's getting harder?
STEINBERG: One thing that's changing is that everyone is reading on Kindles or Sony Readers. I've made an adjustment in my head and when I envision an editor reading the material, they're sitting somewhere and reading on the Kindle or the Sony Reader. I don't know how that affects what I submit yet, but it's certainly something I'm thinking about.
STEIN: With nonfiction I think about trends all the time because it follows trends in a much more obvious way than fiction does. With fiction, none of us follows trends—we fall in love. We also fall in love with nonfiction, but there's a measure of practicality that goes with it, which also has to do with our own interests. I'm particularly interested in politics but I haven't wanted to take on a political nonfiction book in several years. And I don't envision wanting to anytime soon. Well, aside from Cory Booker. Do you hear me, Cory Booker?
What about Jon Favreau? Wouldn't he be the biggest get right now?
MASSIE: Everyone must want him. Or Reggie Love.
STEIN: But if I'm interested in something and I need to help shape it—because often nonfiction will come in as an idea rather than a real proposal—I definitely try to think about whether there's a market for it considering where we are now, and where we are in our times. That's not something that's different from ten years ago or five years ago. But I think that considering the shrinking market will become all the more important. There just isn't room for books that are kind of interesting to some people anymore.
MASSIE: I think about the lack of book reviews. All of these places are getting rid of their book review sections. I think about that in terms of "How is a book going to get out there? How are people going to find out about it? What can I do and what should the author be doing beyond what the publisher is doing?" When you think about how overworked publicists are and how small publicity departments are and how many books they're working on, it will sometimes keep you up at night, especially if one of your clients has a book coming out. I think, "Oh, God. What should we be doing? What should we be thinking about? How do we get the word out?" Because there's no such thing as a review-driven book anymore.
So what should writers be doing? What are your authors teaching you about that?
MASSIE: To think outside the box. To think about other ways of getting the word out. It used to be that you'd have a meeting with the publicist, or a phone call, and there would be almost a checklist you'd go down. "We're going to send it to the newspapers and the magazines and this, this, this, and this." That doesn't exist anymore. It's a whole new world. There are so many other distractions out there. You really have to think, "Well, how do people find out about books? Where do they hear about them?"
And what are you learning about that from experiencing it on a daily basis?
MASSIE: I think a lot of it is word of mouth. It seems like there's a critical mass that a book has to achieve in order to work. You have to get all the big reviews, and if you don't, how do you get that critical mass? Is it the independent booksellers hand-selling a book? Is it having great placement in the front of Barnes & Noble? I mean, I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out what you have to do.
STEIN: I do think, with literary fiction, it's about getting it in the hands of the bloggers, who we don't read. When I say that I'm joking, but I'm also not joking. I should say the bloggers who a whole new generation of readers are reading. And the social networking. Everyone should have a Facebook page. Part of it is personality. Some authors are incredibly magnetic and funny, and that's not something you can tell your author to be. You can't tell your author, "When you do your readings, make the audience fall in love with you."
RUTMAN: "Be more charismatic." [Laughter.]
STEIN: That's something that just happens, and that sells books. There are certain authors who are very funny at their readings and draw crowds, who maybe at a different time wouldn't have sold as well as they do now. But they're just the right thing for the blogging atmosphere and just the right thing for buzz. There's something underground about them because they give almost stand-up comedy routines when they read. I think it's going to be different for every author in a way that it wasn't before, and that's why we have to think about how to publish each book individually in a way that we didn't have to before.
What else are they teaching you?
STEINBERG: I have a client named Keith Donohue who wrote a book called The Stolen Child, and Amazon optioned it for film. I think it might have been the only time they ever did that. So they had a vested interest in making the book work. And they made it work.
But that sounds like an exception to me.
STEINBERG: That's my point. We have to do exceptions. With fiction, these days, you have to work under the exception rule because fiction does not have a platform. Publicists are stumped. That's why I think nonfiction has come to the fore a little more. Publicists are sort of like, "Well, no, we don't know what to do. We're not really sure." They used to be able to rely on reviews and now even that's gone. One thing I ask myself, even though I said that writers shouldn't put "I think this could be a great movie" in their query letter, is, "Could this novel become a movie?" I used to work at the agency that represented Chuck Palahniuk, and before the movie version of Fight Club came out, that hardcover had sold about five thousand copies. And after the movie came out I think the tie-in edition sold something like a hundred thousand copies in the first few months. So that's something I think about. I'm like, "Wow, I need to re-create that for my clients." If a book is made into a movie, no matter how small, it helps the writer forever.
STEIN: This is kind of an abstract thing to say, and I don't know exactly what I mean because it hasn't happened yet, but I think the agent's relationship with publishers has to change a little bit. I think that it has to become a little bit less adversarial and a little bit more open and cooperative. Which means that the publisher has to do their part so we don't have to be adversarial. But there can be a way for everybody.... Look, we're all in a sinking ship. So all fucking hands on deck. I think there's a little bit of editors not wanting to tell agents what's really going on and agents feeling like they have to sort of choose their shots with regard to when they call editors and ask for numbers, ask what's going on with publicity, ask about the marketing plan, all of that stuff. And we shouldn't have to do that. We're partners in this thing, and we're all trying to do the same thing. We shouldn't have to feel that way, and the editors shouldn't have to feel like they have to keep secrets. I mean, if there's a secret, or if there's something to feel ashamed about, we should figure out what to do about it.
RUTMAN: Preemptive sharing is really great. When editors keep you overly appraised—there's no such thing, really—and just give you information without having to be asked, it is deeply appreciated. I find that when a book works, it's almost always in that situation. You feel like all of the parts of the house are working in tandem and the editor is inclined to update you because they're pleased with the way everything is coming together. If you have to excavate the information—
STEINBERG: It feels like pulling teeth.
RUTMAN: Or there's just nothing planned.
STEIN: But Jim, let's say you do have to excavate. Or the editor is in a position where they feel like maybe something at the publishing house has fallen short. In that situation it's best that the editor is up-front with the agent so that they, with the author—because it's the author's job too—can all save the day as much as possible. It's just got to be all fucking hands on deck. You can't be all hands on deck if everybody doesn't know what's going on.
MASSIE: There's no transparency. You ask, "What's in the budget? What's in the marketing plan?" You're constantly asking and you think, "Why can't you just know what's in the budget for this book? Why can't you know what's being allocated for this book?" They're like, "We'll see, we'll see, we'll see." No.
RUTMAN: I think there's an assumption that you will find it lacking, and will want—
MASSIE: But it's so much better to know. It allows you to manage expectations. It allows you to think about what else you can do. It's so frustrating to constantly.... Managing an author, especially a first-time author, is difficult enough. Just trying to find out what you have to work with is so frustrating.
STEIN: They aren't used to this new wave of reasonable agents. [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: It's also this frustrating catch-22 where they don't throw money at a book until it does well.
MASSIE: Which means it's not going to do well. That kills me.
STEINBERG: That is incredibly frustrating to agents because a book isn't going to do well unless you're actively doing something for it. You can't just wait and see if it does well and then try to make it do even better.
I hope you know that that's frustrating to editors, too. We aren't the ones making those budgeting decisions.
STEIN: That's my point. If nobody else at the house is doing anything for a book, the editor and the agent and the author, every now and then, can have a flash of brilliance and come up with something that might work.
STEINBERG: It's hard. Sometimes you get to that conversation and you're like, "Let's think of those out-of-the-box things that no one usually does, and let's do them," and there's sort of silence on the phone.
MASSIE: Total silence. They're like, "Um..."
STEINBERG: You can hear the crickets. They're like, "Well, anyway, I've gotta go..."
MASSIE: "I'll think about that and get back to you!"
STEINBERG: "I'm going to brainstorm tonight and I'll get back to you tomorrow."
But what are the out-of-the-box things that are working?
MASSIE: I think it depends on the book. But I also think about, "Does John Grisham really need a full-page ad in the New York Times every time he has a new book. Really? Does he? Is he not going to sell those books?"
STEINBERG: His agent would say yes.
MASSIE: Fine. But do the authors who are so well established really need the biggest piece of the marketing budget? Their audience is there. They know when their books are coming out. They're there and waiting. Why not use that money for establishing an author?
STEIN: Think about when a really big band goes on tour. They always have a couple of opening bands, and those opening bands get exposure. So why isn't Grisham giving some exposure to a young writer or two? Why isn't he doing the same thing? Why isn't he going on tour and saying, "This is my opening act and I'm supporting them"?
MASSIE: That's a great idea.
STEINBERG: I think somebody like Stephen King has thought of that and is doing it in Entertainment Weekly.
MASSIE: Stephen King definitely does that.
STEIN: Absolutely.
RUTMAN: A book campaign gets interesting when it starts to look like another industry's campaign. I was lucky enough to work on a book where we did really cool tour posters, for example. And one day the author suggested, "Hey, it would be really nice if you guys would print up some guitar picks. I would throw them out to people at readings." The publicist said, "That's a great idea. Let's print up some guitar picks." That doesn't take a huge effort, and I don't know that it made the difference for the book, but swag is always appreciated. I'm not saying that that's a uniformly good approach, but thinking about a book as a potentially cool object—something you could covet in a way that you might covet some other cultural product—is, I suppose, the way it's going. Publishers probably don't need to be encouraged to treat books more like products, but at the same time, something basic is changing, isn't it? I mean, if book review outlets are as fleeting as they are.
STEINBERG: I think we're in an in-between time period. Reviews are going away but there's nothing there to take their place. It will be the Internet in some form, but nobody knows how, exactly.
STEIN: If those short-form book reviews that are just like, "This is the book, here is the plot, thumb up, thumb down, or thumb in-between," are the ones going away, so be it. If what's left behind are the book reviews that actually say something about books, great. Let's do something exciting with what used to be the space for those, frankly, boring synopses of books.
STEINBERG: I think we can also take a lesson from something I saw in a bookstore in Salt Lake City once. I was there for a writers conference. I went into the YA section and all of these teenage girls were talking about books as if they were cool. I was like, "That's what we have to do. We have to make books cool again." How do we do that? I don't know.
RUTMAN: Was there a time when books were cool? I guess there was.
STEINBERG: I don't know. But the vibe in that YA section? Those girls were all like, "Oooh, what did you read?" They were trying to one-up each other with what they'd read. It was amazing.
RUTMAN: Kids talk about books differently than adults do, and that's why a handful of YA books are such spectacular successes. There's this unself-conscious discussion and inclination to share. I don't know how we appropriate that and make it a possibility for adults. When we're considering a manuscript, one of the things that we're trying to glimpse is whether or not it might be adopted by book clubs. How often do you get something that you feel could become the subject of conversation among people who, you know, maybe their first inclination is not to evaluate the merits of a book. And the books that tend to get that far probably don't do it because of an especially successful campaign. The frustrating possibility we're always forced to consider is that it's not really within anyone's control, even if a publisher makes a really concerted effort. Part of our job, and certainly part of our responsibility, is to see that the publisher carries out its duty as fully and faithfully as possible. But they certainly do that and books still fail to reach more than a few souls. I don't know what makes people like books. There's a basic mystery.
STEIN: But I just saw Revolutionary Road this weekend and walked out of the movie and could hear everyone saying, "Have you read the book? Have you read the book?" I thought, "Thank God. Thank God people are saying that." And that book is on the best-seller list now.
I find that amazing. It's one of the bleakest books of all time and it's been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
STEIN: It's totally bleak, and it's brilliant, and it's so much better than the movie, not because the actors didn't give it their best shot but because Sam Mendes was a terrible director.
STEIN: But that's the thing. People want to read that book. That's exciting. It's cool and it's hot and it's depressing all at the same time. And maybe after they read Revolutionary Road they'll want to read another depressing novel. It's cool to read depressing novels.
RUTMAN: There's little that I find cooler.
You guys work on commission. How does that affect the decisions you make when it comes to selling a book where maybe you have multiple offers?
STEINBERG: It's always a combination of the money and the right place. What that combination is varies, but you have to take both into account. I've taken less money a lot of times to have the right publisher—probably not a lot less money—but a little less money to be published in the right place.
MASSIE: The right place for a little less money, over time, could be more money. It can't just be about the money. There are so many different factors.
STEINBERG: An advance is an advance against royalties, and royalties are an aspect of it.
MASSIE: Right. And if you don't earn out that advance, your next one may not be as big.
STEIN: And to clarify, when we say "the right place" we mean the place we think will be just as enthusiastic, or even grow more enthusiastic, from the moment they buy the book until it's published, and make it a best-seller if possible. And the place where the book won't disappear if, you know, Alan Greenspan or Hillary Clinton or Obama happens to pop up on their list.
STEINBERG: Stability is also important these days. I was selling a book recently and there were a few publishers that I'd heard weren't doing so well. I definitely took that into account. Because it can take a year or two for a book to be published after you sell it. Will that place be around in two years? Will the editor be around? Stability is so important to writers, which is why this time period is even tougher than you may think.
RUTMAN: What we do is really hard, readers. We just need you to know that.
STEIN: We have to think a lot. [Laughter.]
You're joking but my wife is an agent and I know that it is really hard. Especially when you're less established than some people. How do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I thought you were going to ask, "How do you pay your rent?" [Laughter.]
STEINBERG: If you want to talk about what's at the forefront of our minds....
But seriously, how do you compete with people who are more established?
STEIN: I don't. I don't think that I compete with people who are more established. I think they throw me a bone every now and then, if they're too busy. People who are really established? If they want a writer? I don't think I'm going to compete with somebody who's been in the business for twenty-five years. I think that's unreasonable. Why would I compete with somebody who's been in the business for twenty-five years? Unless it's a perfect match, for some reason. I just can't see a competitive situation unless, for example, a writer is recommended to an agent who's been in the business for a long time and some younger agents and there's very good chemistry and a good match. I think that experience in this industry is really invaluable, and I respect experience a lot. So if I were in the shoes of a writer who was choosing between good chemistry with somebody with a lot of experience and good chemistry with somebody who was young, I would probably go with the person with a lot of experience.
RUTMAN: The only thing at your disposal in that situation—if you're at an experience and success quotient disadvantage—is the quality of the attention that you can offer the writer.
STEIN: That's true.
RUTMAN: And that's what you're presenting to them. It's like, "Look, I will talk to you more often."
MASSIE: "And I won't pass you off to my assistant."
RUTMAN: And we're probably going to be more engaged in things that they want to be engaged in. You know, talking about what's wrong with the material in a closer way than somebody else. What else can you really offer? And that's something.
STEIN: "I'll edit your book."
RUTMAN: All you can really do is try to work up superior chemistry to the chemistry you think they may be working up with somebody who just doesn't have the time or inclination for them in the way that you might. I also don't like to know—I don't need or want to know—who I'm competing with.
MASSIE: I don't either. I never want to know.
And they should never tell you, either.
MASSIE: Some people do, though.
But they shouldn't.
MASSIE: You're right.
RUTMAN: They shouldn't. You want to say, "Really? Oh, she's really good. She likes this? Congratulations!"
STEIN: But how do you guys feel about this. If there's an agent who you really respect—who's been in the industry for a long time and who you may even think of as a mentor—and if you were a writer, wouldn't you go with somebody like that, even if you knew they were busy, over you? Or would you go with you?
RUTMAN: I'm supposed to be me in this scenario?
STEIN: You would give them more attention and more of your time, and that person might have them dealing with their assistant more often, but that person is a mentor to you for a reason. They have so much experience and knowledge that you couldn't even begin to have.
STEINBERG: In my experience it's so rare that you compete with other agents. I don't really think about it too often. It's not like being an editor, where one agent submits to twelve editors and you know you're competing with other editors. As an agent, usually it's a single submission, just to you, because you know the person somehow. Or you get to the material so much faster than everyone else because you're immediately drawn to it off the slush pile and you know that other agents aren't involved. In my experience it's very rare.
RUTMAN: You don't find that with referrals? Where maybe some thoughtful referree has given the writer three or four names?
MASSIE: Of course. I always assume that.
STEIN: I assume that too.
RUTMAN: And then you think, "Oh, crap. This is really good. Agent so-and-so is probably going to see this too." And then they do.
So what do you do? That's what I want to know.
MASSIE: You fight as hard as you can and you argue why you're the best person for that project and that author and you hope that they agree.
RUTMAN: Or why Anna is, depending on the situation. [Laughter.]
STEIN: Exactly. I try not to get clients as much as possible. Can you tell?
STEINBERG: Speed is a great help in those situations. You can be like, "I'm going to read this tonight and call you tomorrow."
MASSIE: That is so hard, though. I have two small children so I just can't do speed.
STEIN: I don't like to tell writers that they need to make a decision right away if the book is still out with other agents. I think it's important for them to have a choice, in the same way that we want a choice between editors. We like to be able, if we can, to shop an offer. We like to be able to make a decision between editors. I think authors are entitled to that decision between agents, too.
RUTMAN: You also don't want them to go with you if they have doubts in their mind. Because that will affect the relationship down the line. There have been instances when I've been like, "Oh, go with the other person," because I could just tell that they wanted to. That's fine. Sometimes the other agent is a friend and I'm happy for them. Until it hits the best-seller list. [Laughter.]
Talk to me about what editors do that makes you the most frustrated.
STEINBERG: The bandwagon mentality. When I submit a book to them and they call and say, "What's going on?" They're not supposed to say, "What's going on?" They're supposed to either say "I hate this" or "I love this" or "It's okay" or whatever. It's their job to tell me what's going on at that point. I've done the work, I've submitted to you, and you're supposed to tell me what's going on. If you're calling me and saying "What's going on?" then you're just wondering what you might miss out on because other editors might be interested and you're not going with your passion.
RUTMAN: Or perhaps don't call and ask what's going on without having some intention of your own to offer.
STEINBERG: That's very frustrating.
MASSIE: Or flip-floppers. Someone who disappears on you. Somebody who sends you an e-mail like, "Don't do anything without me. I'm loving this and getting other reads," and you never hear from them again. You're like, "What happened?"
STEIN: And we all know what happened.
MASSIE: But call and tell me. We need closure. The author's like, "What did they say? What's going on?"
STEIN: Show your confidence in your taste. And if you lose in the house...
MASSIE: Just say so. It's so much easier. And then you trust that editor. They loved it and for whatever reason the other readers didn't. But be transparent about it. It's so much easier to know what they're thinking than to wonder.
STEIN: And you'll go back to them because you understand their taste.
MASSIE: Yes. And if they don't tell you, you won't go back to them. There are editors who I won't go back to. And I'm sure all of you have your list of those editors.
RUTMAN: Explaining yourself is really helpful. I want to know on what grounds you are saying no, or on what grounds you couldn't get something through. It's all useful because it rounds out your sense of who you're offering a book to.
MASSIE: And it's so important to an author to hear about how people are responding to their work. When people don't get back to you, or they disappear, it's so frustrating because you're the person stuck in the middle trying to manage your author's fears and hopes and expectations. If it's a no, it's a no. It's easy.
STEINBERG: I also don't like when the editor has his assistant write the pass letter. I'm not submitting to the assistant—I'm submitting to you. I didn't have my assistant work up this submission for you. Because you can tell when the assistant's doing the form rejection. Agents should not get form rejections. You just don't do that.
STEIN: It's also frustrating when editors disappear after they've acquired a book. If, for some reason, things aren't going as well in-house as they'd like, they sometimes hide. Or if they're just really busy. Look, everybody's busy. Just say, "I'm busy." The disappearing act is just unattractive behavior.
Do you resent how collaborative the acquisitions process has become?
STEINBERG: I try to submit to places that aren't like that. I go out of my way to try to find the few remaining places where people can make decisions because they want to.
RUTMAN: Is that a matter of place or editor selection? Finding an editor whose opinion doesn't need—
STEINBERG: I guess it's the person.
STEIN: But I also see it—buying by committee—as something that has become pretty necessary. If an editor is really passionate, and everybody else isn't so passionate, it's going to be pretty hard to publish that book. I see it as something that's more and more necessary these days. If you sell a book to an editor who doesn't need all of that back-up, it's kind of tricky. Let's say you end up with sales and marketing people who just aren't that psyched about it. That's not so great for the book. I don't have so much of a problem with the committee as I do with the taste that the committee is coming up with. Which has just been really mediocre over the past few years.
RUTMAN: Good distinction.
STEIN: I don't think that the individuals have bad taste. I think it's just been a taste of fear over the past few years, and I hope that the committees will somehow—and this is just hope—become more courageous over the next few years. That somehow, with the market contracting, instead of thinking, "We need to be more mediocre," they will be thinking, "If we're actually going to be publishing literary fiction, it has to be really fucking good." And that means that some people in the house will kind of hate a book, but see what's amazing about it, and other people in the house will really, really love it. There wouldn't have to be consensus within the committee for the committee to get behind it. It would be a little different kind of committee, if that makes sense.
RUTMAN: And I guess this applies more to nonfiction than fiction, but please acknowledge comp titles as the limited and specious resource that they are, at least as the basis for making your decision.
But in the publisher's defense, it seems like sometimes that's how the accounts are making their decisions. At least to some extent.
RUTMAN: True. But I feel like a house has to have enough consequence, built in, to persuade a buyer. It's not like the house can't anticipate the reluctance that the buyer may ultimately express, and there's got to be a way to overwhelm that reluctance with the fact that they give a shit.
STEIN: But I think that also comes back to us, and to what we advise our authors to do in our nonfiction proposals now. The comp titles shouldn't necessarily be limited to the subject they're writing about. We have to broaden the spectrum to the kinds of books that could possibly work. We have to think about the moment when the sales reps have to face those guys. We have to think, "Jesus, what kind of comp titles could possibly relate to this in a way that could work?" I mean, it's so boring to have to think about that. But we can't rely on them to do that job for us anymore, unfortunately. That's another way that our jobs have changed.
RUTMAN: The anticipation of just about every possible objection. I mean, there are always a lot of possible objections. The list is long. And you try to speak to them as much as possible, even in the introductory conversation. I think we all appreciate how many rounds of approval the editor is responsible for securing, and that they have to create some kind of consensus with a really disparate group of tastes and responsibilities. When you think about all of those different barriers, it's kind of a wonder that as many books get bought as they do. How do you get this much approval from that many people this often? So it's kind of amazing when you hear how many books a certain group within Random House or something is going to publish. You guys are going to publish twelve hundred books this year? This one group found enough to agree on twelve hundred times?
Do you guys think the industry is healthy? Just give me a yes or no around the table.
STEINBERG: No.
MASSIE: No.
RUTMAN: I don't think so.
STEIN: No.
RUTMAN: But I do wonder if there's ever been a point when you could get four people to say yes.
STEIN: But here's the silver lining: It's unhealthy enough that it's an exciting time. It's broken enough that publishers and agents and everyone has to change. Everyone has to rethink what they're doing. So we have a group responsibility, and an opportunity, in a way that the industry has probably never seen before.
RUTMAN: Part of me craves that. If we're near a precipice, we might as well actually be on it. Let's get to the moment when some basic model really gives way to whatever other model that really smart people are going to help conceive of. Is this what Jason Epstein's been talking about for a long time? Maybe. Is the big company going to acknowledge, "Is this business for us, ultimately? We tried this. We kind of gave it a look. Eh, it's okay. Synergy's overrated. It's a stupid word. We're going to abandon that." Is it going to become a business for the fewer? Is it going to return to the financial interest of a select few wealthy people who are prepared to collect a really modest profit, if any? And does that make for more interesting publishing? Possibly. Maybe.
STEINBERG: Or will it go the other way, like you were saying before? Will we start making concert posters and guitar picks for publicity and using other industries' models to promote books? It could go that way and become more like the movie business.
RUTMAN: And those industries are claiming a state of serious unhealthiness as well. So if every single culture industry is ill at the same time, what do we have to look to?
STEINBERG: And maybe we also shouldn't feel so bad.
MASSIE: It's an interesting time, if you think about it. Look at how the music industry got hit so hard by iTunes and iPods. They had no time to react. But the book publishing industry actually has a little time to think about things and explore possibilities and try to figure out what the next thing is going to be without being hit so hard.
What are the big problems in your opinions, and who are you looking to—Jim said Jason Epstein—for the solutions? Is it Bob Miller? Is it Jon Karp? Who is it?
STEIN: Those are the first two people I would have mentioned. The big problems are too many books, inflated advances for—
RUTMAN: The few.
MASSIE: Marketing budgets going to big, established authors.
STEINBERG: No one ever hearing about great books that are published.
STEIN: Returns.
RUTMAN: Trend-hunting.
STEINBERG: Barnes & Noble making many decisions for publishers.
STEIN: Inflexible models across the board. For example, it's time for us to be reasonable as agents. We shouldn't ask for unreasonable advances. But in exchange, shouldn't we be able to ask for paperback escalators? Publishers will say, "It's our company policy not to give paperback escalators." But we're going to give a little bit, so publishers should give a little bit.
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So who are you looking to?
MASSIE: I don't know who to look to yet.
STEIN: Nobody's really stepped up yet except for Bob Miller. He's really the only one. Jon Karp had a great idea ahead of everybody else but he hasn't done anything that's quite like what Bob Miller is doing.
I feel like paperback originals might be one place to look in the short term. What if some established publisher said, "Hardcover books are the eight-track of the publishing industry. They don't make sense anymore—in this culture, in this economy—and we just aren't going to do them anymore"? Would you all continue to sell them books?
ALL: Yes.
RUTMAN: Because every house with a serious line of original trade paperbacks is usually publishing some really interesting books. Think about a handful of years ago when Vintage was making a concerted effort and publishing what I guess they were designating as more "difficult" books. One of the most beautiful trade paperbacks they did—it had French flaps—was Notable American Women by Ben Marcus. That thing was just too cool. It was the perfect trade paperback. I thought, "Okay! Maybe this is a kind of turning point." Not because it was a book that was ever going to sell Jhumpa Lahiri numbers. But that turned out to be a small little experiment that seems all but discontinued.
STEINBERG: I think it's always attractive to agents when publishers have a vision. If they said, "We're just going to do trade paperbacks, and we're going to make it work," that would be immediately attractive. Because they have a vision. It's not just like, "Oh, let's publish this and see what happens. Good luck to us all! Bye!" [Laughter.]
RUTMAN: But if you sell a book and it's acquired with the intention of making it a trade paperback, and three or four months later the publisher comes back to you and says, "We've reconsidered. We're going to make this a hardcover," it's not even implied—it's basically stated—that "we thought we were acquiring nothing, and we've actually had a change of heart. We think we have something. Congratulations to us all." If you were ever under the delusion that there was no hierarchical relationship between the two, it's dismissed pretty thoroughly. And what's going to change that? The Great Depression II might go some way.
STEIN: It used to be about reviews. There was this idea that you couldn't get reviews for trade paperbacks. But there aren't reviews anymore so we don't have to worry about that.
STEINBERG: Silver lining.
MASSIE: Grove's had a couple of original trade paperbacks on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So that's not the story anymore.
STEIN: Grove does wonderful trade paperbacks.
Stop it, you're going to make Morgan blush. But seriously, I wish the whole economics of advances would change so that we could do more.
RUTMAN: And if e-books are costing about what trade paperbacks cost, maybe we can have a more uniform price for books. So you wouldn't have this disparity.
STEINBERG: But one of the goals of agents is to get a good advance, and the way that publishers get to higher numbers is by doing hardcovers.
STEIN: But that could change a little bit. If there wasn't the sort of hardcover-paperback hierarchy, and if we started doing a lot more trade paperbacks, the price of paperbacks could rise a little bit. And there's no reason we should have such low royalties for paperbacks.
STEINBERG: Someone in publishing told me that that's why publishing still exists—because publishers held agents off from having escalators on paperbacks. That's where the money is made.
STEIN: But we need a little of that money if we're not going to ask for high advances.
What are you most worried about with regard to the industry?
STEINBERG: I think if Barnes & Noble folds, or something like that, it might be so devastating that we can't get around it. If Barnes & Noble were to fold, what would happen to all of us? I mean, there's no way that publishing could really continue. We've put too many eggs in one basket.
STEIN: Publishing could continue.
STEINBERG: It could continue, but it would be at a much different scale.
STEIN: Agents would just sell the books to Amazon. It would be the publishers that would be out of business.
STEINBERG: Isn't Barnes & Noble like 50 percent of the market?
RUTMAN: But there is also a pretty astounding percentage of books that are sold in non-book-retailing locations. Which is problematic at least for the likes of most of us because we don't do so many of those books.
MASSIE: They tend to take a certain kind of book.
STEIN: Which is why, although we're very grateful to Amazon, we need to keep our bookstores in business. So if you're going to buy a book, buy it from an actual bookstore.
MASSIE: Look at Harry Schwartz.
It's really sad.
MASSIE: That was really devastating. And it's like a new one every day.
STEIN: If you buy a book from Amazon, you're killing us.
RUTMAN: There, she said it.
STEIN: And you're killing yourself. Thank you. [Laughter.]
What are the other things you're most worried about?
RUTMAN: That the balkanization of commercial publishing will be so complete that an even smaller number of books that claim all of the available resources will take up even more available resources and the ghetto for everyone else will end up being vast. That the midlist will come to encompass everything that isn't a couple of titles.
STEIN: That the midlist, and the kinds of books we do, really will become the new short stories or the new poetry.
RUTMAN: The assumption is that you can still anticipate something that will work commercially. Which I guess sometimes you can, but not often enough to justify that as a prevailing strategy. I mean, can we stop paying senators and politicians—sorry, Flip [Brophy, a colleague at Sterling Lord]—and various other famous people tons of money for stories that are—and I apologize, readers everywhere—insubstantial in the extreme?
With one exception, right?
RUTMAN: Obama. [Laughter.]
He's a great writer.
RUTMAN: Exactly. If they write their own books and they write them well, then we have a crucial exception. But generally speaking, this thing of giving somebody, on the basis solely of name recognition, disproportionate resources that could be so much better spent elsewhere? Why do we do that?
STEIN: Imagine a world where books would have to be submitted without the author's name. Obviously there would be no platform. So if the proposal was really shitty, and the writing was really shitty, there would be no sale.
Anna wants a meritocracy in publishing.
RUTMAN: Aw, that's sweet. [Laughter.]
But that raises an interesting point. Why do you all focus on serious literary work when it's so obvious that the real money is elsewhere?
MASSIE: It's what I like to read.
STEINBERG: I like going to work every day and the feeling of liking what I do. I think if someone said to me, "You can do only fiction, and no nonfiction, forever. Will you do that?" I would say, "I don't think I'll like that very much, because I still like nonfiction, but I'll do it." But if somebody said to me, "You can do only nonfiction. No fiction," I'd be like, "I'm just going to quit." There wouldn't be any point.
RUTMAN: I just don't feel equipped to make judgments about anything other than what I like. I feel like my capacity to gauge commercial prospects is kind of restricted. The only thing I can really respond to is what I think works in some way that means something to me.
STEIN: I'm a hopeless optimist, and I think somehow, someday...well, look, Revolutionary Road is on the best-seller list right now. I'm an optimist, and because it can happen, I think it will happen, and I want to be on the front lines when it does.
Are you encouraged by anything you're seeing on the front lines?
STEIN: Our president is a writer. We have a president who loves books and who's all about promoting the arts. That's amazing.
STEINBERG: I like the Kindle and the Sony Reader. I think they're a step forward and sort of address the cool factor. I think it's cool that with the Kindle you can think of a book you want and have it at your fingertips a minute later.
RUTMAN: It's also nice because it means that books are eligible to be included in the world of new technology.
STEINBERG: When you're on the subway, people are intrigued by it. They're like, "What's that?" And that intrigue factor is important.
STEIN: Except they can't see what you're reading.
MASSIE: It also feels like the YA world has really taken off in the last few years and kids are really excited about reading. It feels like there's a whole new generation of readers out there, doesn't it? And it's not just Harry Potter. There are all these authors, people like Cornelia Funke, and all of my nieces and nephews have their favorites. They've all discovered their own different authors who they're so excited about. It's great. I feel like there was a generation that sort of skipped that.
RUTMAN: I'm also encouraged by the things that succeed, for the most part. Look at something like A Series of Unfortunate Events. You have this very self-conscious, writerly line of books that kind of flatter kids' ability to appreciate a certain context in which the books have been written. And kids seem to live in a text-filled world in a way that even we didn't. I don't know if it's the right kind of text, but it might function as the basis for some broader appreciation of written communication.
MASSIE: And look at the YA books that are doing well—they're doorstops. Look at The Invention of Hugo Cabret, that Brian Selznick book. It's huge.
STEINBERG: My daughter loves that book.
MASSIE: My son loved it too.
STEIN: Is it good? Have you guys read it?
MASSIE: It's great. I loved it.
RUTMAN: I think the girth of a fat children's book is a factor in its success. Kids must feel like they're being entrusted with something enormous. It's like, "I don't care that you're only eight. You're going to read 960 pages of epic...." And now that they wheel their backpacks, it's okay. It's safe.
At the end of the day, what's the best part of your job?
MASSIE: Working with great authors. Discovering new voices. When an author's book arrives for the first time—when you get that messengered package and rip it open and there's the book. That's the best feeling. Getting the book in your hands is better than getting the deal.
RUTMAN: Having some part in the creation of a book that you feel strongly about. However incidental your role may be. I mean, I haven't written any books and it's really nice to have helped bring some of them about. That's more than I expected from a workday.
STEIN: I agree with all of those things and, for me, it's also just about making the author happy—making the author's hard work pay off in a way that you just know their endorphin rush is going to go on for a week. That's what makes your endorphin rush happen. It's not the deal. It's their scream.
STEINBERG: I love dealing with creative people on a daily basis and just seeing how their minds work. It just makes me so happy. I think that's probably why I do what I do. I just love what they come up with. Great twists in plot. Things that are unexpected but extraordinary. That's always the best part. I'm really sad when I'm not reading some great piece of fiction for work.
RUTMAN: Constant access to people who are smarter than you is a really nice part of the job.
STEIN: Smarter. More creative.
STEINBERG: More disciplined.
RUTMAN: Better. Just better.
AGENTS ANONYMOUS
In the third hour of our conversation, with a few bottles of wine sloshing around in their brains, the agents agreed to speak anonymously on a variety of topics that would be difficult to discuss for attribution. Any number of verbal tics have been altered in order to disguise the identities of the speakers.
What would you say to writers if you could be anonymous?
Work harder. Be gracious.
Don't be so needy. Don't need constant affirmation.
Once you make a decision to go with an agent, trust that agent.
When authors leave their agent to go to a "better" agent, it is almost always the author's fault. I don't blame agents for poaching. I blame authors for allowing themselves to be poached.
And nine times out of ten it's the wrong decision.
Tell me about some overrated publishers, in your opinion.
Little Random. I think the reputation they built in the era before we came into the industry has gone out the window in the past five years. I can't think of one book of theirs that I've read in the past five years that I've admired. They have no vision. There used to be some good literary editors there—Dan Menaker, Ann Godoff—who had some vision. I think the house publishes schlock now, for the most part.
Spiegel & Grau. They just care about the celebrity-type books. Even if the writer is not an actual celebrity, they only want to buy big books by the sort of literary celebrities. They pretend they're in it for the art but in my view they're not.
Scribner. It's kind of strange because they have this great literary reputation, and I've always thought of them as a great literary house, but I just can't think of anything of theirs that I've admired in a long time. Maybe a little bit of their nonfiction, but not much of it. I can't figure out why that is because, you know, it's Nan Graham and that shouldn't be the case.
Riverhead, these days—after Cindy [Spiegel] and Julie [Grau] left—has not found its footing yet. I mean, the books that have done well for Riverhead lately were under contract already. Junot Díaz. Khaled Hosseini. Aleksandar Hemon, but Sean [McDonald, his editor] was there before the new regime. We'll see what Becky [Saletan] does.
What about on the flip side of that? Which houses do you think are underrated?
Algonquin. They do a great job and they have integrity. They know the right amount to pay but they don't overpay. And they do great publicity.
I wish more houses were like Norton. They have a pretty big list but they also acquire carefully, for the most part, and there's a nice range of serious editors. Their acquisition process is rigorous and they don't often go nuts to overpay for something. They're an employee-owned company and everybody is invested in what goes on. Their offices are really crappy, which is kind of reassuring. And they take chances on books that are ultra-literary while doing unapologetically commercial stuff too.
I feel like Algonquin uses them almost as a model. They're similar in a lot of ways.
They're the last of a dying breed. How many independent houses of that size exist anymore? And there's a reason we haven't heard about any cutbacks or financial issues at Norton. They operate responsibly.
Tell me about some editors you really like to work with.
I'm working with an editor I've never worked with before, Tom Mayer at Norton. He's tireless and will do anything for this book. The author wasn't happy with the cover, and Tom went and got them to hire somebody else. I mean, that never happens. Usually editors are trying to say, "We all love this and the author should too." I've never seen such an advocate for a book.
I would say Kathy Pories at Algonquin. She has amazing taste and she's also a fantastic editor. She makes novels the 25-percent better that they need to be. She's such a straight shooter, she's fun to talk to on the phone... [Laughter.] That can't be discounted! It's a joy to call her. And it lets me be a straight shooter myself and not need to spin anything. That's a nice feeling.
It's only been one instance, but if somebody's had a better experience with an editor than I was lucky enough to have with David Ebershoff, I would wish it on all of you. The level of attentiveness and awareness of the whole process from beginning to end was just incredibly heartening, from securing a publicist to being honest about certain potential impediments. His advocacy was inexhaustible.
Molly Barton is the same way. She will not let a book die. She's still there after publication. She's still there after paperback publication. She just keeps a book alive and does absolutely everything possible. She does things for her books that I didn't even know were possible. She came up in a slightly different way and has a sort of big-picture publishing knowledge that a lot of editors don't have.
Anybody have any horror stories from lunch?
I once had lunch with an editor at HarperCollins, and this was so long ago that I don't even remember his name or if he's still there, but he talked the whole time—very excitably, kind of spitting his food—about television shows and action movies. It's kind of a cliché to talk about going to the bathroom and seeing if you can figure out a way to slip out. But I actually went to the bathroom and thought, "I can't go back. I can't get through this lunch. This has got to be Candid Camera. I can't do it." But I went back and finished the lunch. I thought the whole thing had to be some sort of joke. But it wasn't. It was real and he was real.
I had one lunch where the editor called me by the wrong name the entire lunch. He didn't even know my name! And I didn't correct him because I was so angry. After lunch I went back to the office and wrote him an e-mail so he'd see my name and know.
Of all the people and places who write about the industry—newspapers, Web sites, blogs—who are the smartest and who are the dumbest?
I feel like Publishers Weekly has really gone downhill. I know it's a trade magazine so it's supposed to be boring, but I think it's really boring. I also don't trust the reviews. I kind of liked Sara Nelson's column, though. Just as a barometer of things.
I always feel like when I'm reading Michael Cader he might say something intelligent. Publishers Lunch is one of the better ones.
I thought Boris [Kachka] got a little too much shit for his New York magazine piece. I don't think it was a dumb article. I felt more sympathetic to what he was trying to do than I think most people did.
I think that guy Leon [Neyfakh] at the Observer is really good at digging in and getting scoops. He really keeps going.
It's his first job.
And he knows how to become friends with you and get stuff out of you. He's very good in that way. And he treats publishing like it's something to care about, which is nice. It's like he's always looking for some secret that will be amazing. The things he finds are usually kind of silly, but at least he's trying.
Which is different than Motoko [Rich, of the New York Times], who approaches it like it's a business. A business that doesn't make any money.
Don't you always feel a little surprised that the Times will cover a publishing development as prominently as they sometimes do? They're like, "Layoffs at Doubleday!" and you're like, "That warrants coverage in the New York Times? Really?"
Anything else that you want to get off your chests?
I think book jackets are incredibly important but they're one of the weakest parts of the business. We need to pay jacket designers more money. We need to attract better people. It's one thing that we can control.
We should steal all of the indie-rock designers and bring them into books. Because that shit is great. Walk through any record store. They are so consistently good, and they get paid nothing.
I emphatically second that idea. And I think raiding another industry could be the way to do it.
There are so few things you can control, and the jacket is so important. It's what people look at. Women's legs are not inherently interesting as cover subjects.
Or shoes.
Or the face of an adolescent girl who is blowing bubbles.
Oh, I disagree with you there. I'd love to support you, but I can't. [Laughter.]
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents and Editors: A Q&A With Four Young Editors
If the economic Tilt-A-Whirl of the past few months has proven anything, it's that this carnival life of ours—writing, publishing, trying to find readers—isn't getting any easier. Booksellers and publishers are in turmoil, with scores of staffers having already lost their jobs to "restructuring,""integration," and all the other corporate euphemisms that are dreamed up to soften the harsh reality: It isn't pretty out there.
While it goes without saying that our problems are nothing compared with those of many industries, one's heart can't help but ache for the literary magazines and publishing houses that won't be around in a year; the unemployed editors, publicists, and marketing people with mortgages to pay; the authors whose first books are being published now, or a month from now, or anytime soon.
But difficult times don't have to be joyless times. As I listened to these four accomplished young book editors talk about what they do, I was reminded of a simple and enduring truth, trite as it may sound: We are all—writers, agents, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and readers—in this together. And there are concrete things we can do to connect with one another more effectively. These editors are full of insight about how to do just that.
It seems appropriate, at such a humbling moment, that we met over pizza and bottled water (okay, maybe not exclusively water) in the glamorously unglamorous offices of Open City, the independent press and literary magazine based in downtown Manhattan. Over the years its editors, Thomas Beller and Joanna Yas, have introduced readers to some of the most distinctive voices of our time, from Meghan Daum to Sam Lipsyte. Here are short biographies of the participants:
LEE BOUDREAUX was an editor at Random House for almost ten years before leaving to become the editorial director of Ecco in 2005. She has worked with Arthur Phillips, Dalia Sofer, and David Wroblewski.
ERIC CHINSKI worked at Oxford University Press and Houghton Mifflin before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is vice president and editor in chief. He has edited Chris Adrian, Rivka Galchen, and Alex Ross.
ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO worked at Simon & Schuster and Knopf before moving to Scribner, where she is an editor, in 2002. Her authors include Matt Bondurant, Adam Gollner, and Joanna Smith Rakoff.
RICHARD NASH worked as a performance artist and theater director before taking over Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, in 2001. His authors include Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, and Lynne Tillman. [UPDATE: Richard Nash has resigned as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of Counterpoint, effective March 10, 2009.]
Every reader understands the feeling of falling in love with a book. You guys do that for a living. I'm curious if you've given any thought to the specific things that can trigger that experience.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't know if there's a specific thing, but you know it immediately. The minute I start it I know that it's the book I want to fall in love with. And that's the one I keep reading. I will read a hundred pages of something else, but I won't fall in love with it. You have this immediate sense of texture and place, and you're just inside it from the first sentence. I think the thing that everybody says about first sentences is true. Everyone should try to get that first sentence perfect. I make my authors do that all the time.
NASH: But if you make them do it, they didn't quite do it the first time, did they?
GARGAGLIANO: Well, it might be that you've had them totally rewrite the opening.
CHINSKI: Do you feel like it's different for fiction and nonfiction?
GARGAGLIANO: I do. I always hate that with nonfiction, when you read a proposal, you don't get the writing first. You get the pitch first. I always look to the writing.
CHINSKI: For me, with fiction, there's that funny moment when you feel like you actually want to meet the author. You want to know who the man or woman who's writing it is because there's a real sensibility in the writing. It's not just that the writing is good—there's a kind of intensity of imagination to it. You wonder, "Who is this person who's able to telescope all of these ideas into something that feels accessible?" I think that's one similarity between nonfiction and fiction, even though obviously they're different in many ways: It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. You sort of recognize something but it allows you access to it in a totally different way. But I can't tell you how many times, thirty pages into a novel, I actually want to write the agent and say, "Who is this person?" You just wonder, "Who's coming up with this?"
BOUDREAUX: I think there's always a moment of surprise and delight. It comes in the form of a word. You get to the end of a sentence and go, "Wow, I didn't see that coming. That was perfect." The language just goes click and the whole thing has gone up a notch and you know at that point that you're committed to...a hundred pages? Two hundred? Or you're going the distance with it. The gears just click into place and you realize you're reading something that is an order of magnitude different than the seventy-five other things that have crossed your desk lately, many of which were perfectly good and perfectly competent.
CHINSKI: And doesn't it feel like it's not even just talent? It's the sensibility of the writer. I think about a writer whom I don't work with but whom I admire, Aleksandar Hemon. He does that funny thing where he doesn't use words in an ordinary way, and yet they work and they suggest a whole worldview. Or look at Chris Adrian, whom I do work with and adore. I mean, his writing is really difficult. It's about dying and suffering children—you can't imagine a more difficult subject. But again, there's a kind of intensity of imagination and a way of articulating things that goes beyond good writing. There is a force and energy to the writing. I think that's the hardest thing to find in fiction, at least for me, and that's what I find myself responding to again and again.
NASH: For me it's also when a work of fiction has the force of society behind it on some level. Which is not necessarily to say that it has to be political—I do far less political fiction than people think—but I do want to feel that the writer has access to something larger than himself. To me, the energy you're talking about is something that possesses social force and a concatenation of relationships and responses to the world lived in a certain kind of way. I try to forbid myself from using the word authenticity because I don't actually know what the hell it is, but that's one way of talking about it.
CHINSKI: I have a related question. What do you all think of the word voice? It's one of those words that we all overuse, but do we actually know what it is? I always find myself reaching for it when I want to describe why I like something and why I don't like other things that are perfectly well written. But when I really try to figure out exactly what I mean by it, I come back to what I was saying before. Is sensibility the same thing as a writer having a voice?
GARGAGLIANO: If it comes alive for you, and you can hear it in your head, and it sort of lives inside you, that's when I feel like a writer has a voice. That's when I'll keep going back to something again and again. One of my favorite writers when I was falling in love with literature was Jeanette Winterson. It was just about her voice. I kept loving her books even when the stories themselves started to fall apart. I just wanted to hear that voice in my head. For me, with her, it stopped being about the storytelling, which is unusual. I love story. I want plots in my books.
CHINSKI: And you can think about writers who don't actually tell stories. The Europeans, for example. We always have one: Thomas Bernhard; Sebald; now Bolaño. It feels like there's always one of these writers who isn't writing plot-driven fiction. The voice is so strong that that's what people are responding to. With Bolaño, I find it kind of amazing that you have this nine-hundred-page novel by a dead Spanish-language writer...I mean, I can't honestly believe that everybody who's buying it is reading the whole thing. But it goes back to what you were saying, Richard, about the voice having the force of history and almost being haunted by these bigger issues.
NASH: Haunted is totally the word. Beckett had it too, obviously.
CHINSKI: Or look at Philip Roth. Even in his lesser novels, you can always recognize that kind of force in his writing.
NASH: What you just said reminds me of an artist named Bruce Nauman. I went to see a retrospective of his before I was in publishing. There was this sense, as you went from room to room, that the guy just had access to something that he wasn't going to lose access to. You know what I mean? There was a certain frequency of the world to which he was tuned in. It could express itself in different ways, but he wasn't going to lose his capacity to listen to it, as a result of which the work was always going to be operating on a certain level. He might vary between, I don't know, brilliant and mind-blowing, but he wasn't going to fuck up. Those voices, and those Europeans you were mentioning, are probably at the very upper level.
CHINSKI: That's right. They always seem to have a certain set of questions that they're asking. Even if they're writing very different novels from book to book, they're haunted by one or two or three questions, and no matter what they write, they seem to circle around them. That may have something to do with the voice they bring to a book. I mean, even Sasha Hemon, who's only written three books—you can tell what his obsessions are. That's another thing: I like writers who are obsessed. Chris Adrian is obsessed too. That's what's exciting about reading certain fiction writers.
Aside from what's on the page, and somebody's skill as a writer or voice or obsessions, what other things influence your thinking and decision-making?
GARGAGLIANO: One of the things can be when a book taps into something that's happening in the moment. I'm editing a book right now that's set after World War II in a psychiatric hospital, and it's really a book about what happens to soldiers when they come back from war. I find myself obsessed with the news and weeping when I watch Channel Thirteen because I've been inside of this story for so long and I understand the psychology of these men coming back. I'm hoping that there will be a resonance when we publish it. You're always trying to process things in the world, and when you read a really good piece of fiction, it helps you process things.
CHINSKI: The word necessary always comes to mind for me. Beyond a good story, beyond good writing, does the novel feel necessary? A lot of good books are written, and I'm not saying that they shouldn't be published, but as an editor you can't work on everything, and the ones I tend to be drawn to are the ones that either feel personally necessary or globally necessary in some vague way that's hard to define. And that should be at the sentence level, too. People who can write really well sometimes get carried away by their own writing and forget what's actually necessary on the page. I would also raise the question of believability. A book can be surreal and fantastical and all that, so it's not believable in any straight sense, but it has to be believable in the sense that the author believes in what he or she is doing. Sometimes you feel like an author is just writing for the sake of writing, and that is a big turnoff. It's got to feel necessary at every level.
BOUDREAUX: As an editor, you know how difficult the in-house process is going to be—the process of getting a book out there. The necessary quotient comes up when you ask yourself, "Is this something that really fires me up? What's going to happen when I give it to these two reps to read? Are they going to have the same reaction to some pretty significant extent and feel the need to convey their enthusiasm down the line?" Because I think word of mouth remains the best thing we can ever do for a book. So is there that necessary thing? Is there that urgency? Is it in some significant way different from any number of other novels that purport to talk about the same topic? It's almost like an electrical pulse traveling down a wire. It starts with the author, then the agent, then the editor, and then there are a lot of telephone poles it's got to go through from there. If it's lacking in any way, you know that the electricity is going to peter out. Sometimes you can almost see it happen. You can watch it happen between one sales rep and another sales rep. You're like, "Oh, that just petered out between those two telephone poles." And the book is only going to do so much.
When a lot of us were starting out I think we may have felt like, "Oh, it's a little book, but it's my job to make it work, and I'm going to." I feel less like that now. Because you can't work on everything, and you can't do everything for every book. Even when you do do everything you can think of, so many good books get ignored. So many good books go by the wayside. You've got to be able to figure out if each one is necessary enough that you can really do something with it. Because it's not that rewarding as the editor, or as the author, to just have a book sit there—when it dies a quiet death and nobody even hears it sink. "We tried! We'll do better with the paperback!" The number of times you hear that! You know you're lying and they know you're lying and everyone's just going to pretend it will be totally different a year from now.
It's got to have enough juice in it to go somewhere. I feel like that juice can take any number of forms. It's an ineffable quality, but you kind of know it when you've got it in front of you. Everyone is not going to agree on fiction, either. I do pretty much all fiction. When I want to buy something, in most cases nobody else is going to read the whole thing. They're going to believe me when I say it's good all the way to the end. They just like the voice and then we run with it. You're never going to get a whole roomful of people to agree on fiction the way you sometimes can with nonfiction: "Is this the right book at the right time by the right person with the right platform to write the book on whatever?" With fiction it's all sort of amorphous, and you've just got to feel like you're picking the ones that are potent enough to go the distance.
NASH: We're all just proxies for the reader. But we're going to have different ideas about who the reader is and how we connect to that reader. Do we have commonality with this imaginary reader? But I certainly find that I am powerfully animated by the sense of having a duty to connect the writer with the reader. Is this a book that's going to get one person to tell another person that they've got to read it? Which is the closest thing, I think, at least in the land of fiction, that's going to pass for figuring out what the hell is meant by the word commercial. As you said, your own energy can always get one other person to read the book. But is that one other person going to get the next person to read the book?
Are there any other things, besides what's on the page, that you're looking at when a book is submitted?
GARGAGLIANO: This was one of the hardest lessons for me. Unlike what Eric was saying earlier, when I used to read fiction before I was in publishing, I never wanted to know who the author was. I didn't want to look at their pictures. I just wanted to exist in the worlds that they had created. That was it. When I got into the industry, I quickly learned that that was not acceptable. The first thing I get asked at our editorial meeting is, "Where have they published?" You want to know that somebody has been publishing their short stories, even if a total of a hundred people have read them. It's always the first question.
CHINSKI: One thing I'm looking for is experience in the world. I keep coming back to Chris Adrian, not for any particular reason. But he's somebody who has an MFA, he's a practicing doctor specializing in pediatric oncology, he's in divinity school, and you can feel all of that in his writing. There's an urgency, a sense of questioning, and an obsession. You can tell that all of that experience is getting distilled into his writing. He wants to understand something about loss and our relationship to transcendence. I feel like with the best writers, you recognize that in their work. It's exciting to me to feel like it's being drawn not just out of the desire to write an interesting story and find readers. It's a different form of necessity that they feel they need to wrestle with because of their own life experience.
BOUDREAUX: I've never been able to say what my books have in common. I'll make an argument for escapism. I want to be transported. I don't care where you take me, but I want to have that moment that we all had when we were reading as kids, when the real world ceases to exist and your mother tells you to come have dinner and it's like resurfacing from the bottom of a swimming pool. "Where am I? What am I doing?" That's what I want. I'm not looking for any particular kind of book, I'm just looking for the intensity of that experience. It doesn't matter what agent it comes from. It doesn't matter if it's long or short. It doesn't matter if it's a young voice or something that's more mature. I just feel like you sit there as a proxy for the reader, open to having a new experience. And if they can give it to you, great. I don't even need it to happen in the first sentence. I'll give it three or four pages sometimes. [Laughter.] I'm seven months pregnant so I'm feeling patient and maternal toward the world—I'll give them four or five pages to say something that I find interesting.
On the flip side of that, give me some things that you find beginning writers doing wrong.
NASH: Not listening. Not listening to the world around them.
GARGAGLIANO: Trying to sell stories that aren't really a book. They're not a cohesive whole. There's no vision to the whole thing that makes me feel like this person has a reason for writing a story collection other than that they had twelve stories.
NASH: Assuming that having an attitude equals...anything.
CHINSKI: Or assuming that good writing is enough. I'm sure we all see a lot of stuff where the writing is really good. It's well crafted and you can tell that the writer has talent. But, again, you don't really feel like the writer necessarily believes in his or her ability to open it up into a novel. I know the old adage "write what you know." I'd kind of rather somebody write what they don't know. And figure out, beyond their own personal experience, why what they're doing should matter to the reader.
BOUDREAUX: I've always wanted to give people that advice too. "Do you have to write what you know? If you know it, I might know it. Which means I've already read it. Which means that your book is the nineteenth novel about a mother-daughter relationship. And I. Don't. Care." The crudest way to put it is the "Who cares?" factor. Why, why, why do I need to read four hundred pages about this? The necessary thing, and the authentic thing, and the voice thing are all much better ways of saying it than the "Who cares?" factor, but it's basically the same thing. "What is the necessity of reading this? What are you doing that is different?"
CHINSKI: I'd rather somebody be ambitious and fail a little bit than read a perfectly crafted, tame novel.
NASH: I have published novels, especially first novels, that I knew failed on some level because of what they were trying to do. I felt that that was okay.
CHINSKI: That's more exciting.
NASH: But what would be the version of that that actually answered your question?
CHINSKI: "Have courage"?
NASH: Don't try to be perfect. Don't be boring.
CHINSKI: That's really what it is 99.9 percent of the time—good writing, but boring. And it's the hardest thing to turn down because you think, "This is good. But it doesn't do anything for me."
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. You're like, "There's nothing wrong with this. I've got nothing to tell you to do to fix it. It's just...there."
CHINSKI: And that's a hard rejection letter to write, too. Because it's not like you can point to this, that, and the other thing that are wrong with it. It just doesn't move you in any way. It doesn't feel necessary.
Do you think it's too hard to get published today?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's hard but not too hard. I don't know how many more books we could have out there.
BOUDREAUX: I think we all kind of know that too many books get published. You can listen to your own imprint's launch meeting, you can listen to all the other imprints' launch meetings, and multiply that by every other house, and you know that every book did not feel necessary to every editor. When you think about it that way, it doesn't seem all that hard to get published.
CHINSKI: But there are also a lot of people who can't get published.
NASH: There was a great little moment in an article in Wired about a year ago. It was an article about the million-dollar prize that Netflix is giving for anyone who can improve their algorithm—"If you liked this, you'll like that"—by 10 percent. One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn't been completely solved, but it's been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I'm imposing my own question on the question you asked—"Is it too hard to get published?"—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, "Are there too many books?" I personally don't feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it's hell having so much supply. But we didn't exist before 1993, and you guys all existed before that, so you are feeding off a different supply and we're enabling this new supply. I love the fact that Two Dollar Radio exists, and all the other new indie presses that have erupted. I think that's healthy. I don't think a solution to the problems we face as an industry is to say we're going to reduce consumer choice by publishing fewer books. Now, at the level of the individual publisher, I totally understand it as a rational decision that a given executive committee would make at a large company. My comment that there are not too many books published has to do with culture rather than a given economic enterprise. I think we could publish more books. You just have to recognize that they may be read by five hundred people. And that's perfectly legitimate. Blogs can be read by fifty people. You just have to think, "What's the economically and environmentally rational thing to do with this thing that has an audience—but that audience is just 150 or 250 people?" It may not be to print the book. It may be to publish it through a labor-of-love operation that is completely committed to a given set of aesthetic principles and will print it in a way that is environmentally sensitive—chapbook publishing, let's say. The poetry model could have a lot to say to fiction and nonfiction publishing.
I think about the midlist writer a lot and I feel like it's harder and harder to build a career the old-fashioned way—slowly, over several books that might not be perfect but allow you to develop as a writer. Part of that has to do with the electronic sales track. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer and speak to that.
BOUDREAUX: When we published Serena by Ron Rash it was such a proud moment of doing that thing—of almost reinventing a writer. So I feel like it can still happen. The model of building somebody hasn't gone completely out the window. It gets hard with the "This is what we sold of the last book, this is all we're ordering this time." And you're stuck with it. But a lot of editors and a lot of publishers stick with people.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel like Scribner is really good about that. We can't do it with everyone, but there is definitely a stable of authors. I have writers for whom I haven't had to fight that hard to buy their second or third books. It's because everyone recognizes their talent.
NASH: It can be because the reps love selling them. The reps love reading that galley, even if they're going to get [orders of] ones and twos. But it makes them so happy to read that galley that they're not going to fight you when you present it to them.
CHINSKI: You have to think about the identity of the list as a whole, too. Sometimes it means paying an author less than what they've received before, but it doesn't mean we're giving up on those authors. I think, speaking for FSG, it's important to us to try to build writers. Roger Straus apparently said, and Jonathan always says, "We publish authors, not books." That's more difficult today, given the way of the world, but it's still the guiding principle. Think about Jonathan Franzen, who published two novels that got great reviews but didn't sell particularly well. Then The Corrections came along. There are tons of examples like that.
But aren't you guys and FSG the exception to that in a lot of ways?
CHINSKI: I wonder if it's really that new. Obviously the mechanics have changed, but there's always been a huge midlist. We remember the really important writers. We probably don't even remember the best-selling writers from twenty years ago. You remember the important ones—or the ones that have been canonized as important. The economics have changed and obviously the chain bookstores are a different part of the equation than they were fifty years ago, but I suspect there's always been a vast midlist.
GARGAGLIANO: I also don't think it's very constructive for authors to think about that too much. You're sort of fortunate if you get published at all. You're fortunate to find an editor who you have a great relationship with and a house that believes in you in which everybody works as hard as they can for you. There's only so much you can do.
NASH: If you're going to stress about something, be worrying about your reader. Don't stare at your Amazon ranking and don't stare at the number of galleys your publisher is printing. Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine. They don't have to get the book-publishing equivalent of dirt under their fingernails. Which involves whoring, to use a sexist term, but one that I use to describe myself. [Laughter.] Go out and find a reader. It's not about selling a reader a $14.95 book. If you have ten more books under your thumb, then that reader could be worth $150 to you, and it might actually be worth three minutes of your time to respond to their e-mail or chat with them for an extra two minutes after that reading at which it seemed like no one showed up. Those eight people might have some influence out in the world. None of us is in this for the money. It's sort of mind-boggling how many people think that we're sitting there behind our cushy desks. There's just no one in publishing who couldn't have made more money doing something else. At a certain point, yes, we may have become unemployable in any other industry. But there was a period of time in everyone's career when he or she could have gone in a different direction and made more money, and chose not to.
GARGAGLIANO: Can I add one more thing? We keep talking about self-promotion, and I think there's a stigma that it's a negative thing. It's really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier. It's about being really passionate about your book. It's a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it's helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it's about them. It's actually about the book. It's about the writing. It's not about you personally.
NASH: It's about being part of the world around you. One of the freelance publicists I know—I've never been able to afford to use her, but I'm friendly with her—does something that I think is brilliant in terms of dealing with a new author. Rather than trying to make an author blog, which is always hell, she says, "Here are twenty blogs that you should read." And by doing that, they get into it. They start commenting. All of the sudden they start getting that this act of communication is no different than a conversation between two people. It gets the author to start realizing that they're in a community, and that participating in that community is what we're talking about when we say "self-promotion." It isn't this tawdry, icky activity that will demean them. It will help make them feel more connected to the world, and happier.
GARGAGLIANO: I'll give you an example. I published this book about fruit—talk about obsessive people—called The Fruit Hunters. The author is this guy who was writing food stories for magazines and became obsessed with fruit and went on to discover this whole obsessive world of fruit lovers. The book came out and got a lot of attention, and the sales were okay, but it has fostered this whole community of people who are also obsessed. The other day they had an event in a community garden in the East Village. They call themselves the Fruit Hunters, after the book, and they're going to take trips together and everything. There are already a hundred of them. It's this amazing little story of obsession. It's exciting. The author is very involved online. He's happy to engage with anyone who wants to talk to him. He's just really present, and that makes all the difference.
I'm interested in how you guys view your jobs. It seems to me that things have changed quite a bit over time and I'm curious how you see what you do.
CHINSKI: Things have changed a lot. But in terms of the actual editing and acquiring, I don't feel like I'm thinking very differently about what I'm signing up, and in terms of the editing, I still have the same basic ideas of what my role is, which is to make the book more of what it already is—rather than coming in with some foreign idea and imposing it on the book. I try to understand what the writer is trying to do with the book and edit it along those lines. But when I first started in publishing, I had no idea that the role of the editor was to communicate to the marketing and sales departments. I had this very dark-and-stormy-night vision of the editor sitting in a room poring over manuscripts. But you very quickly realize that a natural part of being excited about a book is wanting to tell other people about it, in the same way we do as readers. That's what our job is in-house. And obviously it probably is different now, in terms of the chain stores and all these other things. But I think an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is.
GARGAGLIANO: I feel very similarly. I'm the first reader, and I'm there to make the book what it wants to be, and then I'm its best advocate. I'm its advocate to people in the company because often they're not going to read it—they're only going to get my take on it—and then I'm its advocate to the rest of the world. I write handwritten notes to booksellers. I write to magazine people. I'm constantly promoting my authors. I feel like I'm the one who was responsible for getting them into the company, and I'm the one who's responsible for getting them into the world. I have to take care of them.
BOUDREAUX: The most fun part of being an editor is getting to actually edit—getting to sit and play puzzle with the book. God, that is so much fun! That's what we like to do. We need to do all of these other things...but sitting there with the paper, which you only get to do on the weekends? That's when you get excited. Like, "I'm a real editor!" But this myth that nobody edits anymore compared with a hundred years ago? I've never worked with an editor who doesn't edit all weekend long, every single night. That's the fun part.
CHINSKI: I think that's important to emphasize. I think we all hear that editors don't edit anymore.
BOUDREAUX: I just don't know who they're talking about. Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they are talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that.
NASH: I suspect that agents are doing more editorial work on books before they submit them in order to polish the apple. To some extent the process of acquisition has become more collegial, and it's helpful if a book is not a dog's dinner when you're showing it to people before you can start working on it yourself. That can create the perception that not much happened after it was acquired. And when you have the goal of helping to make a book as much like itself as it can be, that can involve a level of editing that doesn't look very intense on the surface but actually can be quite important. It doesn't have to involve a whole lot of red ink. But the right red ink in the right places, especially when it's subtractive rather than additive, can really make a book fluoresce.
Why did you all become editors instead of agents? And why do you stay editors when by all accounts you could make a lot more money being an agent?
CHINSKI: Has anybody here ever worked at an agency? My first job, for three months, was at an agency. That's why I'm an editor. But sometimes I do think that agents get a more global view of things. Dealing with film and foreign rights and so on.
But in other ways they get a more limited view because they don't have to do all the things to make a book work.
CHINSKI: I think that's true. Wouldn't that be more fun? [Laughter.] But seriously, when I was working there I didn't leave because I didn't like working at an agency. It just wasn't working as a job. I have a really hard time imagining myself as an agent. It's partly just the obvious stuff of doing the deal and so on. I think you have to have a certain personality to get really excited about that. I'd rather go home and really devote myself to doing the editing. I know that some agents do that. But it's not, kind of nominally, what they are there for.
BOUDREAUX: I literally didn't know there was such a thing as a literary agent. I didn't know anything. I was like, "I guess those people who get to work with books would be editors." I just didn't know any better. And I love to play with the words, which they also get to do, but they're not the final word on it. I also don't do enough nonfiction, which I feel like any editor who's got any sense learns to do. But I just don't have the antenna for it. As an agent it would be even scarier to have a list that is 95 percent fiction. You probably need a balanced portfolio in a way that an editor can still get away with being more fiction-heavy.
What are the hardest decisions you have to make as editors?
CHINSKI: Jackets. I find that the most harrowing part of the whole process. As an editor, you're in this funny position of both being an advocate for the house to the author and agent but also being an advocate for the author to everybody in-house. The editor is kind of betwixt and between. And for a lot of books, especially fiction, the jacket is the only marketing tool you have. It's really difficult. I also find that I know what I don't like, but I don't have the visual vocabulary to describe what I think might work.
BOUDREAUX: And the cover is so important. Even if it's not the only thing that's being done for a book, it's still got to be one of the most important things. You've got reviews and word-of-mouth, and then you've just got the effect it has when somebody walks into the store and sees it. I think it's so important to work somewhere where your art people will read the book and come up with something that you never would have come up with yourself. The idea of a jacket meeting where you have twelve people around a table and you bring it down to the lowest common denominator of "It's a book about this set there. We need a crab pot at sunset with a..." People do that! They think it's a marketing-savvy way to go about it. "We need a young person on the cover. But you shouldn't be able to see the person's face. It has to be from behind!"
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing happens when the author tries to deconstruct the cover.
CHINSKI: Exactly. That's one thing that's changed a lot. When I first started, we would send the author hard copies of the [proposed] jacket. Now we email it to them and they send it to everybody in their family. You can predict exactly what's going to happen.
What are the other hard decisions you have to make?
GARGAGLIANO: I have two, and they're related. One of them is when I love a book but I don't actually think that we're going to do the best job of publishing it. I anguish about that because I want the book for myself, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for the author. The step beyond that is when you've already been publishing someone, and it's the question of what's best for their career. You offer a certain amount of money, and the agent wants to take the author somewhere else, and you have to ask yourself whether or not you go to bat for that person and get more money because you want to keep working with them despite whether the house might really support them. That's a hard thing to figure out.
I think part of what makes it hard is that editors serve different masters—the authors, the agents, the house. How do you guys navigate those allegiances and responsibilities?
NASH: I will confess that I came into this business not motivated to become an editor. I was a theater director and happened upon Soft Skull because the guy who founded it was a playwright whose plays I directed. The whole thing was going belly up in the middle of my friendship with this dude. He basically did a runner, and there were these two twenty-two-year-olds at the company, and no one else, and there were all these authors, and the whole thing was fucked. I had a messiah complex and came in and tried to be Mr. Messiah for six months. And in the middle of my messiah complex, I fell in love with the process of publishing. So in a weird way, I did not come in with the idea of working with writers. I came in as a problem solver, and that's all I've ever been in a certain sense. The problem I try to solve is, "How do you connect writers and readers?" Those are the two masters for me. Recently I've been trying to think, believe it or not, of the publishing business as a service industry in which we provide two services simultaneously, to the author and to the reader. We may pretend to offer a service to the agent, and we may pretend to offer a service to the company. But only to the extent that we fulfill those other two services—to the writer and to the reader—are we truly serving the agent or the company. And we have to use our own instincts on a minute-to-minute psychological basis. Obviously you're accountable to the bottom line and P&Ls etcetera, but you're being asked to use your own instincts, and that's what you have to use in order to bring writers and readers together.
GARGAGLIANO: There are moments when it's sticky. When you're dealing with a jacket, for example. But on the whole, everybody wants the same thing, and that makes it easy. The thing that I always have to remind myself is that the people who are on the sales end also love books, and they also love to read, and they could be making more money in some other industry too. When you remember that, it makes your job much easier.
CHINSKI: I agree that we do all want the same thing, but don't you find that sometimes people don't behave that way?
GARGAGLIANO: Sometimes. But sometimes they do.
CHINSKI: It just amazes me how combative the relationship can become. I mean, it doesn't happen that often, but it does become combative sometimes. When we were talking before about authors saying that editors don't edit...there's just this assumption that the publisher isn't doing enough. Sometimes agents don't quite understand how things actually work in the publishing house. I'm not saying that across the board. But it does happen. I find those situations really difficult, where you feel like you're being accused of somehow not caring enough about the author when we all know how many hurdles there are. I mean, we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't care.
GARGAGLIANO: I've been very lucky with my authors. I haven't had many bad ones. The relationship is all about trust, and once you start that relationship and you start that dialogue, they trust that you're taking care of them. But there is a point when it's out of the editor's hands. And if they've trusted you that far, most of the time they'll accept whatever happens, in my experience. Usually the call I get will be from the agent.
BOUDREAUX: It's like you can almost have two different conversations. In one of them the agent gets what's going on and is just being helpful and trying to get everyone on the same page. And in the other one somebody is making demands or accusations that aren't going to actually help anything. It's more just for show. You know, "Emboss this part of the jacket" for no good reason. You do get the feeling sometimes that they are fulfilling their service to the author in a way that actually doesn't have that much to do with the book.
GARGAGLIANO: But that's the agent. I'm more worried about my author's happiness.
CHINSKI: I agree with that. A combative relationship with an author is pretty rare. Obviously it happens sometimes, but I'm thinking more about the agent. I don't want to overstate it, but sometimes it does feel like we should all understand more that we do all actually want the same thing. No publisher or editor signs up a book in order to sink it. Who would do that? We're not getting paid enough to be in this business for any reason other than we actually love the books we're working on.
What do you wish writers knew about you that they sometimes don't?
GARGAGLIANO: I think most writers don't realize that every editor goes home and reads and edits for four hours—that they're not doing that in the office. That in the office they're advocating for all of the authors they already have.
NASH: I don't even get to read when I go home. When I go home, I'm continuing to advocate. I haven't been able to read at all recently. I've really just become a pure pimp.
CHINSKI: I thought you were a whore.
NASH: I'm both at once! It depends on the street I'm walking down.
What else?
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's important for writers to remember that we're not their enemy. We love books and we're looking for books that we love.
CHINSKI: And ads are not love.
GARGAGLIANO: And ads do not equal sales.
BOUDREAUX: If those two things appear in print—that we're working nights and weekends and ads don't sell books—we have all done a fine job here. We are martyrs to the cause and ads are ridiculous. But I think editors like ads too. It's like having your business card published in the New York Times.
Have you guys ever gotten any great advice about your jobs from a colleague or a mentor?
CHINSKI: I can quote somebody, Pat Strachan, who is one of the most elegant, serious, and lovely people in the business. She said to me, "Just remember, when you're all stressed out, that the lives of young children are not at stake." And I do think that's worth remembering. We all love what we do and we take it really seriously, but you have to keep things in perspective. I also have one from David Rosenthal. He used to say, "If you're going to overpay for a book, you should at least be able to imagine the things that have to happen for it to work at that level, even if it may not actually work at that level."
BOUDREAUX: It should be in the realm of possibility.
CHINSKI: Yeah, and you should be able to picture, very concretely, what would have to happen and how you might go about making those things happen. You don't want to just buy something blindly.
What have your authors taught you about how to do your job?
GARGAGLIANO: To be honest with them. I often have the impulse to protect my authors and treat them as if they are more fragile than they actually are. It's better if I can have an open conversation with them. If I start that early on, the better our relationship is going to be going forward, and the easier it will be to talk about tough things. That took me a while to figure out.
BOUDREAUX: They teach you over and over and over—and this is soobvious—but they will always have a better solution to an editing problem than anything you could come up with. If you just raise the question, they will solve it. The universe of their book is more real to them than it could ever be to anyone else. You trust them with the internal logic of what's going on. You just show them where the web is a little weak—where everything that was so fully imagined in their head has not quite made it down to the page. Not only, as you said, are they not that fragile, but the world they've created is not that fragile. You can poke at it endlessly, and you'll just get really good answers and really good solutions. When you bring something up, you never find that you will unravel the whole sleeve. I've never had that happen. Where it's like, "Oooooh, we'd better hope that nobody notices that."
How do you guys measure your success as an editor?
NASH: Survival.
Tell me more.
NASH: For me, for a long time, there was a very direct correspondence between the success of my books and my ability to eat pizza. Now, in the last year, it has become less direct, since I don't have to make payroll, least of all my own, anymore. Because in the past, in order to make payroll, I would do it by not making my own payroll.
But what about in a deeper sense?
NASH: I suppose I was answering as a publisher, which is what I was and in a sense what I am anterior to being an editor.
I think I just mean more internally, in a more internal way.
NASH: When the book becomes what you imagined it was going to be based on the fact that it was almost already there. And you helped it get there.
CHINSKI: But we all want more than that, too, don't we?
That's what I'm trying to get at.
CHINSKI: We all want our books to have an impact. Beyond sales in any kind of simple sense. You want people to talk about them. You want people to find each other because of them. I worked with a writer who very elegantly described a book as a table that everybody can sit around and start a conversation around. And I think, not to sound terribly cheesy about it, that's what we all want. We want our books to have an impact in the world. And that's really rare. Sometimes it has nothing to do with sales. So I think it's more than just feeling like you did your job on the page. It's feeling like you did your job in the world.
GARGAGLIANO: That it went beyond you.
CHINSKI: Yeah. Books should transcend themselves in some way, and I think that's what we all really want.
NASH: The reason I got excited about publishing, compared to theater, was that the theater I was doing had no fucking impact on the world whatsoever.
GARGAGLIANO: Do you feel like it's better in publishing?
NASH: It's immensely better. Now, it may be that the joy I get from publishing is relative to how hard it was in downtown, experimental, Richard Foreman-acolyte theater. I set the bar so low for myself! [Laughter.] But in publishing, even indie publishing, thousands of people who I will never meet, who don't want to act for me, will actually buy one of my books.
CHINSKI: That reminds me of another great quote that I'll probably get slightly wrong. I remember when Philip Roth came to sales conference at Houghton Mifflin. I think it was for The Human Stain. He gave a presentation to the sales force and basically talked about the death of the novel as a force in our culture. "That'll be a good way to get the sales reps really excited!" [Laughter.] But then he said the most extraordinary thing, which has always stayed with me and which I've said to a lot of writers. He said that if his books were to sell ten thousand copies, which doesn't sound like a whole lot, but if he were to sit in a room, and each one of those people were to walk by him, and he could see them face to face, it would break his heart. I can't believe I forgot that earlier. That's probably the best description of why we do what we do. Whether it's three thousand people buying a novel, or five hundred people buying a book of poetry, it does kind of break your heart if you actually imagine each of those individuals reading the book.
NASH: That's why it was not a value judgment when I said the audience for a book might only be 150 people, in this world of more books. It's about the intensity with which that connection might occur.
CHINSKI: Do you guys all remember one moment where you felt really content? Whether it was something specific that happened or just a moment in your career? Where you felt like, "Okay, this is it. Now I'm kind of happy. This is all I could ever want." Where you actually slept well for one night?
I like the question.
GARGAGLIANO: That is a good question. [Laughter]
CHINSKI: I mean, I'm just wondering, was it when a book hit the best-seller list? Was it when a book got a great review? I'm curious what those different feelings are.
BOUDREAUX: I'm trying to come up with something that won't sound like complete dorkiness. I mean, yeah, the best-seller list feels amazing. It feels amazing because of all the great books we watch not get read. When you see one that's actually getting read? Boy is that an amazing feeling. But that little moment of satisfaction? I was trying to think, "What was the first time as an editor that I really felt that way?" Maybe being promoted to editor was my greatest moment. You know, Ann Godoff was doing the benediction and it was kind of like, "You are now an editor. On your tombstone they can say you were an editor." I had this little glimmering moment of, "Yeah! I came here, I didn't even know what publishing was, barely, and now..." Thank God for the Radcliffe Publishing Course. I wouldn't have had any idea of how anybody moves to New York or gets a job had I not ended up doing that. I had been working at Longstreet Press in Atlanta, where we published Jeff Foxworthy's You Might Be a Redneck If... That's actually my proudest moment—what was I doing forgetting that? But seriously, I did that course because I didn't know anything about anything and I thought I'd go back to Longstreet and work there. But then I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe I'll try New York for one year. I'm sure I'll end up back down in Atlanta before long, hoping that somebody at Algonquin would die so that somebody from the South could get a job at a slightly bigger publisher whose books you actually occasionally heard about." You know, I think actually getting promoted to editor was sort of like, "Wow, here I am. This is really a job that I'm really going to get to do." I still sort of feel amazed at that.
GARGAGLIANO: Getting a good review is also amazing. It's so gratifying when you have loved this thing for so long and somebody in the public says that they love it too. It's a thrill.
BOUDREAUX: Getting a review in a place that's always been hard to crack. I'd bring up Ron Rash again. He was a regional author who had never been reviewed in the Times, never been reviewed in the Washington Post. He had this Southern fan base. The booksellers loved him. The San Francisco and L.A. papers had been good to him in the past. But everybody else ignored him. Getting him a daily review in the Times was such a bursting-buttons proud moment for him. I've never been happier about the work I've seen my company do on a book. Because we knew what he had felt like he'd been missing. And there it was, lining up—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker—when everybody had been ignoring him.
NASH: For me it was the summer of 2002, when there were two things that persuaded me that I should stay in the business. One was the first book I ever acquired, by a woman named Jenny Davidson, who I'd gone to college with. I was not even sure what one did at a publisher, and I thought, "I should acquire something." We had to find books because there was nothing in the pipeline. So I asked around and my old college friend had a novel that no one wanted to publish. I didn't know what galleys were at that point. But at one point our distributor asked us for some galleys, so we printed out manuscripts and tape-bound them and sent them some places. And the book ended up getting a full-page review in the Times. It ended up being pretty much the only review it got. It didn't get any prepubs because I probably didn't send it to the prepubs on time. But for whatever reason, some editor at the Times Book Review decided to review it. So I had this sense of not having fucked up—this absence of failure in a world where you're up against it.
The second thing that happened had to do with the second book I acquired, Get Your War On. I'd look at my distributor's website and see the sales and the backorders. And one order came in—I think it was the second order that the book got—and it was Harvard Bookstore, which ordered forty copies. That was more convincing than the Times Book Review. It was the first time a bookseller had ever trusted me, the first time a bookseller had ever said, "You're not an idiot." I don't think in either of those situations did I realize how hard it was. It was only later, when I tried to get the secondTimes review and the second forty-copy-order from an indie bookstore, that I realized how good it was.
But the second thing was bigger than the first thing because ultimately it's about survival. I wasn't being glib when I was talking about survival. There was a very direct, one-to-one translation between my ability to sell books and my ability to stay in business and pay everyone. There is a British publisher call Souvenir Press, apparently they've been around for a long time, and I got a catalog of theirs one time. It included a letter from the publisher, and in the letter he quoted some other august independent publisher, saying something to the effect of, "A publisher's first duty to his authors is to remain solvent." Which was instructive because if you don't, it's not some glorious failure. All of your authors go out of print. And one of the reasons I ended up selling the company—one of the reasons was that I fucking had to because PGW had gone tits up and there was just no way to avoid that—but there was also a sense that if I fucked up too badly, the whole thing would go kaput, and I had an accountability to the authors to not let it all go kaput because it was not going to be some cute little failure where everybody would be like, "All right, peace, Soft Skull. It was very nice but now we'll all move on." It was like, "Oh, there are a number of authors whose careers actually depend on this."
Let's talk about agents. Tell me about the difference between a good one and a bad one.
GARGAGLIANO: A good agent knows what to send you. They're playing matchmaker, and they do it well. Those are the happiest relationships—those authors are happiest with their agents and they're happiest with their editors.
CHINSKI: A good agent also understands the process inside the publishing house and the kinds of issues and questions that an editor has to deal with on a daily basis. But I think, most importantly, they know what they're sending and who they're sending it to.
BOUDREAUX: A good agent can be very helpful when you get to those sticky wickets, whether it's the cover, or an ending that still doesn't work, or something else. An agent who can honestly appraise the work along with you and add their voice to the chorus of why, for example, the author needs to change that title. You want it to be about the book and you want it to be about the author, but every now and then the sales force knows what the hell they're talking about with a "This is going to get lost because it is black and it has no title on the cover. It's not going to degrade the integrity of the book if you change it." An agent can either be helpful in that conversation or they can sit there and be a roadblock and let you be the bad cop. An agent who's willing to be the bad cop with you can save an author from impulses—and help them understand why it's the right thing to do in a world where two hundred thousand books get published every year.
GARGAGLIANO: The same thing is true on the publicity front, when you have an author who wants something and you have an agent who's able to make the additional phone call and work on the team with the publicist and the editor. It's much better than getting a phone call from an agent who's just yelling at you.
CHINSKI: Just to step back a little bit, obviously the agent's job is to be the advocate for the author. But, along the lines of what you were both saying, that doesn't always mean agreeing with everything the author says. I think sometimes the agent forgets that. That, actually, they can be most constructive for the author—not just for that book, but their career—by explaining some difficult things to their client.
GARGAGLIANO: And encouraging their author not to be difficult, which doesn't win any fans in the house. If the agent is able to step in and say something in a constructive fashion, that is often helpful.
CHINSKI: It's human nature. We don't like to admit it, but people like to work for somebody who's appreciative. That doesn't mean, in a saccharine way, just affirming everything that the editor and publisher are doing. Obviously, we all make mistakes. But the conversation has to be constructive. We've all seen it over and over and over again. If an author, even if they don't agree with you, is appreciative and trying to work constructively with the house, and so is the agent, it just changes the energy of the way people respond to that project—from the publicist to the designer to whoever. It goes back to what we were saying before: We all want the same thing, and if everybody can keep that in mind, it just makes everybody want to work all the harder on behalf of the book.
NASH: The squeaky wheel theory is bullshit in our business. It's just complete bullshit. It doesn't work.
CHINSKI: I have a sense that authors sometimes get that as concrete advice—to be a squeaky wheel—and for everyone out there, there's a way to express your convictions without being...
GARGAGLIANO: And that ties into being proactive for yourself. If you're out there doing a lot of work for yourself, that energy is—
NASH: So inspirational. When you have an author who shows up at a bookstore and then a week later the sales rep shows up at the store and the rep emails me and says, "Guess what? So-and-so just came by Third Place last week. The buyer was so excited to meet him." Then the rep emails everyone else on the sales force and says, "Look how hard this author is working." It's amazing how effective an engaged author is. But if the author is like, "Why aren't my books in Third Place?" it accomplishes nothing.
We all know that there are less than great agents out there. How are writers supposed to avoid ending up with one of them? Put yourself in their shoes.
CHINSKI: I think they need to do a lot of research, for one thing, even before they get an agent. It amazes me how many times we get query letters from agents who clearly haven't looked at our catalog. I think they need to ask a lot of questions of whatever agent they're thinking about signing up with and make sure the agent knows who they're submitting to and why and so on.
But what if the author doesn't know any of that stuff?
GARGAGLIANO: The author should know. It's their business.
CHINSKI: So much information is available online. There's no excuse now to not know what a house is doing and even what individual editors are doing.
GARGAGLIANO: Every time you read a book, the editor's name is in the acknowledgments. It's very simple.
NASH: The fact that agents don't charge money to read is so widely an established fact online that it's mind-boggling that you still get submissions from agents who are obviously functioning that way. The agenting equivalent of chop-shops.
I mean more the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that goes back to what we were talking about with the author's relationship to their editor. It's a personal connection. You want someone who understands your work and is articulate about it and has the same vision for it and can talk to you about your whole career and not just the thing that's in front of them. And then that conversation extends to the editor and the editor's conversation extends to the house.
NASH: With regard to the so-called "A+" and "B+" agents, when I've seen authors switch agents to get somebody more high-powered it pretty much has always failed. So if that's what meant by the difference between a B+ agent and an A+ agent, there is no difference. If they met the criteria that Alexis just articulated, then the odds are that they're the right agent for you. I mean, there's not a whole lot of variance in the advances I pay—there's not a lot of variance in what I can accomplish and not accomplish. Maybe there is with you guys. I've always had this theory—I could be wrong—that who the agent is might make a 20 percent difference in the advance an editor is going to offer. But it's not going to make an order-of-magnitude difference. Probably. It's not going to be the difference between ten thousand and a hundred thousand, let's say.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that's true 90 percent of the time. I think there are a very select group of agents who people just pay attention to before they even know what the book is. And that sets expectations.
We may as well name them.
NASH: Nicole Aragi, presumably.
GARGAGLIANO: Tina Bennett. Lynn Nesbit. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. Suzanne Gluck.
CHINSKI: Eric Simonoff. I mean, I know from friends at other houses that when a manuscript comes in from certain agents, they start circulating it before they even read it because they presume it's going to go really quickly and for a lot of money. And that's not true with other agents. It just changes the game entirely. I think an author has to understand what they want. They have to do some soul searching, for lack of a better phrase, and figure out if it's just the money they need or if they need something else. And it's hard to hold that against someone. I know that editors always bitch about having to pay too much, and obviously it can have big consequences in a house—if a book doesn't earn out and so on—but you can't really hold that against the author. We never know exactly what their circumstances are. Maybe they have five children who they need to send to college. But they need to figure out what their priorities are. I do think we've often stumbled up against this thing where, in the same way that people think advertising equals love, they think that the advance equals love. And that's just not always true. But people assume that the more you pay, the more you love a book—that if you offer fifty thousand dollars more than another house, then you love it more and will be more devoted to it—and that's not necessarily the case. I think a good agent will explain to the author what all the different variables are, and specifically within the context of what the author needs, whether it's financial or their career more generally, and that is the ideal way to make the decision.
How do you guys feel about auctions?
CHINSKI: We try to avoid them if we can.
BOUDREAUX: I don't mind an auction as much as I hate a best-bids [auction]. And I don't mind a best-bids as much as I hate a best-bids and then the top three get to do it again. What the hell? Everybody does that now. It's insane to me. And the other thing is, does everybody have to talk to the author now, or meet the author, before you get to make an offer? What happened to the arranged marriage? "Eric likes me, Eric likes you, how 'bout we do a book together." I mean—
CHINSKI: Have you gotten the one where you don't get to talk to the author unless you promise to make an offer in advance?
GARGAGLIANO: Oh, that's horrible.
BOUDREAUX: That happened recently. You weren't allowed to talk to the author unless you'd ponied up however many six figures.
CHINSKI: There's an admission price to even talk to the author. That drives me crazy. At FSG, we try to avoid auctions. We decide what we think a book is worth, make the offer, and the author either decides to come or not come, and we bow out if it doesn't happen.
NASH: I mean, any economist will tell you that the winner of an auction has overpaid. In a lot of worlds, outside the publishing one, certain auctions get structured so that the second highest bidder wins. Because the presumption is that the overbidder has overpaid in such a way that it could imperil the business.
BOUDREAUX: I love that! Second place wins—let's hear it for all the B-students!
CHINSKI: All you A-students are crazy.
I hear what you're saying, Richard, but what about with books like Everything Is Illuminated or Edgar Sawtelle? You're not the loser if you won those auctions.
NASH: But I mean in aggregate. Any of these things are statistical, so there are always outliers.
CHINSKI: Actually, I came in second on Everything Is Illuminated.
BOUDREAUX: Were you the underbidder?
CHINSKI: I was, actually.
Apparently I was wrong.
GARGAGLIANO: To be fair, there is a benefit to an auction, which is that, at least in my position, the whole house has to pay attention to the book. You end up getting more people reading it and talking about it, and that creates a certain excitement that isn't to be negated entirely. As long as you don't overpay too much, within that excitement, I think it can benefit the book.
CHINSKI: But what about the problem—this is rare, but we've all seen it happen—where the money becomes the story behind the book. That gives me a queasy feeling. Even if it doesn't happen in a negative way, which we've obviously seen happen. But if that's the driving momentum that gets a book attention? I guess, on one level, great. We'll take what we can get. But on another level it just makes me queasy.
GARGAGLIANO: There's a huge difference between an auction that ends at two hundred thousand and an auction that ends at a million. There's a huge spectrum there. But if you're in an auction with five different houses, your publishers are going to pay attention. Because everybody else is paying attention.
Do you guys think you feel the money you're spending in the same way that maybe Richard does?
BOUDREAUX: I don't know if you sweat the difference between 150 [$150,000] and 175 [$175,000]. But you definitely...One [$100,000] and five [$500,000] are different. And five [$500,000] and three million are different. I'll tell you what's easier: three million. Because then everybody did have to get on board. You are not out there on your own saying, "I believe!" But those middle, lot-of-money numbers when maybe nobody else read the whole thing and somebody is letting you do it? You do feel responsible for that in a "Boy do I need to make sure I don't make a single misstep the whole time. The manuscript has to be ready early. I've got to have blurbs early. We've got to get the cover right. I've got to write those hand-written notes to people." You feel the need to justify it. But at the same time, you don't have to lose sleep every night because you won the auction by going up ten or fifteen thousand dollars. I think auctions can be not horrible when you agree on the number beforehand. What I hate is feeling like the ego contest has begun and somebody thinks so-and-so across town has it and you're trying to guess who it is—or somebody inside the house, when there's a house bid situation. The bullshit competition drives me up the wall. Being in an auction and saying we think it's worth three hundred or we think it's worth eight hundred—I don't sweat that if we're making a decision beforehand. It's when you get into the middle of it and suddenly the book that you thought was a great two hundred thousand dollar book...You're paying four [$400,000]? Just because there are still four people in it? I mean, when an agent calls and says they have interest, that's fine and dandy. But it's not going to change my mind about whether I liked the book or not, and I don't want the publisher deciding because three other houses are in and "We should get in on that, too." So if you can make these decisions before the craziness starts, it's fine. It's when the craziness begins—
CHINSKI: The feeding frenzy.
But it seems like that's how it works now. You're getting that email from the agent right away.
GARGAGLIANO: Noooo.
CHINSKI: But don't you feel like you get that more and more?
GARGAGLIANO: I don't feel like it changes my mind, though.
CHINSKI: No, I just mean more as a strategy to get people to pay attention.
BOUDREAUX: I feel like, when you get a submission, you know that it's so easy to send that everybody on earth has it already. And it's twenty a day and there they are on your Sony Reader and the attention paid to things has diminished just by the ease with which everything gets slotted in and slotted out. And then the agent's like, "I've got interest! I've got interest!" Well, "I've got a ‘No!'" I can email fast, too! [Laughter.] Unfortunately, that's how it ends up working sometimes. "You've got to get back to me quickly!""Okay, well I guess I won't be deliberating over this very long. I've read ten pages and we can be done, then." If everybody just wants to speed it up that much.
CHINSKI: But I've heard so many agents say that it's becoming more and more difficult to sell a literary first novel that it almost seems like this is compensation for that. There's so much resistance now—everybody's trying to find a reason why they shouldn't buy something because it is so difficult. It seems like we get more emails now that say "There's a lot of interest" just to kind of built up that intensity from their side.
NASH: What I get to do in those situations is say, "Congratulations. I'm thrilled for the author. Next time." I just can't play at that level. That makes my life a lot easier. It's a much less complicated thing than what you guys have to go through in terms of evaluating the difference between two hundred [$200,000] and four hundred [$400,000]. That's one thing I don't ever have to worry about. But I really learned a lot from what you were saying about how when the money gets really big, you aren't accountable anymore. Not that you aren't accountable—but there's a lot of shared responsibility and the buck isn't stopping entirely with you. Whereas there's an in-between spot where it's large enough that you're exposed but not so large that anybody else is going to be wearing the flak jacket with you.
BOUDREAUX: The first book I ever preempted, I hadn't finished reading it. It had come in to another editor who gave it to me. So I was starting it late and I hadn't finished it and I went in to tell the publisher, "We've heard that somebody else is going to preempt." The publisher said, "Okay, go offer" several hundred thousand dollars. "Okay!" So I did, and we got it—what do you know?—and the next day the publisher asked, "So what happens at the end?" I still hadn't finished it! I was like, "They all...leave...and go home." I didn't know what happened! [Laughter.] That was kind of scary, and I did feel like "This one is all on me"—because not only had nobody else read the thing, but I wasn't even certain it would hold up. As I was editing it I was like, "I hope that's what happens at the end...." Otherwise the author's going to be like, "Really? Why would you suggest that at the end?" I'd have to be like, "I just think it's important that everything works out that way."
When you look at the industry, what are the biggest problems we face right now?
CHINSKI: I think they're all so obvious. Returns. Blogs.
GARGAGLIANO: And just finding readers.
CHINSKI: The end of cultural authority. That's something we talk about a lot at FSG. Reviews don't have the same impact that they used to. The one thing that really horrifies me and that seems to have happened within the last few years is that you can get a first novel on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a long review in The New Yorker, a big profile somewhere, and it still doesn't translate into sales. Whereas six years ago, or some mythical time not that long ago, that was the battle—to get all that attention—and if you got it, you didn't necessarily have a best-seller, but you knew that you would cross a certain threshold. Whereas now you can get all of that and still not see the sales. I think that phenomenon is about the loss of cultural authority. There's just so much information out there now that people don't know who to listen to, except their friends, to figure out what to read. And that's the question we wrestle with the most. I think publishers have to communicate more directly with readers—that's the big barrier we're all trying to figure out. How much to use our websites to sell directly and talk to our readers directly?
So what are you doing to try to do that? What are you experimenting with?
CHINSKI: I can think of one thing. I mean, it's a small thing, but we recently started the FSG Reading Series uptown at the Russian Samovar. It's amazing. It's actually turned into a kind of scene. The New York Observer and the New Yorker have written about it. And I mean "scene" in a good way. In all the ways that we were talking about before, what makes us most happy is when a book forges a community around itself. It's a small thing, but now if we can somehow bring that online, or expand it in some way, it will be a way for FSG as a name to mean something, which will mean that we have another way to bring our writers to readers. The names of publishers, notoriously, are not like "Sony" or other companies where the name means a whole lot to readers. It may mean something to reviewers or booksellers, but I think we all need to figure out ways to make our names mean something. That's another way to establish authority so that people become interested in the individual books. That's a big challenge, and there's no easy solution to it.
What else are you guys trying to do, beyond the hand-written notes and the bigmouth mailings? What are you lying awake at night thinking about doing for this novel you're publishing that doesn't seem to be going anywhere?
BOUDREAUX: I pray that the people in our new media department who are supposed to be figuring out this problem are staying up late at night. That's what I think about as I roll around at night. And they are always coming up with things that I hope will work.
CHINSKI: And now we have this amplification system, supposedly—the Internet—which is supposed to amplify our ability to create word-of-mouth. But I don't think anybody's quite figured out exactly how to do that—or at least how to make it translate directly into sales. We all can see, in certain cases, our books being talked about a lot online. But what does that mean in terms of sales?
NASH: In our case, we've never really relied much on cultural authority, although we've certainly used it here and there. But for the most part, to the extent that we've been successful, it's been through the things that you're asking about. I check our Web metrics several times a week, whether it's Quantcast, Alexa, or Compete. These are places for measuring traffic. I try to figure out what the traffic is and what the demographics are. So I'm doing a lot of stuff that would probably make you want to shoot yourself.
BOUDREAUX: I'm glad you're doing it, though, so I can read about it in this article. Then I can call somebody and say, "You should do that! That's brilliant!"
NASH: One of your new media people, Amy Baker, was briefly involved with Soft Skull back in the day. She played on our street hockey team that was known as the Soft Skull Sandernistas, which was named after my predecessor. [Laughter.] But seriously, as Eric says, the Internet is amplified word-of-mouth. The things that are happening online are amplifying a process that's already in place. I mean, the genius of Oprah has never been her ratings. Her ratings aren't that spectacular compared to a lot of other shows. It's that Oprah connects to her audience in an intimate way, as if she were one of eight women who have lunch together every Tuesday. And that intensity of relationship—plus the fact that it is able to occur on a reasonably broad scale—is her genius. So what you do is go looking around the world for people with a certain level of trust. Authority, in a certain sense, has been partially replaced by trust. Part of what you can call "trust" today is the remnants of authority. People "trust" the New York Times.
CHINSKI: And people trust their friends.
NASH: Exactly. People trust Liesl Schillinger. People trust Ed Champion. Or they hate them. And you're just trying to get your stuff to people who are trusted. In my case that involves doing it myself, in a lot of cases.
GARGAGLIANO: This is one of the things that I get most frustrated by, partly because I didn't care about book reviews when I wasn't in publishing. I would never read the New York Times Book Review. I just wanted to walk into a bookstore and find something. But people don't do that anymore. People aren't interested in the community of books. So it's finding the niche markets. I just published a book called The Wettest County in the World. It's a novel about the author's grandfather and granduncles, who ran a bootlegging ring during Prohibition. It's amazing. And we've gotten IndieBound, we've gotten lots of things for it, and it's gotten amazing reviews. But the sales aren't going to happen on that alone. So I've been mailing it to bloggers who have beer blogs and whiskey blogs, and bourbon drinkers, and distilleries. I'm trying to find the niche market. I think that's the way things are going. I think that kind of thinking is much more exciting—you're more likely to find the readers who are interested—but publishers aren't set up to find niche markets for every single book.
BOUDREAUX: That's the thing. Do you do the whiskey mailing and then the beer mailing and this mailing and that mailing? It seems like there aren't enough hours in the day and there isn't enough staff—the Amy Bakers of the world—to do that.
NASH: That's where the writer needs to come into it. And interns. That's one of the ways in which interns can be so valuable. That's great work for them to do—a Technorati blog search on whatever. It's not hugely difficult, and it's kind of interesting.
GARGAGLIANO: It can also be useful for books down the line.
CHINSKI: That raises an interesting thing for writers to consider. I mean, how many times have we all heard that a certain book is going to appeal to this audience, that audience, and everybody else in the world? You just know that it's not true. But if you can go really deep into one community, you might sell ten thousand copies of a first novel, which most first novels never sell—at least the ones that are supposedly going to appeal to everyone. I don't think novelists should spend too much time worrying about who their audience is, but it's something to consider. I just think that line—"This book is going to appeal to everybody because it's about love or family or whatever"—doesn't work. I think the author and the publisher need to think more specifically. If you could sell one book to everybody on two city blocks in New York, you'd probably be selling more copies of that book than we do of the ones we just send out into the world and hope are going to sell magically. But how do you reach everybody on those two city blocks in New York and get them to buy the book? That's the task, metaphorically, that so many of us are facing: how to get to them and make them believe us. Because at the end of the day we're companies, and all of those people online who are talking to each other aren't necessarily going to believe that we have their best interests at heart. They'll think we're advertising to them through other means. So we have to establish a certain amount of trust with readers, not just as companies but as people who also love books in the same way they do. Again, it's a small thing, but the idea behind the Samovar reading series—not that it's a totally new idea—is that the editors at FSG love books, and you guys love books, so let's get together. And it's not just about trying to sell our books to you.
NASH: One of the things that that accomplishes that may not be obvious from the get-go is transparency. You're putting yourself out in the world and exposing yourself in a way—making yourself vulnerable. I have never understood why the staffs of publishing houses are invisible to readers, who are ultimately the people who pay our salaries. I mean, my wife is a corporate lawyer, and her photo and bio are on her firm's website. Book publishers just refuse to allow their staff visibility to the world. If Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Whatever are willing to allow all the partners' and associates' photographs and bios to be seen by the world, what about publishing is so important that we can't be allowed to be seen? I know that part of it is that we don't want authors bugging us too much. But I think that's part of what the Samovar reading series accomplishes: a certain willingness to participate.
Just in the space of your careers so far, what has been the most destructive new thing that's come about in the industry?
NASH: It's technology. It's been both constructive and destructive at the same time.
CHINSKI: So do you think e-books have been both?
NASH: E-books are one of the last ways in which technology is playing itself out. One of the first ways was desktop publishing. Another way that's been more incremental is the ability of digital printing to be commensurate with offset printing and for various machines to flatten the economies of scale. But, yeah, the ability to satisfactorily download a book digitally is turning out to be one of the last things that technology is accomplishing. I guess the other thing is just the capacity of e-mail and the Web—the social Web, in particular—to flatten communication. And it's all simultaneously destructive and constructive. It's destroying cultural authority but it's enhancing one's ability to cost-effectively reach individuals who might have other kinds of cultural authority. It's lowering barriers to entry, which is constructive because new presses can come along. BookScan is based on technology and has constructive and destructive components. The kind of supply-chain inventory management that Baker & Taylor and Ingram are doing, where they can now say to us, "We only need two months' worth of inventory; we don't need four months of inventory," is destructive because my working capital needs go up by 20 percent on that one phenomenon alone, but it's good in that I can actually see Ingram's demand building and respond to it. If I see big Ingram demand in the month before I publish something, I can say to myself, "I'm going to print advance orders plus two thousand as opposed to advance orders plus five hundred." So it's fucking me and helping me at the same time.
CHINSKI: I agree with Richard. Obviously a lot of things are changing right now, and some of them make things a lot more difficult, but they also—and I don't mean to sound like a Pollyanna—offer some opportunities. I'm always really wary of the sky-is-falling thing, this idea that we're at the end right now.
GARGAGLIANO: We're just at a place where we have to reinvent ourselves, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet. People have started reading in this other way that I don't understand because I don't read that way. But it's our job to figure out how they're reading, and then to figure out how to deliver something they want to read.
CHINSKI: Are you reading on a Sony Reader?
GARGAGLIANO: Yes, and I love it. It's the best thing ever.
CHINSKI: I'm still adjusting to it. We just got them in the last few weeks. On one hand it's great. On the other hand, I still want to write in the margins and it's hard to go back and forth and figure out where you are in a manuscript. I actually physically find myself reaching to turn the page.
GARGAGLIANO: I do that all the time. It's really disturbing!
CHINSKI: Your brain gets tricked into thinking you're actually reading a page. But on the other hand, as I was saying, it's great, and we're seeing sales of books.... I mean, I saw something recently about the Kindle. People who have a Kindle are actually buying more books. So on one hand, it scares the shit out of me that people are reading on Kindles and Sony Readers. But on the other hand—
GARGAGLIANO: Why?
CHINSKI: For no reason other than that it's different.
GARGAGLIANO: I think it's so exciting.
CHINSKI: That's what I mean. It's also really exciting. It will bring a lot more people into reading. And this younger generation is so used to reading online that it doesn't really matter. It doesn't mean the death of literature.
BOUDREAUX: I was amazed at how quickly we all got used to the Sony Reader. It's still a little different from an actual book. But when I first got into publishing I remember reading a manuscript, instead of a finished book, and feeling like it seemed to lack a certain presentational authority. It took me a minute to take a manuscript seriously. It will be the same way with the Sony Reader. But, my God, we've all adapted in a period of months? Imagine the twenty-year-olds who are reading everything online all the time and switching back and forth among seven screens that are open all the time. The notion of not reading that way must seem odd to them.
GARGAGLIANO: I think that in several years the book object is going to be more beautiful and more precious.
BOUDREAUX: It's going to be like vinyl records.
GARGAGLIANO: Exactly.
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I feel the same way—that these changes are going to happen. But the thing I don't understand is why hardcover books still exist.
GARGAGLIANO: I don't understand it.
NASH: It's because of the library market.
GARGAGLIANO: I published a book this fall that we crashed into the schedule because it was shortlisted for the Booker. We did a hardcover just for the libraries and a trade paperback for everybody else.
NASH: I mean, you're right. I was being semi-glib but not entirely glib. The question is, "Why will the print book survive?"
No, I'm literally talking about the hardcover book. Right now, at this moment, why does it exist? I'm looking at a hardcover and a paperback side by side and asking what the consumer is getting for almost twice as much money. Two pieces of cardboard?
CHINSKI: Well, we get two shots to publish the book.
But do we really, with the way the accounts are ordering, or do we just say that?
CHINSKI: But there's still that idea. Also, there's still the hangover of thinking that critics won't pay attention to a paperback in the same way. I know that's not as true as it used to be, but—
NASH: The existence of the hardcover has to do with history. It has to do with certain structures that are in place that haven't been replaced—structures varying from the library market to perceptions about reviewers to perceptions about quality in the mind of the customer. It also has to do with customers wanting certain books at whatever price. They don't care whether it's fifteen dollars or twenty-five dollars—they just want it because of who it's written by. But that's not going to last.
CHINSKI: But here's an interesting case: Bolaño's 2666. We did the hardcover and a three-volume paperback edition in a slipcase. They're priced the same. Which do you think would be selling more? I guess because they're priced the same it's not quite a fair question, but people do seem to be gravitation toward the hardcover just because it's the more conventional format. The paperback is selling well too, but the hardcover seems to have some kind of recognition factor. So I don't think it's just publishers sticking their heads in the sand. It's also readers still thinking that that's the way they discover new books.
Even when they cost ten dollars more for no apparent value?
GARGAGLIANO: I wonder that too. We don't really do very much—
NASH: Value is created in the mind. A classic thing that happens in American retail capitalism is that people will buy the more expensive thing. It's been proven over and over again. If you're at Barneys and there's an eighty-dollar lampshade and a fifty-dollar lampshade, you buy the eighty-dollar lampshade because you think it's worth more. That is endemic in American retail capitalism. But I think the distressing thing in publishing is that we're not making more beautiful objects. I think that one of the things that electronic publishing will allow us to do is free the print object of its need to have a given exact unit cost that is our mass-market way of delivering the product at a given price. The download will allow us to generate volume, and then we can create this gorgeous, elaborate fetish object for which we can charge gloriously outrageous sums of money.
But who's going to be selling them if that happens? Look at what happened to the music business.
NASH: Precisely. Look at the Radiohead model. Radiohead has already done it. Eighty bucks for the limited edition but only ninety-nine cents for the download. That's the model. It's just a question of "How do we get there in a way that doesn't involve complete chaos?" But it seems like that's where we're going. And I think it will be customer-driven—we'll go there as fast as the customers will be willing to go there.
What are you guys seeing in the industry that you find encouraging?
NASH: Fan fiction.
Which is?
NASH: People so in love with a given story and set of characters, or a given world, that they are doing their own version of it. I just think that's spectacular. Not necessarily as writing, but as a cultural phenomenon.
Anybody else? Come on, there's got to be something that's encouraging.
GARGAGLIANO: This is not a good time to ask that question. [Laughter.]
CHINSKI: It's like what Richard was saying—some of these things that are scary are also encouraging. The Kindle and the Sony Reader are bringing people to books who might not have come to them otherwise. I mean, that's something.
NASH: Look at the thing Eric said about people who own a Kindle buying more books than they did before they had a Kindle.
CHINSKI: That's pretty encouraging.
BOUDREAUX: And beyond that, I had it in my head that Kindles and Sony Readers would exist in the way audio books did—that it wouldn't be exactly the same. There would be certain kinds of books that really lent themselves to that format in the same way it was for audio books where you had businessmen driving on business trips. You couldn't get a novel published by your own audio publisher—they weren't interested—but a certain kind of practical nonfiction flew off the shelves. But Edgar Sawtelle has been a huge seller on the Kindle, which is not at all the kind of book I would have thought would be selling well in that format. It's six hundred pages long—there's a good reason to put it on a Sony Reader instead of reading a hardcover—but I just wasn't expecting the number of downloads to be such a close ratio to what's selling in a bookstore. I thought we'd have to figure out what categories worked, and once again fiction would be the category that would be left out as everybody read self-help books or Freakonomics on their Kindle. And I find it encouraging that people are downloading this big fat debut novel.
Anything else?
NASH: The use of social media to talk about books: Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari. Reading books is a solitary activity, but books are also the richest kind of social glue, and the profusion of ways to be social with one another will be tremendously advantageous to books. The commonality that having read the same book introduces between two people is so much richer and more dynamic than the commonality of having watched the same TV show, for example.
It seems like agents lament the consolidation of the industry because it gives them less options. How do you guys feel about it?
BOUDREAUX: It doesn't seem to lessen their options when they submit to every single imprint in the house and then you're on the hot-button contest to see who reads it first.
NASH: I think it's kind of pointless to think about it. As individuals, there's sweet fuck-all we can do about it. With everything else we've talked about, human beings at our level can affect things. We can affect the outcome of a given book. We just cannot affect the outcome of a corporate merger.
BOUDREAUX: And for a group of people who've only been doing this for a decade, in which this has always been the case and it was already the death knell of publishing back when we were first getting into it and everybody lamented consolidation—
CHINSKI: When I saw The Last Days of Disco, it was heartbreaking. [Laughter.] That's when I realized what we've lost. As you were saying, it's hard to know because it's the world we live in. It seems like even within the force of consolidation, there are so many imprints blossoming within these places. I don't quite understand what the corporate thinking is behind that. But that's just because I'm not making the decisions, I'm sure.
BOUDREAUX: You've also got a group of people here who have ended up at certain kinds of imprints within those places. So we've all clearly struggled, those of us who are in the corporate world, to find a place that's least like a corporate structure. I mean, that's the great thing about Ecco. When Dan Halpern sold it to HarperCollins he had an agreement with Jane Friedman that basically said, "But we will never have to act like we are a part of corporate publishing. We will keep doing it exactly how we've been doing it." So you get to pretend you're this little thing attached to this big thing, which is how I imagine it being at Scribner and FSG. You get to have the benefits of the deep pockets, and somebody's figuring out the new media thing and revamping this site and that site, and you have the economies of scale of getting your shipping done or whatever, and you still get to sit there and work on your books. So we've also self-selected for a certain kind of publishing within corporate publishing.
And you really did, because you left Random House without having new a job lined up.
BOUDREAUX: I did. I thought I'd go see if anybody wanted me to come do fiction. Thank God Dan Halpern was out there. God bless him. Because it's true: Who doesn't want to do the small list inside the big house, which is just a different kind of experience? I mean, it seems the best way to make that deal with the devil. As you say, Richard, the conglomeration isn't going to go away.
CHINSKI: It doesn't actually mean that writers have less choice, I don't think. There are so many imprints within these companies. It's become an easy straw man to point the finger at. "Oh, these big corporate publishers that don't understand what books are." There are still a lot of editors working at imprints within these big corporations who care about books in the same way that somebody working at Scribner when it was independent cared about books. I think it's really easy, because there are so many frustrations that we all have as writers and editors and agents, to just blame it on some Corporate culture with a capital C. As Richard said, there are a lot of things that we can't control but there are also a lot of things that we can try to control, at least at a certain level. And that probably hasn't changed that much from fifty years ago.
BOUDREAUX: And certainly, the competition in-house is every bit as fierce as the competition out of house, when you and so-and-so from Simon & Schuster both have the book and there's a house bid.
GARGAGLIANO: The agent gets the same benefit of the imprints within the house riling each other up and competing against one another to put on the best show for the author, and the author gets the benefit of choosing between all of these different imprints. I don't think, for the author, it's a major difference. But I wasn't around when it wasn't like that.
NASH: I suspect that to the extent that consolidation has created problems in the industry, the problems are farther downstream than acquisitions. Retail consolidation is the real issue.
Speak to that. How do you feel about so much power being concentrated on Fifth Avenue and in Ann Arbor and Seattle?
NASH: It was all going to happen anyway. The book business was just later to the party, quite frankly, than the clothing business or the cereal business. The real estate was all the same. One of the reasons why we've become really dependent on social media is that it's a kind of hand-selling at a time when the 1,000 people who used to be able to hand-sell are now down to 150. And the capacity of the corporate retailers to hand-sell is either purchased or anecdotal. When I say anecdotal I mean it hasn't completely vanished. I can tell that the B&N in Union Square is putting Soft Skull books on the countertop that weren't paid to be put there. So there is anecdotal hand-selling going on. But you have a situation where the capacity of the retailer to sell a given book to a given, recognized individual has virtually disappeared—down to percentage points. It will work with a few titles—I'm sure you guys have all published books that have been made by independent retailers. But their ability to be a part of the social network of the community of books is gone and we have to find some other means of generating that word-of-mouth. Retailers just exist to shelve the books and make them visible in a given community. They're not selling them to the community.
CHINSKI: But don't you think they understand the crisis they're in, to a certain degree, too? That's why Barnes & Noble has B&N Recommends now, and Starbucks is getting involved, and everybody's trying to—
NASH: Yeah, you're right. I think they realize what they have wrought. Well, they do but they don't. Half the time they're trying to sell on price—they're doing inventory churn—and then the other half of the time they're trying to go intimate. I think they're kind of schizophrenic about it. I think that's part of the problem. I mean, a lot of the independents that went out of business deserved to go out of business. They weren't actually trying very hard to hand-sell. They were just taking the finite number of books that publishers could then publish and saying, "Okay, you pick from these five hundred books." But the great ones are the ones that we have with us right now—St. Mark's and Prairie Lights and the rest. They're doing a great job of being retailers. But you're exactly right about the chains. At times they are definitely trying to find that community-oriented approach.
CHINSKI: The way they'll host book clubs in the stores, for example. In the same way that people like to blame the corporate publishers, it's really easy to point your finger at the chains. I'm not saying they don't present a certain set of problems. But it's interesting that, in a way, they're wrestling with the same kind of issues that we're wrestling with in trying to find a way to interact more directly with their customers. It's a kind of funny crisis all around.
At the end of the day, what makes it all worthwhile?
CHINSKI: Pizza.
NASH: This roundtable.
BOUDREAUX: The glamour of this!
CHINSKI: Going home and editing for four hours.
That's funny. That was actually going to be my next question, but I was going to do it in the anonymous section at the end so you wouldn't have to lie about it. Seriously, though, what makes it worthwhile for you?
BOUDREAUX: Books mean enormous things to people. They are things that save people's lives, at times.
NASH: Even the lives of children!
BOUDREAUX: That's right! The lives of children! I don't think any children have ever lost their lives because of something an editor did, but children have most definitely had their lives improved by something that a writer, and an editor, put out there.
CHINSKI: We're doing it for the kids!
BOUDREAUX: Why don't we make that, "We're doing it for our children, and our children's children."
EDITORS ANONYMOUS
Later, after the pizza was gone and even the most constitutionally strong among us were getting a little punchy—and understandably so—the panel agreed to speak anonymously on a range of topics that would be awkward to discuss for attribution. As usual, a number of verbal tics have been altered in order to preserve anonymity.
Does it bother you that so much of your work has to be done on nights and weekends?
Sure, every once in a while it catches up with you. But you can't concentrate in the office so it's just the way it is. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that sometimes you don't feel resentful. I always have that in the summer because I find that authors all deliver at the beginning of the summer because they want to go on their summer vacations.
Yeah, it's always just before Christmas, just before New Year's, just before the Fourth of July. The book's might be three years late but they go and deliver it on July 3rd.
Publishers have to let you have some time out of the office. And I feel like that is increasingly looked on as this sort of three-martini-lunch thing—that the editor needs the occasional Tuesday to edit at home. You can power through an awful lot, but at a certain point there are too many manuscripts stacked up, and it's been going on for so many years, that you've got to be given some time to do it that isn't just every Saturday of your life.
Such a big part of the job is to pay attention to what the rest of the world is doing and what's being written everywhere else and what other people are interested in and what you yourself are interested in—because you take all of those obsessions and you find the books that you're passionate about on all of those topics—but I don't really have time to do that.
That's my biggest frustration: not having enough time to read published books.
And it's a great disservice to your own job not to ever be able to read anything for pleasure—and not to ever be able to read the other books your company is publishing—because you've got x number of submissions to read and your own new authors' backlists to read and what your house is doing that's working because you just need to understand what that thing is that so-and-so just published. About eight rungs down you get to read something just because it sounds good—something that you're not reading to learn something about your job.
What do agents do that drives you crazy?
Ask for ads.
Submit the next book when you haven't even published the first book and you don't even know how many you're printing.
Assume that just because one book did really well you have to pay for your previous success.
And with fiction, more and more, the success of one novel does not mean that the next novel is going to sell at the same level. And I don't think that a lot of agents have caught up with that fact.
"Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" I want to be like, "Have you prepared for your launch meeting yet? Have you written your tip sheets yet?" They don't realize that you may have something from the four other big agents. I'm being flip about it, but they do tend to forget that. Two days later it's "Have you read it?""No, I'm actually editing your author who's under contract."
There's also a tendency to misinterpret an early read for actual depth of publishing program behind that early read. Sure, being the first editor to get back to them on a novel may well mean a particular enthusiasm and a good match, but it also may not. So to require that everybody be in on day two, set up meetings on day three, and be ready to do the auction on day four? Is that all the thought that you want us to put into it?
And using the weekends and holidays as a tactic. I hate the Friday e-mail saying, "Just in time for you to enjoy this weekend..." Or over Labor Day weekend! It's like the new destination wedding. You know, in the same way that you hate your friends who picked the three-day weekend to get married on so you can all go to Hawaii. I'm like, "Really? You had to save this for Labor Day weekend? I had all summer when I didn't have shit to read."
What are the biggest mistakes that writers can make in dealing with their editor or agent?
I think the bigger problem is dealing with their publicist. You have to be very nice to your publicist. You should send them flowers.
I had an author who used to leave messages at four in the morning saying that she didn't want us to publish her book anymore. She wanted us to take them off the shelves! That was fun.
Despite the fact that there is a real personal connection, authors should realize that we're not their therapists, we're not their best friends in the world, etcetera. I can fix your book but I can't fix your whole life.
What about when an author calls because there aren't enough hangers in his hotel closet? [Laughter.] That's happened!
Tell me about a few up-and-coming agents who you feel are great for fiction or memoir.
I think Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord is really smart. He's both a no bullshit guy and a genuinely nice guy. That may sound naïve, but it really does matter.
I think Maria Massie is fabulous. If I could publish the writers of only one agent, it would be Maria.
Julie Barer. I did a book with her and she went about getting blurbs like nobody I've ever seen. She brought them to me, every day, like a cat bringing me a bird. Eight in a row. I've never had an agent who went to bat that much and called in that many favors. It was amazing.
There's also Anna Stein, who's wonderful. She's got a very cosmopolitan worldview and she's also got a taste for a certain kind of political nonfiction that is quite interesting. The first book I got from her was a left-wing case for free trade, which you don't necessarily expect from Ira Silverberg's former foreign rights person.
You know who else is good? Robert Guinsler. He's really smart and really enthusiastic about his books. He has a lot of smart projects.
What kind of information will you withhold from your authors?
I never tell them when my bosses don't love their book. Or when it's been a battle to get them attention on the list.
I will hold back particularly bad feedback. If it's a novel, not everybody is going to agree on it. I've never had such a tsunami of bad feedback that I thought they really needed to hear it.
Do you send them all of their bad reviews?
I leave that up to the author.
I've started telling debut authors, "A lot of writers who have been through this don't want to see the bad reviews. Will you give me permission to not send you the bad reviews?"
When it comes to sales figures, I give them the information. I mean, I don't go out of my way to do it if the news is not good. If it's great news and I can say, "We did this and we did that and we did this," I give it to them all the time. But I don't go out of my way to say, "You're holding steady. Nothing's happening."
What other editors or houses are you impressed with lately?
I think Penguin Press is doing a great job. You look at their list and there's a consistency to it that is really amazing. I don't know how the finances look. But just as books, they're incredibly consistent.
I think Bob Miller and Jon Karp are doing a great job.
I've been impressed with a house called Two Dollar Radio. The reason I'm impressed is their own tagline: "They make more noise than a two-dollar radio."
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Lynn Nesbit
On a recent afternoon, I walked up Park Avenue from my office in downtown Manhattan to interview the literary agent Lynn Nesbit. The agency she founded almost twenty years ago, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, occupies an entire floor of a large office building on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street. In the elevator, I couldn't help but think of the celebrated authors who must have taken the same ride to visit Nesbit, and my mind wandered to some of their memorable opening lines: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" (Hunter S. Thompson). "That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze" (Tom Wolfe). "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends" (Joan Didion).
For Nesbit, the beginnings of things were no less evocative. Raised in the small town of Dundee, Illinois, and educated at Northwestern, the Sorbonne, and in the Radcliffe Publishing Program, she came to New York in the fall of 1960 and took the first job she was offered. The position, as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal, was unsatisfying. She badgered Sterling Lord—even then a legendary book agent—for a job as his assistant, but he had nothing permanent to offer. So, in her spare time, she read manuscripts for him in French. Eventually a position opened up, and Nesbit leapt at the opportunity, despite a salary cut of ten dollars a week.
She worked her way up to being an agent in Lord's office; her early clients included Donald Barthelme, Michael Crichton, Frederick Exley, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. In 1965, she left Sterling Lord to start the agency that would become International Creative Management; in 1989 she joined forces with Mort Janklow to found another new agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, which remains one of the most successful in New York. Over the years she has guided the careers of luminaries such as John Cheever, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal; younger writers such as Ann Beattie, Stephen L. Carter, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Price, and Scott Spencer; commercial superstars such as Robin Cook, Richard Preston, and Anne Rice; and nonfiction heavyweights such as Robert Caro, Jimmy Carter, Jonathan Kozol, and Gay Talese.
In this, the first in a new series of interviews with veteran book editors, publishers, and agents, Nesbit talks about her life, her career, and her authors, reflecting on the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today's publishing world.
Why don't you start by telling me a little about your background. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Illinois, in a town thirty-five miles northwest of Chicago called Dundee.
And you went to Northwestern?
I
went to Northwestern because I wanted to be a drama major. But then I
quickly learned, once I was involved in it, that I didn't want to do
it. It was such a serious professional school. So I switched my major
from theater to oral interpretation of literature. You'd do chamber
theater, for example. You'd take Don Quixote and present it
as a chamber theater piece. I was in a production and I played all of
the women roles. Of course they were all variations on Dulcinea or his
fantasy. It was an extremely good way to learn about the construction
of a narrative. Because when you're breaking it apart, often you will
characterize or have an actor play the narrator's role, so you learn a
lot about voice.
What brought you to New York?
I always wanted to come to New York. When I was a child I used to listen to Grand Central Station—"Crossroads
of a million private lives"—and think, "What could be more exciting
than New York?" I was wandering through the English department my
senior year at Northwestern and saw something about the Radcliffe
Publishing Program. I thought, "Hmmm, I want to come to New York, I
love to read books, this sounds like it's for me."
How did you get started in the industry?
At
the Radcliffe program, they told you to take the first job you were
offered because there were no jobs in publishing. They've been saying
that for forty, fifty years. Sterling Lord was the agent who came to
speak to the students, and I thought—I don't know why, I've thought
about this over the years—but I thought, "Agent, that's what I want to
do." But Sterling said he had nothing to offer. So I took the first job
I got, which was as an editorial apprentice at Ladies' Home Journal.
And I hated it. It just wasn't for me. So I kept hounding Sterling. And
I read French quite well then. He was representing a couple of people
who wrote in French, Tereska Torres and Juan Goytisolo. So I would read
the books and write readers reports on them. And I hounded him. After
three months at Ladies' Home Journal he offered me a job, for
which I took a ten-dollars-a-week salary cut. I became his
receptionist, his typist, his file clerk, and I had to weigh the
packages and stamp all the letters.
Was Sterling Lord your primary mentor in the industry?
Sterling
wasn't very interested in fiction, which helped me. He was immediately
turning some things over to me. After I'd been working as his assistant
for a month or two, he went to the Staten Island Writers Conference and
came back and just threw these stories down on my desk. He said to read
them and write to any of the writers I liked. One of the stories was
"The Big Broadcast of 1938" by Donald Barthelme. And I read it and
thought, "This is extraordinary." So I wrote, Dear Mr. Barthelme, I'm
an agent and I just read this story and I think it's extraordinary and
blah blah blah and I'd love to represent you. And he wrote back and
said, "Fine." Now I don't think that happens today. There would be
thirty agents crawling all over that story today—there are more agents
than writers. And there are more writers than readers. I'm convinced of that.
Was Donald Barthelme your first big client?
Donald was very important because I sold the first story of his that I represented to the New Yorker.
And he went on and became such an important force in the short story.
But my first really big client—big in every way—was Tom Wolfe.
How did you meet him?
I pestered Byron Dobell at Esquire.
I told him I wanted to meet Tom Wolfe. This was probably 1963. He'd
published "Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," the piece,
in Esquire, and every other agent was after him too. I still
ask him, to this day, why he signed with me. He says it's because I'm
the only one who suggested he do a book, which is hard for me to
imagine, but that's what he says. He was older than I was, and already
a big deal, and I was just this kid.
The other big writer that I got young was Michael Crichton. I left Sterling Lord in, I think, 1965, to start a literary department for Marvin Josephson. It was called Marvin Josephson Associates. The head of his television department was a man named Ralph Mann, and he had a friend who had been a television agent at the William Morris office, whose daughter was Michael's first wife. This man was determined to find Michael the biggest agent there was. Of course he knew everyone. So Michael was interviewing all these people and he interviewed me, too. He was in medical school then and he had published one of his paperback John Lange thrillers, and he only had one other contract. So he came back for a second meeting and said—and this I remember very well—he said, "Let's grow up in the business together." So that was great.
Who was Marvin Josephson?
He
was a very mild-mannered, shy, rather diffident television agent. He
went around and bought these other agencies. He bought CMA, Monica
McCall, Ashley-Famous. And this became ICM, this big corporate
behemoth. He was never really an agent; he was a deal-maker, a buying
agency.
And when you went there, you were the head of the agency right away?
I
started the literary department for them at age twenty-five. They
didn't have one. I went there and I was this kid. I was really young. I
got there because I was dating an agent who worked for Marvin who said,
"You should hire Lynn Nesbit." That's how I got there.
Tell me about some of the big personalities from those days in the book world.
Well, there were a lot of them. Bob Gottlieb was a genius.
From your perspective as an agent, what is his genius?
In
the first place, he, like Michael Korda, who is my client actually,
could read an eight-hundred-page manuscript in a night and come back to
you the next day and give you a perfect analysis. Also, Bob never let a
manuscript lay around. You would never hear from him, "Oh, I have seven
manuscripts on my desk, I can't get to yours until a month from now."
Bob also has such an incredibly big personality. And I always said that
Bob has a big ego, but he can lend it to his writers, so they can share
it. Bob Caro is one of my clients, and it's written into his contract
that he has to have Bob as his editor.
A
lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the
years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that—from the small
independent shops to the corporatization of it all.
I
say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You
couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is
very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What
was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People
began to worry about it.
The first novel is the easiest to sell. But if it doesn't do well, you're up a creek. You have to reposition the author...because the publisher doesn't want to take another bath.
Tell me about some more of the big characters.
We
just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have.
And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff,
Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more
colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion,
they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He
cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a
madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I
mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric
than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife
and the child. It was just different then.
So you miss the personalities
Yes.
I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed
the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort
of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's
now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an
agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these
drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One
night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up
Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget
that. There was just more of a sense of fun.
So why was that lost?
It's the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn't attract eccentrics anymore.
Where are the eccentrics going?
The movie business. [Laughs.]
When did you start to represent Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne?
My
daughter is thirty-seven and John told this story—it's still difficult
for me to talk about John—he told this story himself. He said,
"Remember what I said to you when we were talking about you
representing me?" I said, "No, I have no memory." He said, "Don't you
remember when I said, 'What if you were to have a child?' Nobody would dare
ask that question of a woman today! You would be stigmatized!" So I've
represented him since before my first child, and she's thirty-seven.
At that point were you already representing Joan?
No. I didn't represent Joan until the book After Henry,
when I came here. It's been a long time now, about eighteen years. They
were very good friends of mine. I knew Joan very well. She was
represented by Lois Wallace. Well, first Helen Strauss at the William
Morris Agency, and then she was inherited by Lois, and then she came to
me. It's been a long time now, but not back into the dark ages like it
was with John.
Were you surprised by the phenomenal commercial success of The Year of Magical Thinking?
Yes. So was the publisher. The first printing was supposedly thirty-five thousand copies, then the Times
magazine piece came out and they upped it to fifty thousand, then if
you look at later editions and the number of printings.… It obviously
touched a chord in so many people—young, old, people who hadn't even
had anyone die. I think the honesty of her voice, the way she directly
addressed the reader, without any sentimentality, was so moving.
How did you meet Hunter S. Thompson?
I
don't know how Hunter came to me. I can't remember the sequence. I
don't know who would have suggested it. Hunter was such a
larger-than-life character. I always said that he was the one writer
who always tried to say, "Oh, that didn't really happen"—talking about
his escapades—but unlike most writers, they probably did
happen. With most writers it's the opposite. He liked to go to these
very chic restaurants in New York. I can remember taking him to the
Carlyle and he'd be snorting cocaine right off his watch. He'd order
six bottles of beer, two margaritas, and some salad. But the funny
thing is, often he wouldn't even touch the stuff. Lunch would go on for
hour after hour and he really wouldn't be drinking all that much during
that time.
I read somewhere that you represented Fred Exley—and you sold A Fan's Notes?
That
was when I was a kid too. That was very early. I don't remember the
date, but that was when I was still at Sterling Lord, I think.
Do you remember how you met him? Were you close?
Oh,
yes. I had an incredible correspondence with him. Fred was a terrible
alcoholic and a tortured soul. Even more with Fred than with Hunter,
there was a very, very tender part of him. Very sweet. Fred showed it
more than Hunter did. I think that they couldn't deal with their
vulnerability, therefore they drank. Or in Hunter's case, he drank and
did drugs and everything else. They just couldn't cope with it. A Fan's Notes
got tons of rejections and finally I sold it to David Segal, who was
great. David was an eccentric. We need more people like him. He started
his career at New American Library, which was a rather commercial
imprint. But David had such a passion for literature and good writing.
For instance, he picked up Cynthia Ozick when no one else did. And
Fred. And Bill Gass.
You represent so many of the original New Journalists. What was it like to be at the center of a movement like that?
When I first represented Tom Wolfe, I was younger than Tom. I was a
kid. And when I went to sell Tom's first book, his editor, Clay Felker,
was the most important magazine editor in New York. I sent Tom's book
out for auction. Viking, with whom Clay had an arrangement as sort of
editor at large, brought Tom in for a meeting with Tom Guinzburg. But
on the auction day, Viking didn't bid. So I thought that was curious.
But they didn't, and the book went to FSG.
A few days later I went to this big literary party at Rust Hills's. I will never forget walking in. It was jammed with every writer and editor in New York. Clay was then dating Gloria Steinem, and Clay walked right over to me—this is like two days after the Tom thing—and he said, "You fucking cunt." I thought, "Oh my God!" I saw Tim Seldes coming up, so I said, "Tim, do you know Clay Felker?" And I walked away.
So what happened—the reason Clay was so furious—was that he thought he could deliver Tom Wolfe to Tom Guinzburg without anyone else looking at it. So of course he got mad at me instead of Tom. He was furious! Tom Guinzburg was furious too.
Now I'm going to skip forward many, many years. It's the publication party for Barbara Goldsmith's book Little Gloria…Happy at Last. It's a dinner at Phyllis Wagner's house. There are fourteen people invited. When she tells me the names, one of them is Clay Felker. And I said, "You know, he and I haven't spoken in years." And she said, "I think he thinks it's time to make up." So I go to the party and he comes over to me for the first time and says, "I'm really sorry about that. It wasn't your fault. It was that fucking Tom Guinzburg!"
But Clay's hatred of me got me a lot of good clients. Because around New York magazine he would scream that I was the toughest, bitchiest agent in town.
And it helps to have a little edge to your reputation?
Of course it does.
Why did you eventually decide to leave ICM and
start Janklow & Nesbit? Was the decision affected at all by how the
publishers were doing that—combining forces and becoming conglomerates?
No.
My decision to leave ICM was more because I wanted to become an equity
partner. I didn't want to just work for a big organization as a
salaried employee. That's pretty much what drove it. And I'd probably
been there long enough, and it was getting very big. I like the way we
can focus more here. I have much more time to focus on the clients here
because we have such a strong back office. It frees me to do more
representation, not to worry about things.
Looking back, what would you say were some of the crucial turning points in your career?
Going to Marvin Josephson was a big turning point—getting to start a literary division. And then I got Charlie Portis and True Grit.
That was a big deal. I had him from the beginning too. Tom [Wolfe] was
a big thing. He was a big deal before I signed him. Michael [Crichton]
wasn't. Victor Navasky was my first client. He was very helpful in
introducing me to people in New York. We used to have this thing at the
Algonquin, the round table—Victor tried to resuscitate the Algonquin
round table. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I used to go, Kurt Vonnegut,
Bud Trillin, Marvin Kitman, Knox Burger. People would come and go. We'd
have it like once a week. This was in 1961, when Victor was starting Monocle and signing a lot of good people on.
Donald Barthelme was a big turning point. Donald was the one who introduced me to William Gass. That's another book that was turned down everywhere and David Segal signed it, Omensetter's Luck. That was a huge literary event. David was crucial.
I never thought, "Oh, here's an obstacle." I didn't think about building a career. It just sort of evolved. James Mills became a client. He wrote Panic in Needle Park. That was a big book. That was when I was at ICM. And Joan and John wrote the screenplay. That might be how I met John, by representing Jim Mills.
When did you meet Jimmy Carter?
I
met him when I was at ICM with Marvin Josephson. He was just leaving
the White House and Marvin and I went to the oval office to meet with
him. I said to him, "You know, I'm one of the few Protestants in New
York publishing." And I think he liked that. So he signed with us and
Marvin and I divided the selling of the presidential memoir. After
that, he began to write more and I completely took him over, and then
he came with me here.
How do you see your principal roles and responsibilities as an agent? Have they changed over time?
You
are part of a writer's support system—a very important part. The role
of the agent is more important today than it was when I was starting
out. Because the publishing world is so corporate, and editors move
around so much, you are increasingly the only fixed point for the
writer. That's one way it's changed. Another thing that I notice here,
with younger agents like Tina and Eric, is that they do a lot of
editing, and we didn't do that when we were young. I think it's partly
because of the editors. There is such pressure on editors to come in
with something that's almost ready to go that the agents are assuming
part of what the editors used to do.
When did you start to recognize that as a phenomenon?
Probably just in the last eighteen years, or ten years.
Did you ever edit?
Not to the extent that they do.
What is your editorial process like? Will you give notes?
Oh,
yes. For example, Andy Greer is a young new client of mine. I've read
the draft of his new novel, which is coming out next spring, five
times. That doesn't often happen, but with Andy it did. It was
fascinating because I kept seeing how he kept enhancing and changing
it.
What kind of specific thoughts would you give?
Just sort of general thoughts. Is this character really working here, or what about this scene.
But what you see with younger agents is more getting in there with a pencil and editing?
Especially on proposals.
What are the implications of that?
I
think the implications are that editors need to see something very
polished because everyone is so nervous. Books are an endangered
species, especially fiction. I do think that younger agents work more
on the nonfiction proposals, with extensive notes, before they go out.
But with fiction, everyone is so nervous about it.
What do you mean exactly by "nervous"?
Nervous
that fiction is very difficult to sell. An editor wants to see
something that's more near completion, that the idea or the thrust
behind a novel is more fully realized. Twenty-five years ago an editor
would say, "Oh, this has promise," and sign it up. Today, editors want
to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.
And this is because of corporate pressures? Profit pressures?
Profit
pressures. You must know that fiction is very hard to sell. Today it's
almost that fiction needs to seem like it's going to be an event. It
almost has to open like a movie, on the commercial side, or else the
editor has to be convinced its going to get such praise, such positive
literary acclaim, that even if it doesn't sell a lot you're launching a
real voice.
Everybody talks
about how the model for a writer's career has changed. You just talked
about a book opening like a movie. There's this blockbuster mentality,
especially for debut novels, with astronomical advances and very high
sales expectations. How do you feel about that in relation to writers
and their careers over the long haul?
Well, if
it works, it's fine.… If they spend a lot and the book works, then
everyone's happy and your career is launched. If they spend a lot and
the book doesn't work, then it's a problem. Because as you know,
everyone can see the numbers today. There is no fudging. And that's
because of the chains. There are two or three big outlets. It used to
be that we couldn't sell as many copies per book. We could argue that
this is very good, this new chain system, because you can sell more
copies.
Tell me how you feel about these changes, the blockbuster mentality.
I
think it's kind of unhealthy. Because a movie is a movie, but when
you're building a writer's career…. As I said, if it works, it's great.
If it doesn't, I think it's a huge black spot on that writer's career.
Everybody knows what's gone on. In the old days, we could fudge it a
bit better. But today everybody knows if a book's been a success or a
failure. There's no fudging. The problem is not the first book. It's
the second. At least nobody asks me that question anymore, "How hard is it to sell a first novel?" The first novel is the easiest
to sell. But if it doesn't do well, you're up a creek. You have to
reposition the author, probably move them to a new house, because the
publisher doesn't want to take another bath. So you sell it to a new
house and say X overpaid and maybe they didn't do as good of a job as
they should have, and the author probably understands that he probably
has to take less money.
If you were a first-time writer and you were offered a big advance, would you be wary of it?
I
think I would probably take it. There are very few who could resist it.
Sometimes an author—and it's happened here at the agency—they'll take a
somewhat smaller advance because they prefer the editor or the house or
whatever. But it's never that much less. It's not a hundred thousand
dollars less. Maybe it's twenty thousand dollars less. But you never
know what will happen. The Elizabeth Kostova book worked. I mean, I
don't think that's literature. It's sort of what we call, you've heard
this term, faux literature. But it sold. Can we think of a book that was a real bomb?
It can be devastating to an author's career.
Well, not devastating, but not hopeful. Let's put it that way.
In terms of the book industry itself, what would you say are the most troubling or frustrating changes today?
What
worries me is that there aren't as many younger people who want to
become editors as there used to be. Because at a certain point they get
frustrated. There's not enough money to make the job palatable, and
they don't have enough freedom. So they feel that they have this
corporate bureaucracy imposed on them and yet they're not making a
decent enough salary. What I see is this flow of young editors becoming
agents. There are hundreds of agents. I can't believe how many there
are. When I was starting out, there were agents, but not at the number
there are now. Because today they can operate out of their apartments
with a telephone. Or they think they can. I can't imagine that because
in an agency you do need a big support staff of people who handle the
foreign rights, the first serial, the permissions. We have two lawyers
on staff who go over the contracts. So I can't imagine operating that
way.
What other changes are you seeing?
I
said this earlier as sort of a joke, but I'm beginning to think there
are more writers than readers. I get these e-mails pouring in from
people who want to write their life stories. It's because of the
memoir. Everybody thinks they have a story. I also feel there are fewer
and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet
who have time to read. They all say, "I'd love to read, but I'm just
too busy." What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there
is a lot of that going on—but they aren't reading books. That
phenomenon, to me, is not a product of the industry, it's a product of
how our culture is changing. People's attention spans are getting
shorter and shorter. And everybody has their specialty. I don't ever
look at blogs or Web sites because I would never get anything done. I'm
tempted to because I hear about these great things.
What
does that mean for the future of books and reading? A lot of people
seem to think an iPod-like device will come along for books.…
Great.
That would be terrific. I have no problem with that. The more forms in
which people can read intellectual content, the better. I don't care if
they read it in a real book or on an iPod. If they're more likely to
read it on some device, great. I have no fear about that. I have no
idea why people do. It's the content that matters, the intellectual
content. As long as we can keep it copyrighted. I also look forward to
books on demand. Jason Epstein has been working on this machine for
years, and he tells me that other people have been trying to do it too.
The modes of distribution are so antiquated.
Epstein
also seems to think that publishers are getting too big and will
eventually collapse from their own bigness and fracture into smaller
shops.
Like what's happened in
Hollywood. I think it will happen. I think it's happening now, with all
these imprints. There are so many imprints. And once they get the
distribution figured out…. If these machines really do become
effective, and there are more efficient ways of distributing books,
then I think there will be more and more independent producers. And
independent producers use a distribution outlet. So the publishers will
be more like distributors. I think it could happen. I don't know
because this business is so primitive—the publishing business—so
unsophisticated. It takes so many years to make a change here that I
don't think it's ten years away.
I'm always thinking about this issue of
distribution—and returns, which is this convention that came about in
the Depression that allows bookstores to return unsold books for full
credit. It's very complex, very fraught, and it's a huge problem. But
nobody really talks about changing it because it would scare
booksellers.
I think the only way to
solve the problem is these machines, books on demand. Then we won't
have to have returns. We'd have a storefront with a display of books,
and you'd go in and print out the book you want.
But what would that mean for booksellers, and for the aesthetics of being a book lover?
I'm
right next to Borders. To go in there is such a nightmare. I love to go
in and browse up near my country house in Millerton, New York. We have
quite a good bookstore, an old-fashioned one. But even with these
machines, they'll still probably display books. There will probably be
some stores where people can go in and browse. I think it's going to
hurt the chains more than anyone. Or maybe it won't. Maybe Barnes &
Noble will get this machine. If there were print on demand, maybe some
independent stores would come back. I mean, people want to go in and
physically pick up a book, and it's hard at a big chain store. It's so
big and the sales clerks don't want to help you.
What effect has the decline of independent booksellers and independent publishers had on books in this country?
I'm
not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg. Of course Barnes
& Noble and Borders—the chains—helped kill the independent
bookseller. But on the other hand, there are so many stores available
to people—in shopping malls, in places that probably didn't have a
decent independent bookstore. So, in a sense, we can say the chains
have helped the book business. They certainly have been able sell a lot
more copies. The blockbuster books sell commensurately much more than
they did thirty years ago.
I
don't think that many people have a real sense of what agents do all
day. Obviously all days are different, but walk me through a typical
day.
You spend most days divided between things.
You're reading the final draft, talking to the editor and to the
writer. I'm having dinner tonight with Jayne Anne Phillips, who just
delivered the final draft of her new novel. I read about five drafts of
this one, too. And I was talking to her editor, Ann Close, yesterday.
Questions like, "When are we going to publish this?" The question of
course this year is the election, which is not always the case. Ann is
sort of pushing for fall of '08, and everyone is sort of nervous about
it, but on the other hand, is the election really going to affect a
novel? Maybe it's a good time to publish them, Jayne Anne's included.
You have all these questions. Then you have the question of the cover.
We often have to go through many sketches before we get a cover. We
also have to send the books out for first serial, which is right at the
time when we get the manuscript in. And then we start thinking about
foreign rights, and we try to submit a manuscript to the U.K., because
the U.K. edition should come out simultaneously. So we hope that the
U.S. pub date isn't so close that we can't have our best shot at
getting a U.K. deal. And then in some cases there's a question of movie
rights. In most cases with literary fiction you want to wait until
there's some buzz.
So you spend your day deeply involved...
Yes. Deeply involved in all the minutiae—it's important minutiae—of the print runs, the jackets, the timing
of the pub date, first serial, foreign rights. And then, if you've
represented an author for a number of years, you have their backlist.
Someone wants to make a movie out of Ann Beattie's "The Burning House."
So you're dealing with that.
Say
you have a novel from a new writer. How do you typically go about
selling it? Do you pick up the phone and call one person, or five
people, or ten people?
If it's of
literary quality but I don't think it's going to be a megabuck sale, I
probably submit it to the key editors who I think would respond to it
at maybe a half-dozen houses.
How do you make those decisions—about which editors you send it to?
It's
part of my job to know editors, to know what they respond to and what
they like. I just intuitively know that from working over the years.
Are you ever consciously trying to match dispositions or personalities between a new author and an editor?
That wouldn't be my primary concern, but I think of that as a secondary problem. Will this person really mesh with so-and-so?
What's your style when you have several publishers interested in a project?
I
would want the author to meet the editors, and probably the publicists,
and maybe the marketing people. Then we would make a decision together,
or the author may have strong feelings about who he or she wants to be
with. I think you have to get a feel for it.
Do you know how many new clients you take on in, say, a year?
I
really don't, because sometimes I'll take on an odd project. I took on
Sherry Lansing's book. I mean that's a one-off. Or perhaps she'll do
another book. That can happen. Right now I have two new authors I'm
ready to go out with pretty soon. I don't know how many I take on.
How are new clients finding their way to you at this point?
They
come in recommended. A client of mine will recommend them to me. A lot
of my writers teach, like Deborah Eisenberg, Ann Beattie, Roxana
Robinson, André Aciman—a lot of them. So they'll recommend someone and
often I'll give them to some younger agent here. I mean, Vikram
[Chandra] came to me through Barthelme and I gave him to Eric. And
Edward P. Jones came to me and I gave him to Eric.
Tell me about some of that, about some of the mentoring you're done over the years.
I hired Binky [Urban] and Esther [Newberg] and trained them.
But what does that amount to?
They weren't agents. They were working in other jobs. Esther had been in politics, Binky had been working at New York
magazine. I hired them when I was at ICM, and they would tell you I
trained them. I hired Suzanne Glück and trained her. John Sterling
worked for me at one time at ICM as an agent.
What do you look for in an agent?
Enthusiasm,
energy, commitment, and taste. Eric and Tina are probably the two
stars. Do you know Tina? She was with my daughter in graduate school at
Yale. Tina was a few years older. Priscilla called me and said "Mom,
you've got to hire this woman." Mort and I looked at her resumé and
said, "This is amazing." And Eric should be an editor! He was at Norton.
Now
put yourself in an author's shoes, an author who finds herself in a
situation where she's lucky enough to have her choice between a few
different agents who want her. What are the factors you would use to
make the decision?
I think a lot of
it is chemistry between the two people. I would also want to know a lot
about how the office works, how much of a support system there is. I
don't want to just sing our own praises, but I think our agency offers
that more than any other agency because we are completely book
oriented. There is not another book agency in New York that has two
lawyers and a paralegal devoted to our authors and their contracts. We
have four people in foreign rights. I would want to know, "How does
this agency work?"
What other factors?
I
would obviously want to know the agent's reaction to my work. I think
it's important to feel out the level of commitment they have. Unlike
twenty or thirty years ago, the agents now—at least here—are not going
to take you on unless they're going to go gung ho. Because they know
how tough the market is. They're not going to speculate.
What about in the industry at large?
I
don't know. I can't speak to that. But I have a feeling that some of
these more independent agents who are just starting out will take more
people because they need it more.
page_5:
What can a writer starting out today do to put himself in a position to find an agent?
They can send stories to the Paris Review, Conjunctions…there
are so many places. If you're writing short fiction, once you have two
or three short stories in those magazines, and you're working on a
novel, then agents begin to wake up and say, "We'd like to see this."
So they have an entrée right there from the quarterly world. And I
think everyone is desperate to find a good novel. We are more desperate than ever.
Do you feel a sense of competition with other agents and agencies?
Well,
yes. I think all agents feel some sense of competition. As publishers
do. If we didn't, I think we'd be very lazy and lax in our jobs. I
think everyone feels they have to be on their mark today. You can't
ever get complacent. You can't ever say, "Well, I've got enough clients
and they're all wonderful and they love me." They could march off the
next day. One doesn't know. It's like a marriage. Friendships break up.
It's personalities. And they're professional and personal. The thing
about our business is it interweaves the professional and the personal
life. That's the way in which it is incredibly different than other
businesses.
What is the single biggest problem with the book world today?
Distribution.
Especially for smaller books. Because the bookstores won't take a
chance. And if a writer has a not-so-rosy track record, then they won't
order more and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, if the book
happens to get good reviews, you're caught out of print and have to
reprint and maybe the books don't get to the stores fast enough. And
distribution is a problem on the other end, too, with books that are
overprinted, books that may get on the best-seller list. It may look
good to the outside world, but the returns may negate the rosy picture.
One
of your agents here, Eric Simonoff, has sold a novel by James Frey to
HarperCollins. Tell me about that decision, the decision to represent
him. Is that something you sign off on?
I
don't know anything about it. I haven't read the book. Eric can do
anything he wants. He's codirector of the agency. Tina and Eric are
very important forces in this agency. I don't mind it anyway. Get over
it; it's fiction.
But tell me how you feel about him, about Frey?
I
have no feeling. I haven't read the novel. But Eric says it's
brilliant. And he wasn't going to take him on until he read the novel.
I didn't want to meet with him early on. It's very interesting because
Nan [Talese] backed him so much and Gay was so opposed to him. But Gay
is a consummate journalist, and this memoir thing is another thing.
Memoir involves such an unreliable narrator. And of course James Frey
got into problems because he kept defending himself. But do I think
everything in A Fan's Notes happened? No.
Nor A Moveable Feast. Actually one of your clients, Nancy Milford, wrote a piece about this in the Washington Post during the Frey thing, which I thought nailed it. But tell me how you feel about this move toward nonfiction and memoir.
I
think it's unfortunate. I think it's mirrored in every part of our
culture. Look at the reality programming on television—people want to
know the truth, they want to identify. This memoir craze has eaten away
at fiction. A lot of people will read memoirs but they won't read a
novel.
What do you read for pleasure?
I mix it up. I try to read books that are current that I don't represent. For example, I read Eat, Pray, Love. I read Larry Wright's book [The Looming Tower].
When I travel, I read books about where I'm going, or maybe a piece of
fiction. I read Joseph Roth's Berlin diaries when I went to Berlin. But
I have to read so many manuscripts that I have to squeeze them in.
Who
are some of your favorite editors to work with today? Who is doing
interesting things, who is effective in how they're publishing, who are
you admiring?
I like a lot of
people. They all bring different things to the table. I like Jonathan
Galassi [at Farrar, Straus and Giroux] as long as Jeff Seroy's there.
Jeff Seroy is an incredibly important part of the way they publish. Now
Jeff is much more than just head of publicity, he's vice president.
Jonathan is an old-fashioned editor, which is great, but when you run
into problems you need somebody like Jeff, who's dogged, who will take
them up. I do a lot of business with FSG. And I do have a lot of
authors with Knopf. I work with various editors there. I represent Gita
Mehta, Sonny's wife, and I know the Mehtas very well. Alice Mayhew is
who I do Carter with, and I've know her for years. She's an eccentric.
But she doesn't do fiction. I think Paul Slovak is a very committed
publisher and editor. I think Molly Stern's kind of great. I moved
Susan Choi to her. Molly's very energetic, she can really dig into the
publishing process as well as be an editor, too. Frances Coady is a
consummate editor. And Jonathan Galassi is a wonderful editor, there's
no two ways about that. But in this current era we have to talk about
people who also involve themselves in the publishing process, which is
what Jeff does. Sarah Crichton has been a very good addition for them.
Can you pinpoint any mistakes you've made in your career?
Sure. I turned down Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
And I read it in many drafts, which perhaps colored my opinion of it. I
mistakenly read it as a true crime book, and there wasn't really a
payoff for that. I didn't understand or respond enough to the
atmospheric quality of the book, and the fact that it was a roman noir in its way. So we all make mistakes.
Do
you have anything to share with younger editors and agents starting out
today, maybe to help them avoid mistakes in their own careers?
I
feel sorry for editors who want passionately to take on a project that
the house makes them turn down, and it goes on to be a big best-seller.
That happens all the time.
I know. So that's a mistake. Not a mistake, but it's a problem.
What about younger agents?
I
think they can take on too many clients. I think that can be a problem.
You have to be selective. If you're not selective, you have too many
people who perhaps you don't care enough about, and you don't give them
good enough service, and their books don't sell, so they blame you.
But you do have to rely on your gut.
You do. And if you really feel passionate, okay. But you can't just sort of throw a fishing line out.
How do you know when a book has you. Is it a visceral feeling?
Yes.
It's about the voice. You think, "Oh my God. This is an arresting
voice." To me, voice matters almost more than narrative. Because it
shows an originality. Many people can write good narrative—actually not
many people; it's hard to write good narrative. But to have a style?
Voice is what makes Joan Didion a great writer. Andy Greer and André
Aciman have it. Have you read him?
No.
Oh, you should. Call Me by Your Name is a brilliant novel. And Out of Egypt
is now considered a classic. It's wonderful. It's just so much fun to
read. Tina Brown e-mailed me this week and said, "I'm so glad you told
me to read André Aciman's book, it's brilliant." But it had a hard time
breaking through because of the subject. It's not a gay novel. He gave
this to me—he's under contract to FSG for a very long novel, it's about
New York life, it's very layered—but he brought this novel Call Me by Your Name
to me two summers ago. He said, "Look, I wrote this novel in a month,
two months. Read it and tell me if you think I should publish it." I
took it home that night. It was a hot summer night, I remember. And I
wasn't going out. I read the thing straight through. Oh my god. I
called him up the next day and said, "André, of course you have to
publish this. Are you joking?" He said, "Well, let me see what Susan
says." He hadn't told Susan, his wife, about it. He comes back and
tells me that Susan said yes. So then I gave it to Jonathan [Galassi]
and he said, "Of course we're going to publish it." It's unlike
anything you've read.
People have such romantic notions about the publishing world. To you, what are the things that ultimately make it special?
It's
given me a fantastic life. I have met so many interesting people. I
have gone to so many interesting places. It just continually opens
doors for me. I just came back from George Weidenfeld's eighty-eighth
birthday party in Berlin with Springer-Verlag. Angela Merkel gave one
of the toasts. It's a wonderful life because you're dealing in ideas,
with literature, with interesting people.
Is there anything you'd still like to accomplish?
I'd love to find and represent a couple of new extraordinary young writers. It's exciting; it's fun.
Anything else?
I just want the business to keep going. I want it to flourish. I just
hope people continue to read books and see them as a source of pleasure
and not as some daunting task.
Is there a memoir in your future?
Definitely
not. I don't think I would have the patience to sit down and write a
book. I admire people who can. And I promised my mother I would never
write a memoir. I'm joking, but I did promise my mother that.
Any final thoughts?
What
makes me happy is seeing these agents I've trained doing so well. It's
been great with Tina and Eric—seeing their careers flourish. I
certainly know with Tina and Eric that they care deeply about the
business, they're 100 percent committed to the writers, and that
they're thoughtful, intelligent people. So that makes me happy.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich
A few months ago, I was at lunch with a literary agent who shall remain nameless, and the conversation turned to the subject of our favorite movers and shakers in the industry. When Molly Friedrich's name came up, my lunch companion—no small dealmaker herself—lowered her voice and said something that surprised me. "If I were a writer, I don't see why you would sign with me or any other agent when Molly is out there. What else could you possibly want in an agent?"
It's a sentiment that's hard to dispute. The daughter of two children's book authors, Friedrich was born in London, raised in suburban Long Island, and graduated from Barnard in 1974. She began her career in publishing a few days later as an intern at Doubleday. Over the next two years she was promoted twice, first to assistant editor and then to director of publicity at the company's paperback imprint, Anchor Press. After a year in publicity she took another new job—and a risky step backward—as an assistant to the agent Phyllis Seidel. Soon she moved again, joining the Aaron Priest Literary Agency, where she remained for the next twenty-eight years. In 2006, she set out on her own and formed the Friedrich Agency.
I don't think I can adequately convey the whirlwind of charm, passion, and sheer personal magnetism that Friedrich has spent the last three decades unleashing on the publishing world in service of her clients. Like many of her authors—Melissa Bank, Sue Grafton, Frank McCourt, Terry McMillan, Esmeralda Santiago, Jane Smiley, and Elizabeth Strout among them—she is a force of nature. But behind the deep voice and the big laugh, there is also a Long Island girl who was forced to grow up fast under challenging circumstances; a young wife who left the corporate world because she didn't want to raise her kids by telephone; a brass-knuckle agent who admits she will go to the wall for any novel—flawed or not—that makes her cry three times; and a mother of four who wrote a children's book, You're Not My Real Mother! (Little, Brown, 2004), after her adopted daughter told her precisely that one day.
When I arrive at Friedrich's office in New York City for our conversation, I am ushered in by another of her daughters, Lucy, who just graduated from college and is working as her mother's assistant for the summer. Friedrich's office is bright, warm, and unpretentious. The walls are painted with wide yellow-and-white stripes that run vertically from floor to ceiling. But its most remarkable feature has to be a memento that hangs on a wall in the corner: a framed newspaper clipping from Christmas Day 2005, when two of her clients' books, Sue Grafton's S Is for Silence (G. P. Putnam's Sons) and Frank McCourt's Teacher Man (Scribner), sat side by side atop the New York Times best-seller lists for fiction and nonfiction. As my lunch companion might have observed: How the heck are you supposed to compete with that?
I always like
to start with a little background. Where are you from?
I'm the daughter
of two writers. I grew up in a family in which language was very important. The
one who is known, my father, is the one who got published and didn't raise the
children. My mother, Priscilla, is the one who raised us. The two of them
collaborated on thirteen children's books. The best book they wrote is called The
Easter Bunny That Overslept, and it's been
in print since 1957. It has been illustrated not once but three times and was
even made into a miserable television show for a while.
The first exotic thing about me is that I was born in London. My parents met in France and were married in Paris—they were both writing, my mother was painting—and they lived a kind of faux-glamorous expatriate life. They had three children in quick succession. The first was in Frankfurt, I was in London, and my brother was in Paris. Then they moved from Paris to Long Island, and they were penniless. They had no support from either set of parents. Those were the days when even if you were educated and had children, you were expected to suck it up and fend for yourself. The first place they lived was with William Gaddis's mother. She had a home in Massapequa and her house had an unrenovated barn. And that's where we lived—in the unrenovated barn. My one claim to literary fame is that apparently there is a scene in The Recognitions in which the main character is describing a naked two-year old on a summer lawn who's putting pennies into a Woolworth's plastic beaded purse. Apparently that is yours truly. When I learned about it I thought, "God, full circle! Even then I was counting money!" But I haven't gone back to see if it's true. It's a piece of family lore. I'm not going to egomaniacally go back through that very long book searching for a possible portrait of my two-year-old self.
I guess the point is that I grew up very comfortable around books, comfortable around writers who would come out to dinner parties and were always sort of around. My father started out at Newsweek and then was at the Saturday Evening Post for years. He started writing books then. He wrote a couple of honestly not-very-good novels and then he wrote many books as a cultural historian. But he never gave up his journalistic work. He needed to earn a steady, consistent living because by then there were five children, the third and fourth of whom were retarded. Today I am their guardian. The fifth child was born eight years after the fourth one, and he's the one who died in a plane crash. So it's a large and noisy family that's complicated in the way of all interesting families.
Where did you
go to college?
I went to
college at Barnard and graduated with a BA in Art History. My father would not
allow me to major in English. He felt very strongly that if he was going to pay
tuition, which he did, and that if I was going to be reading books all my life,
then there was absolutely no reason for him to underwrite four years of
studying Melville. So I tried to figure out the thing I could study that would
be the one thing he didn't know about, and that was art history. I studied the
early Italian renaissance. Then, of course, there was the question of "What do
you do?" What do you do with a BA in Art History from Barnard, when you
basically can't do anything but analyze the diagonal composition of a great
painting? Not useful! My parents were very consistently clear that when we graduated
there would be no support. We were not to have any kind of meltdown, we were
not to reveal any learning disorders—if we had them we were to keep them to
ourselves. We were to get on with it, and sort ourselves out, and always live
within our own incomes.
How did you
get started in publishing?
When I was still
in Barnard I was renting a room from Connie and Tom Congdon, who was an editor
in the apex of his fabulous commercial book editing life because he was the
editor of Jaws. Tom said, "You should go
into publishing." I called my father because he was the one who could be
counted on for an honest response. He said, "Absolutely not. Publishing is what
people go into when they don't know what else to do." I said, "But that applies
to me!" Congdon said not to pay attention to my father. He said he'd get me an
interview at Doubleday. And I do give good interview, as you will learn by the
end of this evening. I was a great interview—very confident—and I had done
all kinds of interesting things because I'd been working every summer from the
age of thirteen on. I'd also gotten pretty poised about being around adults,
kind of old beyond my years, I guess, especially with my brother and sister as
they were.
But then I had to take the typing test. They knocked off ten points for every mistake, which gave me a score of negative thirty-five. They said, "We'd love to hire you, but..." and I went away. I decided to spend the second semester of my senior year typing the op-ed page of the Times every day. I went back for that typing test two more times, and I was finally hired at thirty-seven words per minute as an intern at Doubleday. I think I was hired really for tenacity alone. It was a great program that they have long since discontinued. You got to spend about two weeks working in every conceivable department: the different editorial departments of Doubleday, the copyediting department, rights and permission. You got to go out to Garden City and deal with the purchasing offices. You got to go on the road with a sales rep and watch books not get placed. Even back then, in 1974, books were skipped. It was really a devastating experience to observe secondhand.
At the end of four months you got to choose where you wanted to go, and naturally I said editorial because I have no imagination. I had the choice of working either in Doubleday trade or Anchor paperback, which back then was about eleven people. It was really big. I went to work as the assistant to Loretta Barrett, who was the editorial director. It should be noted that almost everybody who was at Anchor at the time—aside from Bill Strachan, who has no sense—has become an agent. Marie Brown, Elizabeth Knappman, Loretta Barrett herself, Liv Blumer. We are all agents.
Tell me what
those early days were like for you.
Anchor's list
was fairly academic back then. There were about 135 books published a year, of
which 60 percent were reprints and 40 percent were trade paperback originals.
The fact is, I had grown up in a family of extremes. My youngest brother, Tony,
was brilliant, and so was my older sister, Liesel. I didn't test well. I didn't
learn easily. And I didn't consider myself especially bright. But I was a huge
overachiever. It wasn't until I went to college that I realized that if I
simply worked harder than anybody else, I would do fine. I saw the same thing
at Doubleday. It was great. People would give me work and I would do whatever I
was told. I had all kinds of time because my husband was still a sophomore in
college—I'd gotten married by then—and he had no time to talk to me anyway.
In those days you also got paid overtime, which was essential because I was
making six thousand dollars a year. We were really quite penniless, and
overtime was what kept the wolf at the door. So I did whatever I was told. I
wrote flap copy. I put books into production. I consulted the art department on
jackets. I gave books their titles when no one else could think of one. I read
whatever I was told to read and even what I was not asked to read.
Mostly,
I taught myself how to do the job. When I started working for Loretta, I had
inherited this adorable little office—it was really an outer office—with a
huge window. But I had no view because the window was blocked by old filing
that was stacked up and covering it. I decided that I was going to see my view
by the end of six months. That was my goal. Very Prussian. So every night I
would stay late and file. And I never filed anything without reading it. That's
how I learned how things worked. I learned how people were presenting books,
who was buying what books, what Sam Vaughan had decided to publish as opposed
to what Lisa Drew was doing in trade, etcetera. I honestly had nothing better
to do than to be ferociously ambitious. And there was nothing stopping me.
And you immediately
knew that you enjoyed the work?
Oh, yeah. It was
great because everybody was so grateful. People were so happy that I was there.
Loretta would always thank me. The authors were grateful. But even then I think
I had a sense of myself. I remember there was this one agent who called up for
Loretta. I guess Loretta hadn't returned her call, and the agent just started
screaming at me. I said, "Excuse me. You
are not speaking to Loretta. You are speaking to Loretta's assistant. You may
not talk to me like this. Would you like me to have her return your call? And
if she doesn't, you can count on the fact that it is not because I didn't tell
her. But do not scream at me." This woman immediately backed off. When I met
her years later, I said, "You're the screamer!" She had no recollection of it
at all. But I guess even then, if I think about twenty-two-year-olds and how
easily frightened they are, I had one thing that was working to my advantage. I
didn't realize it was an advantage until I was in the business a little longer:
I had a really good voice. I had a voice that was low, and a voice that bespoke
an authority I did not feel. I could use my voice to help me wing it. I would
speak to authors who I had never met—they were all over the country—when I was
impossibly young as though I knew what I was talking about. I would just try
and get the job done, solve the problem at hand, give my boss as little as
possible to get aggravated about. And the response from Loretta was enormous
gratitude.
So I'd put books into production. I'd say, "Would you like me to edit this book?" She'd say, "Well, yeah." And why not? Who says that I couldn't edit? Why not learn by doing? What is editing, really, except an experienced eye learning how to respond to a manuscript? Learning when a passage in a manuscript simply falls apart. Obviously Loretta read all the editorial letters that I wrote at midnight and one in the morning, showing off for her. My job at Doubleday was to distinguish myself. And I did.
How did you
work your way up?
Oh, fast. They
had a sort of indentured servant system. You know, first you were an intern,
then an assistant, then an assistant to the editor, then an editorial
assistant, then an associate editor.... I mean, talk about hierarchical! You
could die waiting. You could be thirty.
I had no time for that. I'd been there for about two years. Everything was
going very well. I was a fully contributing, noisy person. I went to all the
editorial meetings. People were learning that they could count on me. If
somebody gave me something to read, I would never let them down. I might let
them down with my opinion, but I wouldn't let them down by making an excuse of
my life. I made it clear that I was somebody who could be approached for almost
any problem. I spent a lot of time socializing, going to the cantina, whatever.
I'm very social.
So then the Anchor Press publicity director, Liv Blumer, left to become the director of publicity for Doubleday trade, and I was offered her old job as head of publicity for Anchor. That was a big jump. I wasn't sure that I wanted to be in publicity, but I recognized it for what it was, which was a big jump. It seemed like a really good thing to do—to learn how to run something, to hire people, to learn how to promote and publicize books. And I knew I'd be good at it. That job was very good training for me when I became a baby agent, a year later, because it taught me how to present books that no one really wanted to hear about.
Did you like
doing publicity?
In my opinion,
the two jobs that are the most exhausting in this business are the jobs of the
foreign scout and the publicist. The reason is that there is never an end to the job. If you're a scout, there is
always another book you can cover, another house you can do well by, another
report you can write. If you're a publicist, for every eighty letters you
write, and eighty ideas you try, there are seventy-nine that don't work. But
the only ones that the author hears about—and the editor hears about and your
boss hears about—are the ones that work. It is a thankless and really
difficult job. But I did it.
Were you any
good at it?
I had one
fabulous moment. I'd started, and I was doing everything. I had hired a woman
who had no experience in publicity. She had just finished getting her MA in
Shakespeare's Apocrypha at NYU, which proved to be totally useless. So there
were the two of us—clueless. Meanwhile, the big book on Doubleday's trade list
that year was Alex Haley's Roots, so no
one wanted to listen to a publicist for Anchor Press. Everyone was deliciously
over-focused on Roots.
After six months at the new job, I decided I had earned a vacation. One of the books I had been publicizing was from the "Foxfire" series. It was a wonderful book by Eliot Wigginton called I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. In my reading I had come across a newsletter that was written by a woman named Kay Sexton. It was a newsletter called the "B. Dalton Newsletter" that was put out by the bookstore chain. I read the newsletter and thought, "This woman really needs to know about the specialness of this book." So I wrote her one of my two-page letters introducing myself and telling her what the book was about and why she had to know about it and get behind it. "All the proceeds are going to Reading Is Fundamental.... Eliot Wigginton is wonderfulness himself...." I never heard a word from her. So I was going on this two-week vacation, and before I left I told my assistant that I was going to call at the end of the first week to check in. This was in the days before cell phones, obviously. So I called my assistant from a payphone in a bathing suit and said, "Anything going on?" She said, "Molly, you won't believe it. You've got three bouquets of flowers!" I said, "What?" She said, "It's so exciting—your entire letter is the subject of the ‘B. Dalton Newsletter.'" Kay had written something like, "In all my years of doing this newsletter, I've never heard from anybody at Doubleday until I finally received this extraordinary letter from one Molly Friedrich, who urged me to take a serious look at I Wish I Could Give My Son a Wild Raccoon. Her letter is so powerful that I print it here in full. Please adjust your orders accordingly." The reason I was getting flowers is that you could see a direct difference from before the newsletter came out and after. Usually, the marketing people, who pay the advertising people, are always taking credit. You never know whether you have actually, tangibly made a difference. Except this one time. So that was my terrific moment in the sun.
Why did you
leave Doubleday to become an agent?
I did the
publicity job for a year and then I got a phone call from an agent at the time,
Phyllis Seidel. She worked out of her Upper East Side brownstone and she'd
never had anyone work for her. She said that she was interested in turning her
cottage industry into something a bit more fast-moving and professional, and
she said she'd heard wonderful things about me from two people who were so
different that she was intrigued. She asked if I would come up for an
interview. By this point I had learned that it is incredibly important to never
say, "No," and I'd been in the business long enough to see that agents were
really essential to the industry. I had also been in the business long enough
to see that, on the publishing side, there were a lot of meetings. There was a
lot of time spent gathering your insecurities together and having them
reflected in a group meeting where you got to shore yourselves up. You know:
"Well, nineteen of us like the jacket, what do you think of it?" That kind of
thing. There was a lot of inefficiency.
Plus, I was married by then and knew I wanted children. I didn't know if corporate America was that hospitable to having children, at least for somebody who really wanted to be around them and actively help them grow up. There weren't a whole lot of senior people at Doubleday at the time who had young children. I decided that I wanted to find an angle of this business that would allow me to continue working but to work around my life and my children. It was a really conscious decision. I also had been exposed to a lot of agents—some of them wonderful, some of them appallingly bad—a whole raft of agents from the sublime to the really questionably professional. But I had been around that angle of the business long enough to see that if you really worked hard to build up a stable of great writers, it might be a good way to earn a living.
So with that sort of young, unformed knowledge in mind, I took the subway up and interviewed with Phyllis. She offered me two things. First, she was willing to allow me take on writers of my own if it didn't intrude with the business. That was really important to me because, after all, I had been a boss already and this was already taking a step back and becoming an assistant again, apprenticing myself to her in order to learn the business. And second, she said she would give me 4 percent of anything I brought in, which was kind of the carrot before the donkey's nose. It wasn't going to cost her anything to give me 4 percent, and I don't think she even thought I would bring in anything interesting. So she did it. But it sure was useful later on, and it set a precedent that I used as part of my negotiation when I left a year later to join Aaron Priest. I took that 4 percent commission with me as part of my negotiation.
Tell me about some of your early clients.
The very first client I sold was
Phyllis Theroux, who has a book right now that I'm trying to sell and will die
trying. I began working with Aaron Priest in 1978, and six months into working
for him—it was just Aaron and me, impossibly small—Aaron decided that he
wanted to move to California to open an office in L.A. This was a huge job
change. He had made it very clear when I started that he did not want me to
take on clients. He wanted me to be his assistant. I said, "Fine. But can I
work on finding clients as long as it's not at your inconvenience?" He said, "I
don't care what you do, just don't inconvenience me." So I would work at night
because my husband was busy with law school I was writing letters to short
story writers at Redbook, all that stuff. When Aaron got in
his car and was driving across the country with his wife and kids, he would
call once a day. He'd say, "Hi. I'm in Iowa. Anything doing?" I'd say, "Nah."
But by the time he got to California, five days later, I had sold three books.
I had literally been waiting to be released. And the first book was Phyllis
Theroux's, which I auctioned to Julie Houston at Morrow for twenty-five
thousand dollars. It was called California and Other States of Grace.
It was absolutely wonderful, and she went on to write others. But that was my
first book, which makes me sentimental about selling all of her books.
Eventually it became clear to Aaron that I might be more valuable as a baby agent than as only his assistant. I said, "Come on, let me hire an assistant part-time. It's not going to cost that much." Then, when Aaron came back from California six months later, there was no question. I wasn't going to go backward. I got very lucky that way. I could have been his assistant for four or five years without ever having the opportunity to really step out. It was his decision to go to California that really gave me the breathing room I needed to show off. To show what I wanted to do. To show what I could do.
How did you build a list in those early years? Were you
getting referrals, was it the letters you were writing, were you reading the
slush?
Certainly I was reading slush, and nothing was coming out of
the slush. Some of it was the letters I was writing. And I never said, "No."
Let me give you an example of what I mean. There's a movie agent named Geoff
Sanford. One day he came blowing through the Aaron Priest offices. When he walked
in, Aaron wasn't around. Don't forget that I had this scary voice, the gift of
gab, the ability to make someone feel at home, whatever you want to call it. I
said, "Geoff! Come on in! How are you?" We talked for a while and he said, "Oh,
you're going to be great." We didn't do any business, but about a year later he
called me up and said there was this writer named Sue Grafton. He said he
really liked her, she was a really good egg, and she had written a book called A
Is for Alibi.
Then he told me she was leaving her agent and asked if I might want to take a
look. I said, "Are you kidding? I'm starving to death. Of course I'm
interested." But I also said, "Why does she want to leave her agent?" And Sue had
told him and I can tell you because Sue has always been very straightforward
about it. Kathy Robbins was her agent at the time, and Kathy was in the process
of taking her authors from a 10 percent commission to a 15 percent commission.
Sue liked Kathy enormously, but she felt, like death and taxes, that no one
should ever charge more than 10 percent. She just felt very strongly about it.
I love finding something and getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody's life. Changing a writer's life.
What is the lesson there, beyond never saying "No"?
When you're an agent, you must be open to
every single person. There is no one who doesn't have an opportunity to see me.
I really mean that. There is no little person who will be turned away by me. I
mean, why not? What on earth does it cost me? The business of being an agent is
the business of forming relationships, and everything is a seedling. If you go
to a writers conference, as faculty, you will probably not take on anybody at
that writers conference. But within five years, if you have done your job and
been open to the universe—not to sound too California—you will eventually
have a terrific client approach you who knew somebody who was the brother of
someone who was at the conference five years ago and scribbled down your name.
This has happened over and over and over again.
I'll give you another example. Many years ago, an editor at the Atlantic suggested to me that there was a writer named Elisabeth Hyde who was working on a novel. He thought I should check it out. So I wrote to her immediately. You know, "I hear from so-and-so that you're working on a novel." It turned out that she had just signed on with an agent. The letter I wrote back was something like, "Oh, drat. I have a two-year-old so I'm not allowed to swear. Well, best of luck to you, be well, blah blah blah, and I'll look forward to reading your book between hard covers." Well, she held on to that letter. A couple of years ago—when my daughter who was then two was now twenty-five—Elisabeth Hyde wrote back to me. She sent me the letter I had written to her more than twenty years ago. She said her agent retired, and she inherited another agent who didn't much like her work, and then she went with another agent who didn't like her novel at all. She asked the agent if it was all right for her to try to sell the book on her own. This agent, apparently, said, "Yeah, sure. Fine." She said, "If I find a publisher, will you help me with the contract?" He said, "Yes." So she finds a publisher on her own, MacAdam/Cage, and the agent negotiated the contract for zero advance, a fifty-fifty world rights split, and took 15 percent. I mean, honestly! At that point it occurred to Elisabeth that maybe she should find an agent who really liked her stuff. So she went back to her file and that's when she found my letter.
See how important it is to be remembered in this business? When you interact with someone, you want to make the molecules in the air change a little. You want somebody to say, "God, she's good!" You want to be remembered. You want to make an imprint. As an agent, you have to be able to do that.
I just read this great novel you sold by James Collins called
Beginner's Greek. He came to writing late, and I'm curious how he came to
you.
He came to me
recommended by a magazine editor. I'm not going to tell you who it was because
if I do, then all the hard-working agents, if they're really doing their jobs, will
call this editor up and ask to buy him or her a meal. I have to keep some of my
fabulous contacts to myself. But I was totally in love with this book and
really, really wanted to get Jim Collins. I knew that he was seeing three or
four other people, and I knew that he was well connected. I knew that my competition
was going to be horrible. Hateful. You always want the competition to be
someone who is really different from you, not just someone who is another
version of you. So I didn't know what to do to distinguish myself. Jim decided
to come to New York to meet with people. Of course I had read the book really
carefully. I thought, "I'm going to take this guy to lunch. I've got to get
this guy."
So I blow-dried my hair and put on a suit and put on Erase under my eyes. I'm taking him to Patroon—this very manly place, a guy place—and of course I get there early because I'm nervous, which is so typical of me. I don't know what he looks like. I'm waiting in these seats against the wall. There's a guy next to me who is also clearly waiting for somebody. We're both waiting. So I decide to balance my checkbook in order to stay calm while I wait. A guy walks in and I ask him if he's Jim, and he says no. He goes off and sits with this other guy. About five minutes later, another guy sits down. And I say, "Oh, I love your book." He says, "You do?" And I start to go on and on and on about how amazing his book is. He looks at me and says, "I can't tell you how sorry I am not to be the person you are expecting." I say, "You're not Jim Collins?" He says, "No. I'm the owner of the restaurant. You ate here once before, so you're in the computer, and I was coming to introduce myself and say hello." I couldn't believe it. I was like, "Now I've lost all my mojo! Get out of here!"
So finally Jim came in and I said, "Are you Jim? You had better be Jim Collins." I was so exhausted by then that it was just ridiculous. But it was him. He looked kind of formal, in a double-breasted suit, and very tall, and slightly nervous, but in a way that was deeply appealing. I was just as nervous as he was. And we just talked. I asked if I was his last meeting—I wanted to be his last meeting—and then I told him that I thought he should not be allowed to leave the table without saying yes to me. "Just say yes!"
You said
that?
What did I have
to lose? I think he was charmed, and he could see that I was serious. What does
a writer want? A writer wants your passion. They want you to see the book in
the same way that they've written it, and they want you to go to your death
trying to sell it. They want to see that you are able to speak coherently and
articulately about why you love the book. And I told him it was too long. I
told him he needed to do this, that, and the other thing. I told him there were
places where it was overly precious, where there was too much throat-clearing.
I was very open with him. But he didn't disagree. So I did the best I could to
win him over. He was one of those very intimidating people because he really listened. I hate it when people listen too well because then
I tend to fill in the blanks and start talking too quickly and get really
Latinate and formal and nervous. Anyway, it was a great meeting. I said, "You
have to let me know. I really don't wait well. Please." And I told him something else. I told him there
were other agents who could sell this book as well as I could, but nobody could
sell it better. And then he called me up. Now it's in its fourth printing. It's
doing very well, and it's gotten very widely reviewed, and we've sold it around
the world. It's just been great.
You also
represent Melissa Bank, who has gotten all tangled up in this issue of chick
lit. Tell me what you think about that.
I don't consider
her chick lit. I don't know what chick lit is. First of all, is there anybody
out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the
thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of
stuck in the middle is character. So here we have a collection of short
stories—The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing—that doesn't have a single plot because it's made up of loosely
connected short stories with one story that isn't even part of the rest of it.
But what everybody loved about that book is what is absolutely not genre. I mean, chick lit has become a category,
right? But I didn't sell that book as part of chick lit. First of all I wasn't
even sure that I knew what chick lit was. And the thing that everybody, to a
person, loved about Melissa's book is that it had an original voice.
Now, what is an original voice? Well, think of it like this: Go to Bonfire of the Vanities and close your eyes and pick a page and have someone read you two paragraphs. If you can't identify those paragraphs as the rhythms and cadences that belong to Tom Wolfe, you're finished. I'm convinced that eight times out of ten, with Melissa Bank, you could do the same thing. Now that is saying something. So I don't know. What is chick lit? Does it mean fiction that primarily attracts the interest of women readers? Well, that would include Jane Austen. Is Jane Austen chick lit? Absolutely not. Has Jane Austen ever written about anything other than marriage proposals, linens, china, and who has a good dowry? No. I adore her. I read her every year. But that is what her books are about. So is she the queen of chick lit? I don't know. It seems kind of silly to me, to be honest. If I read a short story by Melissa Bank, I can always identify it as Melissa because of the voice, and my view of the world is altered for having read her work. That's a lot for a short story to have succeeded in doing, and that's what her stories do. So I don't know, and I don't care, whether Melissa Bank is considered part of the chick-lit world. What I do know is: One, that I love her; and two, that I respect her. And there are many writers who I love and many writers who I respect. But there are very few whom I both love and respect, and Melissa is in that small group.
Tell me how
Terry McMillan came to your attention.
Terry was
recommended to me by a young editor at Houghton Mifflin named Larry Kessenich.
She had sold her first book to Houghton Mifflin, and she didn't like the contract
and she didn't like the agent. Right in the middle of the deal, she decided
that she didn't want anything to do with the agent, and it just fell apart. She
wasn't under contract yet, and it just fell apart. Larry put my name out there
as an agent she should talk to. I always tell editors, "You don't have to
recommend me exclusively. I know that's a terrible burdensome thing for you if
things don't work out. But just put me on a short list. Or put me on a long
list. Just put me on a list. I promise you I will read this quickly. I will not
embarrass you. I will read this well. And if it's really wonderful, I won't
necessarily send it to you exclusively, but I won't fuck you over, either." I
was always good to my word, so it was easy for me to be recommended.
With Terry, I was on a short list of maybe six agents. I loved the pages, and she came to meet me. I said, "Oh, you're great. You're going to be a star. I don't know how effective I can be, but I will fight very hard on your behalf." She had already seen four people and she said, "I want to go with you. I like your energy." But I said, "No. Wrong. You've already made an appointment with this last person, who comes very highly recommended, and I want you to see that last person." She said, "Why?" I said, "Because if you and I ever have a fight, or a temper tantrum, I don't ever want you to wonder what that other agent would have been like. I want you to come to me with a full education of having met five other people who were highly recommended to you. Besides, you made an appointment and it's wrong to cancel your appointment. Go ahead and continue your education of finding an agent." So she did, and in the end she came back and told me that she still wanted me, which was great.
What was it
about her writing that you responded to?
I fell in love
with Terry's writing because she had an original voice. Go back and read the
first page of Mama, when Mildred, the
mother, is wielding an ax. It's like, "Whoa!" It springs off the page. That's
why it happened. But Terry built a career by believing in herself more than
anybody else did. She really worked hard. She had a two-year-old son, and she
was living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. She was doing programming or
something in a law office. Things were not easy for her. But she just got on
the phone with all these bookstores and said, "I want to set up a reading" and
"You're going to want me" and "You must want me."
I remember that Houghton Mifflin got an offer of ten thousand dollars for paperback rights. This was before we knew how Mama would perform. I called them up and said, "No, no, no, no, no. You have to understand who you are dealing with. You are dealing with a force of nature, and it's a force of nature has not been felt yet. You will make a terrible mistake if you sell reprint rights for ten thousand dollars. Believe me, if you hang on a little bit longer, you'll be rewarded." And they did, and they were.
So to go back to your question about how you build up a list, the answer is that you just keep fighting on your authors' behalf. Sometimes the fighting is not effective—it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference. But sometimes it is effective, and when it is, and your efforts have been proven right, people start to remember. They start to think, "Maybe she knows what she's doing." Then it gets to the point where it gets out of control with editors who want to see your submissions and become really upset if they don't.
Tell me about
that.
I remember one
editor who started to cry at lunch. This was one of the people to whom I did
not say "No." She's crying and she says, "I just really want to know what I can
do to get on your submission list." I thought, "This is really appalling. I am
now in an official tight spot." Sometimes you have lunch with people and you
know by the time the breadbasket is empty that you will not be submitting to
them anytime soon. It's usually when somebody says, "So! Tell me about your
list!" I think, "You jerk. You moron. How dare you have lunch with anybody
and not know that stuff." When I have a first lunch with anybody, I know what
they've published. I know how to spell their name. I take the time to learn who
my audience is.
But when this person started sobbing and saying, "What can I do?" I was very gentle with her. I said, "The thing is, it's not easy." I'm not a mean person, and there is a part of me that's deeply maternal. But I knew she was a disaster. I said, "You have to find your own people in the beginning. You can't expect agents to just submit their most beloved thing to you. If they haven't done business with you, that is a huge risk for them." I said, "Tell me about some books you have published that you have found on your own and won and done well by. Books that you've really published well. And this is not a test. I don't mean to put you on the spot. But if you don't have an answer—and I suspect you don't because you are, after all, very young—then two things have to happen. One is that you have to build a list a little bit, and the other is that you have to be right about a book at least two times in the next five to seven years. If you do that, people will start to send you things, because you will have stepped out on an editorial limb and proven yourself right. That's the way to get attention. You have to be right."
I think that's how it works. You hang around long enough, and you insist, like Scarlett O'Hara just before the intermission, "As God as my witness...this book will sell!" And if it does sell, and you were right, and everyone else was wrong, then you build up credibility. But it takes time. Here I am, thirty years later. I'm old! I'm fifty-five years old! But seriously, it is a business of staying with it long enough to really build up credibility and respect and a reputation for honesty. Always for honesty. God, this is a small business. I can tell you exactly which agents exaggerate the interest they have. I can tell you who lies. They're out there. I know who these people are. It's my job to know.
How should an author choose which agent to go with?
First of all, I don't think an author
should approach an agent before they have a manuscript. I had an author come to
me who didn't think he'd be ready for seven to ten years. He'd had a huge first
success and he was leaving his agent and wanted to sign on with somebody new. I
asked him why he was leaving his agent. It was clear the agent had done a
wonderful job selling the book, a wonderful job on foreign rights. And now the
author wanted someone new to exchange letters with him—talk to him, be his
friend, be his sponsor—for five years or seven years before his next book was
ready? He said, "I've left that agent because I want someone more prestigious."
I said, "I don't want you. I don't want to read what you've written. I don't
want to read what you will write in seven years. I don't want you. I want you
to go back to that first agent and show some loyalty, because you have a really
shabby reason for leaving that agent. That agent has done everything possible
to secure and establish your career. You've done something too—you've written
a good book. You have every reason to write a second good book. But for you to
leave because you want someone more prestigious? That sucks. Bye!" He wrote me
a letter saying he admired my moxie.
But you know what's really sad? That author did go with someone else, a very well-known agent, and that very well-known agent sold the book for three hundred thousand dollars. So you know what? I'm sorry to say it, but this author was sort of right. Not right to leave his agent, but right to think that going with an agent who was very well known might have helped him. We'll never know what the poor, sad, sorry, hardworking first agent who would have gone to bat for life for this guy would have done. But would that editor have paid ten times what the first book was sold for? I don't know, but it really stinks.
So how is an author supposed to know whom to choose?
Okay, so the first rule is that an author should never
approach an agent until they have something. If I met every person who wanted
to just have a chat before they sent their book, I'd go out of business. If
they have a book and they are sending it out, they should always say in the
letter if they are doing multiple submissions. That is common courtesy. I would
also say that I want to know the circumstances under which I am reading
something. Have you sent this to ninety-five other people? Have you sent this
to one other person? Do I have this exclusively? Because if I push aside my own
reading, which is the tyranny of all our lives, in order to be fast, at least
tell me what I need to do. The other thing is that the author should agree—if
the author is playing consumer here and sending it to five agents who want to
read it—that he's not going to make a decision until he has heard from all
five people. You should respect an agent's time. Do we get paid for our time?
No. Respect a busy agent's time. The thing I want to kill someone for is when I
read something over the weekend and I'm about to pick up the phone to tell them
it's the most wonderful book since War and Peace, and they say, "Oh,
sorry, I've signed on with Joe Blow who called on Sunday morning." No. No, no,
no, no, no. That is really wrong. Be fair. If you are going to put us on the
spot, give us all a fair chance.
The first thing you are going to look for is: Who responds? The second thing to look for is: What do they say? And what do they think about the book? Now this is where it gets murky, because a lot of agents get the author by saying, "Oh, it's wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!" Then they sign the author on and begin the hard work of getting the book into shape. That tends not to be my style. I tend to be very up-front about what I think the book needs from the very beginning. And I have lost authors because of it. Sometimes I wonder, "Should I become dishonest?" Should I say, "It's great!" to get the author and then deconstruct the manuscript over the course of twenty painful weeks? I don't know what the answer is. I know you always have to be true to yourself and your own style, and my style is to be utterly frank about what I think the manuscript requires, how I would position the book, and what I would do on its behalf.
Then the author may say, "Oh God, I can't decide! You're all so wonderful!" If that's the case I would say to get on a plane and come meet us. Figure it out. You should never be afraid to talk to your agent. Some authors are terrified of their agents. On the other hand, there are some agents who have very different styles and are overly friendly. They become "the girlfriend." They become so close with their authors that we arrive at what shrinks call "the boundary problem." This is also problematic, because then the agent loses the authority they are supposed to have in the author's life.
What kind of questions should an author ask potential
agents?
You are fully within your rights to ask an agent whom else
he represents. You are also within your rights to ask an agent to tell you
about a couple of authors whose books he's sold recently. You can't live on
your laurels and sit around bragging about your top five best-known clients.
"What have you sold recently, and how'd it go?" And maybe ask, "What did you
love that you weren't able to sell?" Everyone thinks I sell everything I touch.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There's loads of stuff I take on and don't sell. It's
extremely painful. So I think it's fair to talk about these things. I think you
want to see what kind of a match you are. Can you talk with this agent frankly?
Do you feel comfortable?
But it also goes the other way. It's a mutual interview process. There are many people I talk to and realize that I may love this person's work but I do not love this person. This person is going to be trouble. Big trouble. I had one author who I took on. It was a beauty contest, and I won her. She was a nonfiction writer, and I don't have much nonfiction, so I want nonfiction. She'd been published before and had a raft of fabulous journalistic credits to her name. I worked with her a little bit on the proposal—you know, shoring it up—but she was a true pro and didn't need much help. I got three offers and sold the book for six figures. It was great. But by the time the contract arrived, this woman had so exhausted me that I called her up and said, "I'm not going to tell the publisher this because I don't want the publisher to be nervous about it, but once the contract comes in and it's signed, I want you to know that I am leaving you. I'm giving you my full 15 percent. You can take it. I want you to thrive. But you have exhausted me. I'm sorry, but it just isn't a good match." Nonfiction books don't take six months to write. They take years to write! And the prospect of having this woman in my life for years filled me with such a chill that I thought, "I can't do this. Let's solve this."
Tell writers one
thing they don't know about editors, something that you know and they don't.
I would say that
they must view the fawning, deeply complimentary praise that marks the honeymoon
phase of their relationship with an editor for what it is. They must not buy into
it. They must realize that editors will say almost anything to get a book when
they have to have a book. The problem is that what you need from editors is to
have them be there for the long haul. Not just the long haul of the publication
process, but for the next book and the book after that as well. When the first
review comes in and it's terrible, you need your editor to say, "That fucker!
He didn't understand the book at all. Ignore it and go on." An editor needs to
be deeply, lastingly loyal to an author and a book that he decides to buy,
because bad things will happen and that loyalty will be tested.
Tell me what you're looking for when you're reading a
first novel or memoir.
That's so easy. I'm looking for the
first page to be good. Then I'm looking for the second page to also be good.
Really! The first page has to be good so that I will go to the second page and
the third and the fourth. It's true that sometimes I get all the way to the end
knowing that I'm going to turn a book down—I've come under the book's spell
but the spell is not holding me—and then I may feel committed to reading it
and showing off with a fabulous editorial letter. That does happen. But the
main thing I look for is immediate great writing.
I think the world of memoir is divided into two camps. One camp is the memoir of an unbelievably fascinating life. Huge! Can you top this? Death, famine, child abuse, all kinds of terrible and extraordinary events...but the author can't write. In the other camp you get beautiful writing—magnificent writing—with a kind of pointillist attention to every marvelous detail in the course of a life in which nothing interesting has happened. It's usually one or the other. So when you can combine those two things in one book—an interesting life and good writing—then you have pay dirt. But it's hard. It's hard to sell memoir, especially if it's not big in an obvious way.
What about with fiction?
Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are
higher. All editors say the same thing to me. They say, "I've got money to
spend. I'd really love to do business with you. I'd love to buy a book from
you." That's code. What they mean is they'd love to buy a book, for which they
can possibly overpay, that is big in obvious and immediate ways. And most books
are not big in obvious and immediate ways. They simply aren't. Something has to
change.
I have sold books for many millions of dollars and I have sold books for two thousand dollars and pretty much everything in between. I have experienced the fantastical joys of selling books for a whole lot of money. It is a joyous moment. But it isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. It isn't. Perhaps it's blasphemous for me to say that. But if you sell a first novel for a million dollars, you are putting so much pressure on that book to perform at a certain moment, in a certain season, at a certain level. And most books don't perform immediately. Something, I think, has to give.
If I'm going to say that maybe we shouldn't take a million dollars for a first novel, that we should take less money, then it seems to me that we all have to think more imaginatively—we agents and editors and publishers, all of us collectively. I think the place to do that is in the royalty rate. You're always taught, coming up as an agent, that the royalty is the thing in the boilerplate that essentially doesn't change. You know: 10 percent on the first five thousand copies, 12.5 percent on the next five thousand, 15 percent after that. We are told that these percentages are pretty inviolate, certainly for most fiction. But where is it written that you have to stop at 15 percent? If you don't want the burden to be up front, with the large advance that sunders all plans if it doesn't work out, then change the royalty structure. Give the writer 20 percent. Go on, do it! And if you're a small publisher, definitely do it. Hold on to your writers!
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But don't you
think most writers want the big advance?
Not necessarily.
You need to be able to read your author. Some authors don't want the big
advance. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about going from an advance of
a million dollars to an advance of ten thousand. It's really unfortunate, but
to some extent an advance is How much do you love me? I decided about ten years ago that the differential
of love in an auction is about seventy-five hundred dollars, which is really
unfortunate. So sometimes when I'm in an auction, and I know that the author
really wants to be with a certain publisher but the underbidder is determined
to have the book and will offer more to win the author, basically I go to the
underbidder and say, "Don't offer any more. Don't do it." Because the author
has made up her mind and I don't want the editor to be humiliated. I don't want
them to be embarrassed. I don't want to financially mug a publisher, get the
top amount, and then say, "Hey, guess what? Thanks for letting me use you, but
actually we never wanted you in the first place!" That's terrible. I have to
stay in business with these people. My job is to do the best job I can for my
author without ever being in collusion with the publisher. That's a very tricky
business.
Tell me
something that you often see beginning writers doing wrong.
I think they can
over-hype themselves. If they have a writing teacher, a letter will arrive from
the writing teacher. It's so transparent. It's not genuine. It feels like a
form of logrolling. And it doesn't really work with me. Or they will make false
comparisons between their book and other books.
This is the
magazine's Independent Press Issue. As you've watched the industry become more
and more corporate over the years, do you think it's been a good thing or a bad
thing for writers?
It's been a
terrible thing for writers.
Why?
First of all,
there are fewer publishers. When I started out, there were publishers all over
the place, all kinds of publishers that were legitimate companies, in business
legitimately, in New York. I mean, what's happening at Harcourt and Houghton is
just another nail in the coffin. I remember having a drink with Dick Snyder
maybe twenty-five years ago. He said something that I found appalling at the
time. He said that in twenty years—remember that this was twenty-five years
ago—there would be four publishers left. And we're not that far away from
that. We're really not. It's bad for writers in the same way that it's bad for
publishers to pick one or two big books and dump all your efforts and resources
into those books. It's great if you're the agent of one of those books. It's
terrific. Enjoy the ride. But you too will be on the other end of it if you
stay in this business long enough.
But I think the main thing that has been lost is a sense of diversity. I mean, everybody complains about this. There just seems to be a terrible sameness, and maybe it's because of the book groups and book clubs in this country, but it feels like readers in America are only having one of three or four conversations a month. Look, I love Khaled Hosseini. I love Elaine Koster. I love Susan Petersen Kennedy. I love everyone connected with The Kite Runner. But I read that book in bound galleys four or five years ago, and really, if one more person comes up to me on the beach this summer and says, "Oh! I love books too! Have you read The Kite Runner?" I really will kill myself. The opposite of that are the people who come up to me all the time saying that there is nothing to read. There is so much to read.
But what are
the implications for writers? Why is it bad?
It's bad for
writers because there is a sameness to conversations in the larger public. And
also because they have fewer choices. If you look at Publishers Lunch, you'll
see nonfiction, nonfiction, nonfiction, romance novel, paperback original,
nonfiction, nonfiction, and then there will be one novel that was sold. Everybody wants it to be obvious
and easy, but most books aren't. It would really be interesting to see whether
a book like The Beans of Egypt, Maine would be published today. It's a great book. Or take Annie Proulx. How
about that? Try describing that to
your editorial department and see how far you get. She's an extraordinary
writer, but you wouldn't get far at all.
So where do
we go from here?
I guess you have
to just keep putting your face to the wind, and never stop trying, and you have
to give publishers a chance to build an audience and a sense of family. I mean,
were doing that with Leif Enger's second book [So Brave, Young, and Handsome]. Paul Cirone, in this office, is the agent.
Honestly, we could've had an aggressive auction for that book. The trade
paperback sales of his first book [Peace Like a River] is one of the great sales stories of all time. Do
you know what the returns on that book are? They're zero! It's sold eight
hundred thousand copies! But we didn't shop him around. We wanted to do what
was right for the author, and the author was very comfortable with the deal we
came up with. The deal we came up with wasunorthodox, but why not do that if you can? And Grove
was very happy. Their first printing is very hopeful, and it's on the extended New
York Times list, and he's doing this huge
tour. It might be a slightly old-fashioned business model, but it's one that
works for that particular author and that particular house. So why not stick
with it? I think that loyaltyis
very important. Just like reader loyalty is important, loyalty to a publisher
is important.
How has
technology changed the business from your perspective?
I'll tell you,
what is hard about being an agent now is the Internet. The Internet is both the
joy and the bane of everybody's existence. The bane part of it for me, for an
agent, is that it used to be that authors were in isolation. Which was partly
bad, obviously, but it was also a good thing because they really got to focus
on their work and confront what was on the page. They weren't distracted and
hyped up by too much information. Today, if you are a writer of a certain
genre, you feel that you've got to get blurbs, you've got to cultivate all
these people, you've got to go to this or that event, and on and on. So you
have writers who aren't really being given enough time to write the best book
they can write. And meanwhile they have become a kind of awful consumer. There
are a lot of conversations about who has what. Like, "Well, Joe Blow has shelf
talkers. Why don't I have shelf talkers?" No! I don't want to hear about Joe
Blow's shelf talkers. You don't have shelf talkers because your career is set
within an entirely different context than the person you just mentioned. They
all compare notes. They compare advances. Part of it is that they have been
told it's no longer enough to just write a good book. They are told that they
have to get out there, press the flesh, have blogs, have Web pages, and get
advance quotes from everybody and their dogs. Then they're told, "By the way,
don't you think it would be a good idea to do two books this year?" This is
insane! It is altogether too fast. Everything in this business is too fast.
But how can
you build a career anymore if you don't do that stuff as an author?
You can. You
have to have some luck. I mean, look at Paul Cirone's author, Megan Abbott.
She's building a career. She's on her third or fourth book. She just won an
Edgar. She's under contract. She's with the same publisher. She hasn't had
outrageously great sales, but she's building an audience. She is a great, edgy,
funny, noir mystery writer.
What about
for a literary writer? Maybe a writer who has published a couple of books that
haven't sold too well?
They are in
trouble. I'm not going to soft-pedal that. It's very, very, very painful.
So what do
they do?
Well, thirty or
forty or eighty years ago when people said, "Don't give up your day job," there
was probably some wisdom to that. Certainly, if you get a large enough advance
and decide to recklessly give up your day job, at least don't give up your
insurance. Hang on to one writing class, which gives you insurance and protects
you and gives you the potential for tenure. Don't give it up. The first thing I
tell my authors when they sell their first book is to try to live as though
they don't have the money yet. Don't start building additions on your house.
Don't start taking expensive trips to Sicily. Try to remember that this might
not happen again. It's very important to me that people live within their income,
whether your income is thirty thousand dollars a year or thirty times that.
Tell me how
you spend most days.
I would say
being on the phone. Of course I do a lot of e-mail now, and I see the
advantages of hiding behind e-mail. A lot of the day is spent getting
information. Learning. I really read every catalogue that is sent to me. I
genuinely want to know what people are doing. From the moment I take a project
on, there is not a book I'm reading—if it's remotely relevant to building an
argument or a case for positioning that book—that won't in some way inform or
aid me in selling that book, or in understanding that project or the
marketplace. A lot of time is spent doing that, and getting information. Who's
selling what? The stuff in Publishers Lunch, I'm sorry to say, is rarely the
big deals. Those can be the people who want the publicity, they want to be out
there. It's great for them. Good. Fine. But it's not the big deals. Sometimes
the big deals aren't even in the rights guides.
What is the hardest thing for you about your job?
The whining. I won't have it. I don't
whine. I don't want whining from editors. I don't want whining from my authors.
I don't want to read about authors I don't represent who whine. I want every
single person who gets published to be grateful that they get to be published,
because many of their colleagues don't get to be published. I don't want
whining about money or any aspect of the business. Of course that doesn't mean
I don't want to know when you have a problem. It is my job to help you figure
out whether a problem is legitimate or whether it is just nervousness,
paranoia, insecurity, fear, dread, the sense that the world is passing you by
and you haven't heard from anybody. You've got to get a writers group, a mother,
a spouse. You have to seek your support system elsewhere. Because that's not
the job of an agent. When I see a problem, believe me, I'm already going at it.
The question is: Do I get on the phone with the editor or do I get on the phone
with the author and tell him I'm going to get on the phone with the editor, and
then not have time to get on the phone with the editor? In other words, you
have to trust that your agent is doing her job. When your agent says, "I will
take care of this," chances are really good that the agent will take care of
it. But at the same time, you can't assume that agents are always effective. I
can howl, scream, beg, sob, and implore, but it doesn't always mean that my
howling will make a difference. Sometimes the answer is just, "No. We've decided
not to publish this book in paperback. The sales of this book in hardcover were
three thousand copies, and we won't publish it in paperback."
What do you love most about your job?
Here is the thing about me as an agent:
I am not only looking for literature that may be a contender. If I cry at three
different points in a manuscript—even if it is lumpy, and overlong, and deeply
flawed—then I am going to go to bat for it. I love finding something and
getting the whole world to read it. Changing somebody's life. Changing a
writer's life. I love the thrill of loving something and really believing in
it, and then selling it really well. All agents know when they've done a good
job. They know when they've done a crappy job too. They know when they've let
their author down and when they've let themselves down by extension. It doesn't
matter if you've sold the book for a song or really aggressively. You know when
you've done well by a book and the book's author. And then having it all work out?
Having it be published well? Being part of that ride? I mean, it's great to be
right. It's wonderfully validating. It's thrilling to share in an author's
success. Frank
McCourt is an obvious example. What gets better than that? And to have an
author who remains unspoiled, like Frank has? It is just a joy to represent an
author like that. He always has been. He's so appreciative and never complains.
And when he does complain it's because he's making a joke out of it. He called
me up one time, maybe a year after Angela's Ashes had come out, and he
said, "Oh Lord, Molly, the taxes." And I said, "No, no, no, no, no. If you're
making enough money to complain about taxes, you don't get to complain about
taxes." He laughed and said, "All right, fine!" He's just a joy to work with.
Is there anything you haven't accomplished that you still
want to?
No. I just want to always be in the
game. I
want to work for at least another ten years. I don't want to retire when I'm in
a walker. The reason why this is such a great job, first of all, is
that I've been able to work around my children and my life. I have been able to
call my hours my own to an unusual extent, in a way that would not have been
possible if I stayed at Doubleday. But I have a very highly developed work
ethic. I work really hard. What is extraordinary about this business is that we
get to be more interesting than we would otherwise be. Because of our work.
That's really important. In other words, we do go to dinner parties, and we do
meet interesting people, and reading remains and will always remain a great
common currency. It's fantastic to work in the world of ideas, and great plots,
and the great insights that are given to us by writers. I don't ever want to be
far away from that. And I won't be. I refuse. I feel deeply privileged to be in
this business. So what if it's changing? I'm not going to change as quickly as
it changes—there's room for troglodytes like me. And I'm never going to rest
on my laurels. Because if you aren't always excited to get something in that is
fresh and new, then you shouldn't be in this business. If you're just going
along like a hamster in a wheel, then you've lost the pure white heat that
makes this business so much fun. And it should be
challenging. That's what separates the great agents from the good agents.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: Eric Simonoff
When I first entered the offices of Simon & Schuster as an intern seven years ago, I half expected to find rooms heavy with pipe smoke and equipped with decanters of whiskey, their inhabitants ensconced in the quiet seriousness of a library. Instead, I found an ordinary office in midtown Manhattan alive with the ringing of phones, endless photocopying, and assistants scurrying from cubicle to cubicle. An ordinary office, yes—except that it was teeming with books. They were everywhere. They spilled off of shelves and hid in the corners of conference rooms. Boxes of them obstructed hallways. Their jacket art adorned every wall.
I soon learned that books are the magic dust that turns an ordinary building into a publishing house: a place where writers can feel at home.
This spring I spoke with Eric Simonoff, one of the wizards who casts such dust around the hallways of New York City publishers, to learn some of his spells. He is a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor (WME) known for representing some of the most impressive writers—and for making some of the most lucrative deals—in the business.
Visiting WME’s office is different from visiting a publishing house: It feels more like walking into an investment bank. The reception area is sleek and modern, and the place hums with quiet efficiency. Insofar as one sees books lining its corridors, they are tastefully displayed. Everything about WME seems designed to say, “This is where serious creative careers are made.”
The literary agents at WME work in an estimated $300 million enterprise that includes talent agents in Beverly Hills, California; Nashville; Miami Beach, Florida; and London. Like all agents, they are charged with their clients’ economic and professional livelihoods. No wonder, then, that so many prominent writers choose to work with WME, which is both the oldest talent agency in America and one of the most powerful.
When Simonoff and I met, it became clear that the bank comparison stopped at his door. He wore a sweater and canvas shoes, and we sat on a comfortable leather couch inside his office, which is decorated with sports memorabilia, historical artifacts, and the prizewinning books whose authors he has represented. We had never met in person before, and as we shook hands I thought, “Now here’s someone who loves to read.”
Simonoff began his career as an editorial assistant at W. W. Norton in 1989. Two years later, he moved to Janklow & Nesbit Associates as an agent. He became a director of the firm sixteen years later, in 2007, and was widely expected to take its reins one day with his colleague Tina Bennett. Then, in 2009, Simonoff departed for William Morris, where Bennett joined him three years later. Simonoff’s list of clients includes Pulitzer Prize winners Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Stacy Schiff, as well as Jonathan Lethem, Lincoln Child, Douglas Preston, ZZ Packer, Philipp Meyer, Bill O’Reilly, Daniel Alarcón, Alexander Maksik, and Karen Thompson Walker.
For Simonoff, the business always comes back to the books. That’s where we began.
Did you grow up around New York City?
I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia, but my parents were from New York City and my grandmother lived in Brooklyn. The entire time I was growing up, I spent all of my vacations with her in her tiny little studio. They were the best memories of my childhood.
It was New York in the 1970s, but I had no idea how bad New York in the ’70s was. To me it was a magical place. We’d go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the top of the Empire State Building, and always, always, always to Gotham Book Mart, which was a legendary used bookstore in the Forties. I never left empty-handed. I still have all the books my grandmother bought me over all those vacations from Gotham Book Mart, which is sadly no longer there.
You were a bookish kid.
It was what I did best. That’s probably still what I do best: sit quietly and read. It defined my childhood. I was never not reading. My parents could bring me anywhere. So long as I had a book, I’d be quiet and well behaved and happy. And that’s still the case.
You went to college at Princeton, where you studied classics. What did you anticipate doing afterward?
I applied to law school and got in. I had worked in three different law firms during the summers in college, and I suppose I should be grateful that I did, because working in those law firms made me realize that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I deferred admission for two years and sent résumés to the editors in chief of every trade house in New York City. It wasn’t until very near graduation that I got a job as legendary fiction editor Gerry Howard’s assistant at Norton.
Did you aspire to be an editor?
Yes. I didn’t know what literary agents were. So I thought, “Max Perkins, that’s what you do.” Gerry was certainly the closest thing—probably still is the closest thing—to Max Perkins out there. It was thrilling to get to work at a house as venerable and recognizable as Norton, and for an editor as groundbreaking and yet old-school as Gerry.
Gerry wrote incredible editorial letters, longhand, on yellow legal pads, that I would then have to type. Observing his relationship with a text, and also the relationships that unfolded in his correspondence with his many writers and friends, was an incredible and valuable education.
How do you think people learn how to edit today?
I wonder about that. Depending on a boss’s relationship with an assistant, there’s a permeability of e-mail that makes it possible for an assistant to track all of the professional correspondence in real time. That is, to see what’s coming in and to see what’s going out, and to learn the rhythm of a relationship—with a client or with editors, if you’re an agent. So it’s evolving. It’s not the same as Gerry dropping off four or five single-spaced legal-sized handwritten pages and asking me to type them, but I think there’s a substitute for it.
Have the types of publishing relationships that you saw Gerry cultivate changed over the years?
Probably not. It is still fundamentally a business of relationships, as it was then. It probably has always been a business of relationships.
One of the things I marvel at is that so many of the people who were assistants when I was an assistant, or who had recently been an assistant, are running publishing companies today. At the time, it seemed like a complete impossibility that the people with whom you had relationships that were built primarily around swapping books would someday be the heads of houses.
But I think it’s those relationships that are forged at every step of your tenure in publishing that are the ones that ultimately bear the greatest fruit, both in terms of friendship and in terms of business.
Who are some of the people you met at Norton and have stayed in touch with?
There are a lot. I’m not sure I met them all at Norton, but Bill Thomas, who’s at Doubleday; Jordan Pavlin at Knopf; Reagan Arthur, who was then at St. Martin’s; Jon Karp, who was Kate Medina’s assistant at Random House. Molly Stern came a little bit later. We were all assistants at one point. Almost everyone you encounter will have been someone’s assistant at some point.
You were at Norton for two years. Why did you leave?
Norton still is a terrifically stable place, which is to its credit—it’s an employee- owned company. But it was a long wait to become an acquiring editor, and there were people who had already been there four and five years answering phones and typing their boss’s mail. They were beginning to acquire their own books but were not really editors yet. I asked myself, “How many years can I do this before I become hopelessly restless and fail to believe it could be possible?” And at the end of two years I began to mention to my friends that I was looking for a job as an assistant editor at another house.
Jenny McPhee, who was Ash Green’s assistant at Knopf, said, “A friend of mine, Lydia Wills, tells me that Janklow & Nesbit are looking for a young agent.” So I reached out to Lydia. We had a drink, we hit it off, and she gave a favorable report to Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit. They had me in to meet them shortly thereafter, and on the basis of a single conversation with Mort and a conversation with Lynn, they hired me to be a junior agent doing magazine work, selling audio rights, taking the movie meetings when development people came through town, and then eventually building my own list.
I was twenty-three years old, and I went from being an assistant in a cubicle to having an office with an assistant in a cubicle. It was a shock, to say the least.
Had you edited any books on your own at Norton?
There was a book that Gerry and I jointly acquired called The Wives’ Tale by a terrific writer named Alix Wilber. The book was a wonderful work of rural magical realism. All the pieces were there but it was a complete jumble.
Gerry said, “Look, if you think you know how to fix this, we’ll buy it and fix it.” It was a question of taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up and putting it back together again, and working with Alix very closely.
That’s the only book I can claim I really left my fingerprints on. It was a thrilling experience. The agent was Sally Wofford, now Sally Wofford-Girand, who was with Elaine Markson at the time.
You took your taste from one building to another. What else did you bring from Norton into your life as an agent?
It was hard to shake the notion that I wasn’t going to become an editor. It was a relatively recent dream, but my dream was that I’d be an editor someday.
There are some agents who edit, and there are some agents who don’t edit. I came to agenting at a time when editing became a lot more common among the agents. It was still that relationship to the text that I found thrilling, and that is probably the main thing that I brought with me from one building to the other. The other is the realization that I had been completely and utterly bitten by the publishing bug, and I couldn’t imagine working in any other industry.
I’m imagining what it would have been like to join Mort and Lynn.
What impressed me right off the bat was how incredibly comfortable they were with their clients—all of whom, to me, were giants. The notion of being the longtime agent and friend of Joan Didion was so completely outside my experience that it was awe-inspiring. Or David McCullough, or Michael Crichton, or Tom Wolfe, or any of these people.
Lynn Nesbit has represented Tom Wolfe for his entire career. I found that incredibly inspiring, and I thought, “So, I could do that? I could find some bright young journalist and say, ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but let me be your agent,’ and wake up several years later with a superstar client?” Working with Mort and Lynn made it seem achievable.
Who was the first writer you represented on your own?
There was a playwright named John Jiler who proposed a book about Hurricane Gloria hitting Fire Island in 1985. He had summered for his whole life on Fire Island, and in advance of the hurricane the entire island was evacuated by the Coast Guard. John huddled in a school shelter for the duration of the storm, but later heard that ten people had refused to leave. He went back and found the ten people who weathered this unbelievable storm, and told their individual stories alongside the natural history of Fire Island.
What about that proposal attracted your attention?
I remember being struck immediately by the voice. The accessibility of it, the gentleness of it, the sophistication of it, the broadness of it. There was a feeling like, “Okay, this is someone who can tell me a story. He seems to know what story he wants to tell me, the story is a compelling one, the story has not been told before.” That is so often at the heart of what strikes us both in fiction and nonfiction.
After you made your first sale, you continued to sell subsidiary rights for Mort and Lynn. When did the focus shift to your own authors?
I think it happened about three years in. The books I was taking on were beginning to make some decent income, and it made more sense to focus as much time on that as on the subrights. So we hired another agent to help with that.
She was a young woman who at the time had no publishing experience, not a day of it. She had been a graduate student at Yale in English. Her name was Tina Bennett, and we hired her to do the rest of the subrights work. That was a good hire. [Laughs.]
She ended up going on to not just become one of my closest friends in the world but represented Seabiscuit and Unbroken and Fast Food Nation and Malcolm Gladwell’s books and Atul Gawande and you name it.
What about Janklow & Nesbit appealed to you?
There was a very, very strong ethos to the place, from the top down. It was always an extremely dignified office, with a very clear sense of itself, and very focused on wanting to be in the highest of the high end, both in terms of literary merit and commercial possibility. It was never a volume business. It was really about curation.
Did you always see eye to eye about the quality of the books you took on?
I can’t remember disagreeing about quality, and it was a fairly independent process. In the very early days I would run by Mort or Lynn what I wanted to take on, so they had some sense of what was going out under their name. When you’re the name partners in the company you like to know what’s being sent out under your letterhead. But they were great at trusting Tina and me not to embarrass them.
What kinds of risks did you take as a young agent?
When you are young and building a list, you’re able to roll the dice on new talent and think, “I’ve only read three stories by this person, but they’re three of the best stories I’ve seen all year. I have to believe this person is capable of contributing another seven stories to a collection and eventually writing a novel,” and then say to them, “Yes. I want to be your agent.”
In the time that I was coming up in the business, there were many fewer agents than there are now. I felt tremendous amounts of competition from my peers—that if I didn’t take the plunge and say “yes” to a writer, someone else would be there in the next five minutes to say “yes.” And today, it’s unimaginably more competitive than it was then.
There’s always a risk when you call the seven or ten editors with whom you have the best relationships and say, “I’ve read the most extraordinary novel.” Every time you do that, you’re putting your reputation on the line. You send it out and you hold your breath.
No matter how many years you do it, you still sometimes think, “What if I’m crazy? What if the three people who love this book most are me, the author, and the author’s mother?” [Laughs.] And then when the phone rings the next day, and the first person says, “Oh my God, I was up all night reading this, I can’t believe how great this is,” you exhale.
One of the things that now distinguishes you is how quickly your submissions are read. That wasn’t always the case.
No, it was not. Agents don’t have magical powers. The truth is, editors are tremendously hungry for good books. The writer who’s outside of the business views the business as this fortress designed to keep him or her out. And in fact, what I see is an industry in which we want nothing more than to discover an amazing new voice. Who wouldn’t? If you actually have a great book, it matters who sends it out, because you want someone who understands the business, who has the best possible relationships, and who can negotiate the right deal for you as a client. But your book will get discovered regardless. It might just be a question of when.
That said, it’s much nicer to have things get read overnight than have to call three weeks later and say, “Hey, have you had a chance to read that book I sent you three weeks ago?”
How did you distinguish yourself from other agents at first? Was there ever a writer you really had to fight for?
I don’t recall going head to head all that often. I used to go visit the Iowa Writers’ Workshop every couple of years. The first time I went I was twenty-eight, and it was incredibly heady to get out of New York City and to arrive at this hotbed of literary creativity and competition.
Students would sign up to meet with a real live literary agent and talk about the state of the business and whether people buy short stories or not, and I would give a talk about the state of the business and what exactly it is literary agents do. One year I went and kept hearing this name, ZZ Packer. People kept saying, “Have you met ZZ Packer? You’ve got to meet ZZ Packer. Have you read ZZ Packer?”
And ZZ Packer did not come to my talk. ZZ Packer did not sign up for a meeting. And if she hadn’t attended a party for a writer who was in town reading at Prairie Lights, I never would have met ZZ Packer. But I finally met her and I said, “Oh my God, you’re ZZ Packer! You’re the person everyone keeps talking about. Can I read some of your stuff?”
She was surprised, and a little reluctant. Even after that, I had to chase her and say, “No, really, please, please send me anything you want to send me.” That was almost more of a challenge than being up against another young agent. She was just not thinking in those terms, which is also quaint when you think about it in this day and age. There are some writers who write one story and think, “Okay, time to get an agent.”
You were twenty-eight when you first went out there? What else had you accomplished by then?
I can’t remember if had accomplished anything by the time I was twenty-eight. [Laughs.] I do remember vowing when I was twenty-eight that I would have a New York Times bestseller by the time I was thirty.
Did that work out?
I did not, no. I can’t to this day tell you what my first New York Times bestseller was; I don’t remember. But that was the goal I set for myself, and failed at.
It’s funny, there was an Observer piece around that time, in which Nick Paumgarten, who’s now at The New Yorker, was tasked with writing about the up-and-coming young agents. I found it when I was moving offices four years ago, and was interested to note first of all what a good job he’d done picking the young agents of that day, and secondly how little I accomplished by the time I was twenty-eight.
You were among them?
Yes, but I hadn’t really done anything to merit being among them.
Who else was in that list?
The only person who isn’t a literary agent anymore is David Chalfant, but Sarah Chalfant, Kim Witherspoon, Sloan Harris, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Nicole Aragi, and me, I think.
Do you feel competitive with those people today?
I don’t, strangely enough.
Are there other people you feel competitive with?
I don’t think that way, I guess. In fact, many of those people are very, very close friends, and have been for years and years and years.
Did I feel competitive with them? I’d rather my books succeed, I’d rather WME’s books succeed, than anyone else’s books, insofar as I feel competitive.
Publishing is doing surprisingly well given all the reports of its demise, and yet I feel that it’s still challenged enough that any time there’s a great success story, it’s good for all of us. That mitigates the feelings of competition.
Did you set other goals for yourself after the bestseller deadline passed?
I don’t really remember. One thing that you learn by doing is what you’re good at, and what you’re not good at. It’s certainly possible to have beginner’s luck in certain categories. But part of the learning process, of maturing as an agent, is recognizing that there are certain categories that you’ll never really understand.
I remember having a lunch with Jennifer Enderlin when I was a young agent, and she was talking about how much she loved women’s fiction and romance. She undeniably has an eye for it, and it comes from genuine passion, love, and understanding of it. She can tell a good one from a bad one. And I realized I will never be able to tell a good one from a bad one. It’s not where my passion lies. I have huge admiration and respect for her, and still do, because she is really good at something I will ever be good at.
Was that a tough lesson to learn?
Sure. The complicated thing about commercial fiction, especially, is that there’s well written commercial fiction, which I get, and then there’s badly written commercial fiction, which I don’t get. I wish I got badly written commercial fiction. I wish I understood what made a badly written thriller a million-copy seller. But I don’t.
What other lessons did you learn as you were launching yourself?
I think as an agent you have to remember that you have many clients and they all have one agent.
Tell me more about that.
It’s a lonely job being a writer. Years ago, a client said to me, “You’re the only person I’ve spoken to today.” That was a very sobering moment, and I realized what a lifeline an agent can be to an author. I probably spoke to fifty people that day, and this client spoke to one person, and the one person he spoke to was his agent.
I’ve had clients say, “Five years ago you said something that really stayed with me,” and had them repeat that trenchant piece of advice back to me, and I thought, “Wow, that’s a really good piece of advice! I have no recollection of giving it to you, but I’m glad that it helped.”
You’re talking about the importance of the relationships between you and your authors.
Exactly.
Can you characterize the ideal relationship between author and agent?
Everybody’s different. There are some authors who are very clear about what they are looking for, and there are some authors who say, “I don’t need any hand-holding, I don’t need any therapy, I just want you to go out and kill for me and get the best deal possible.” And then there are authors who need a lot of editorial give-and-take, need to contextualize where their work fits into their personal lives, need to know that you know when to give them a pep talk, and when to let them down easy.
When authors are picking an agent, it’s easy to be dazzled by a big name, whereas in many cases, the bright, sharp up-and-coming agent—especially if he or she has the support of a mentor—understands the work better, understands the writer better, can kill for the writer, can devote more hours of the day to the writer, and might be a better fit.
There’s no rule covering all of it. But it’s a relationship worth getting right.
Every relationship is different, but at a place like William Morris Endeavor, you’re probably looking for some uniform level of excellence.
True.
How do you define excellence as an agent?
First and foremost, communication. That is, if you can’t adequately communicate to the community—not just to the publishers and editors, but to the wider world—your passion and commitment to the writer, you probably won’t be able to follow through with the rest. You have to understand the value in the writer and the work, and to encapsulate it in as compelling and cogent a way as possible. That’s a lot of what we do: crafting the pitch. If you understand the work that you’re representing correctly, half the time you’ll end up seeing your own words in the flap copy of the book. There’s also being a member of the community. That is, not sitting behind your desk all the time, but being out there in the world, engaging with all kinds of people. Engaging with editors and publishers, but also with writers, literary festivals, MFA programs, the much wider world of letters.
WME does these amazing retreats every January, in California, where they bring incredible speakers to talk to the assembled offices. London, New York, Nashville, Miami, Beverly Hills—they all convene on this site in California. One of the speakers was talking about collisions—the number of times you bump into somebody serendipitously, and how hugely stimulating to creativity that is.
I find it to be true. Bumping into colleagues and getting out into the world and having those lunches and bumping into people at the lunch spot that you didn’t expect to see tends to be where the real work happens.
What have your writers taught you about staying creative?
If you’re a writer, and you’re working on a book, your job is to wake up in the morning and tackle that which you have set out for yourself, whether it’s solving the problem of chapter three, or getting your character from point A to point B, or starting at page one and meticulously improving the language of every sentence. The dangerous thing about almost any office job is that it’s very easy to become merely reactive. If I’ve learned anything from my clients, it’s that you do have to make your own day.
How involved do you get in helping writers work out a writing problem?
I get involved, but mostly in the form of belief. That is, I believe fundamentally in the talent of my writers and that they will find their way out of the thicket. Also, there are so many examples of writers, even recently, who have gone into the wilderness for ten or more years and returned with masterpieces. Look at the lag time between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, for instance, or the lag time between Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You can tell a writer, “You know what, it’s been a while, but look at these other guys. They did okay.”
How much editing do you do? Is that something you feel in your gut, or is it an intellectual decision?
I do think a good agent edits, but he edits only when he knows that he can make a book significantly better. The last thing I would want to do is screw up a perfectly good book. It is something you feel in your gut. I take on very little in the way of new clients these days. Even so, there are times when you read a story and you think, “I can’t not offer this person representation.” Usually it’s a gut impulse that’s then bolstered by a meeting, or by further exploration of the author’s work. I’ve taken on three first-time writers in the past four or five years.
Can you take me through your experience with one of them?
One of them was Karen Thompson Walker, formerly an editor at Simon & Schuster, as you are now.
A terrific writer.
Terrific writer.
Beautiful person, too.
Lovely person. And that doesn’t hurt, by the way, that she’s a nice person. She sent me a query pretty much out of the blue, saying that she graduated from the Columbia MFA program and that she was working on a novel. There was a line about the premise of the novel, which sounded incredibly compelling, the first forty pages of the novel, and maybe three excellent short stories. I read the forty pages of the novel first, because there’s still a bias in favor of novels in the industry, and you could love the stories but it’s going to be an uphill slog if the novel isn’t working. I was completely blown away by the first forty pages. Those pages exist in her first novel, The Age of Miracles, largely untouched from when they crossed my desk. They were absolutely arresting.
You meet her, you love her, you take her on. Then what?
Then I wait. And I wait, and I wait, and I wait. I waited for four years, I think. A couple of great things happened bam, bam, bam. One was she was promoted to full editor at Simon & Schuster. The other was that she won the Sirenland Fellowship, an all-expenses-paid trip to Positano, Italy, to hobnob with other notable writers. And shortly thereafter she sent me the whole manuscript. I held my breath, thinking, “I really, really hope she pulled it off,” hoping beyond hope that she really did pull it off, and then, as page after page went by, recognizing that she absolutely had pulled it off. When I sent it out into the world, it was greeted with exactly the same reaction that I experienced: jaw-dropping appreciation for what a marvelous writer she is, and what an amazing novel she’d created.
Did you know her book was going to be big? You are known for selling big fiction, and big nonfiction, too—books that garner advances with life-changing numbers of zeros. A lot of people want to know how you do it.
Yes. I knew that book was going to be big. The answer to the question “How do you do it?” may sound facile, but I would ask you, or anyone who’s a serious reader, this question: How many great books do you read a year? How many books do you read that you would recommend to almost anyone you know? For most people the answer is a relatively small number.
If as an agent you read a book and recognize it as that, a book that you know the people you give it to are going to want to give it to other people…those are the big books. Good isn’t enough.
When you have a book that’s truly extraordinary, and you realize the money is going to be significant, do you ever caution writers not to take the money?
No. And you can put this in parentheses after that: “He didn’t hesitate while saying that.” No.
Walk me through the consequences.
I think there are no consequences. Maybe that’s a terrible thing to say. I would rather my client have the money than CBS [which owns Simon & Schuster] have the money. [Laughs.] And this is not to single out CBS. I love my colleagues at Hachette and News Corp. and Bertelsmann and Macmillan. But I’d rather my authors have the money. No one puts a gun to a publisher’s head and makes the publisher pay this money. They pay large advances because they can’t bear the idea of not publishing a particular book. They go in with their eyes open. What’s the worst that happens? You’re paid way too much money for a book that then gets an enormous amount of attention that it probably wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t gotten a huge amount of money for it. These enormous advances, which are fewer and farther between than they were prerecession, are still, as you described them, life changing. They are that rare thing that enables someone to say, “I’m a writer,” and mean it. That is, not a writer slash teacher slash freelance editor slash anything else. To say, “This is what I do because I am able to sock away enough money from that crazy first advance to spend my days writing my second and third books.” Not a bad thing.
The writer who’s outside of the business views the business as this fortress designed to keep him or her out. And in fact, what I see is an industry in which we want nothing more than to discover an amazing new voice. Who wouldn’t?
That will be gratifying for people to hear.
For the few people who get paid too much money?
Everybody aspires! And as you said, those are the books that publishers want to take a crack at too. But when a publisher really takes a bath, it doesn’t feel very good.
Let me say this. If a publisher overpays for a really good book, and that really good book garners rave reviews and does really well by almost every other standard other than the giant advance, they don’t feel good about it, but they don’t feel bad about it.
Every publisher I’ve spoken to who has been in that situation has said, “I’m steadfastly proud of the job we did on that book. I’m proud to have had anything to do with that book,” whatever that book may be.
And then there are the books that earn out, the ones that actually become the sensations that they were destined to be in the first place. And you think, “Wow, I should have gotten more money for that one.”
Do you think the short story collection is in a commercial renaissance?
I certainly hope so. It’s a great American art form. In terms of WME’s ability to sell them in translation, we have a big foreign rights department, and we never sell translation rights to publishers. We reserve those rights to the clients and sell them internationally. There are territories that we find it very difficult to sell short stories in, in which it is very easy to sell novels. Some of the best short story collections do find a lot of foreign pickup, but it usually takes a certain amount of massaging to get publishers on board internationally.
Domestically, I think publishers would still say that in the aggregate, novels far outsell story collections. Every year there are notable exceptions. The question is, how many? In recent years, between Daniyal Mueenuddin and George Saunders, and Junot Díaz, Nam Le, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward Jones, there have been a number of commercially successful short story writers. But each year probably doesn’t allow more than four or five.
In the case of George Saunders, or in the case of Sam Lipsyte, who’s a new client of mine—he used to be with Ira Silverberg, a friend and a phenomenal agent who left agenting—there’s a feeling almost of, “Now it’s time.” In the case of George Saunders, or in the case of Sam Lipsyte, who’s a new client of mine—he used to be with Ira Silverberg, a friend and a phenomenal agent who left agenting—there’s a feeling almost of, “Now it’s time.”
You’d think that in a short-attention-span age, it’d be much easier to sell story collections than novels. Yet the initial investment a reader makes in establishing where he is in a fictional landscape is only made once in a novel, but is made ten times in a story collection. Short story collections ask a bit more of the reader than novels do.
In literary fiction, there is usually work associated with figuring out where you are in each short story, who is telling the story, what the parameters of the world being described are. In a novel, once you get your feet wet in the first fifty pages or so, you can kind of glide on through.
What do the words “literary fiction” mean to you?
People outside the business ask that question on occasion, and it took me a while to figure out how to respond. When you’re in the business, it’s one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it sorts of things.
When you have to actually put some thought into it, you realize that what defines literary fiction is an attention to language on a word by word and sentence by sentence level that is equal to or greater than attention to plot. How’s that for a definition?
I’m probably going to steal it.
And then in purely commercial fiction, plot is paramount. You have to have a ripping good plot in commercial fiction to hold the reader every sentence and every paragraph. Regardless of the craft of the writing, it’s really about transmitting a story. Pure, unadulterated storytelling. With literary fiction, yes, it’s storytelling to a greater or lesser degree, but it is as much about reaching the reader through the nuance of word, rather than merely getting the reader from point A to point B.
Earlier you said that you respond first to voice. It’s easy to see how that relates to the craft of sentences in literary fiction. But you also represent commercial writers. What does voice have to with, say, your attraction to Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston?
What Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston’s books bristle with is intelligence. There’s an incredibly strong voice that comes through their work because there are these two enormous intelligences operating in it. In the same way that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works tend not to be described as literary fiction, there is an intensity of purpose, care, and attention to characters and character development, and yes, plot, in the works of Preston & Child. It makes you think, “Ah, I’m not wasting my time. My mind is being engaged by this work, because I know that I’m in the hands of two incredibly smart writers who are taking me someplace I’ve never been before.”
Are you somebody who prefers a linear narrative, or kind of a curlicue one that hops around in time?
It really depends on the book. I’ve certainly encountered clients’ novels, I can’t think of any particular titles off the top of my head, that in draft were clearly linear books that were made into curlicue books unnecessarily. Sometimes the only editorial note you need to say is, “You know what, just tell this one chronologically. It’ll be fine.”
There’s a tendency to think it’ll be more literary if it’s structurally complex. And in fact that’s not necessarily the case.
Does poetry have a role in your professional reading life?
When you’re a publishing professional and you’re consuming huge amounts of text, both professionally and for pleasure, reading poetry slows everything down. There’s a speed at which you can consume prose, even the densest prose, that poetry just does not allow you.
For me, reading poetry is like putting the brakes on. It’s a conscious act. It requires you to truly stop what you’re doing, and focus not just on the paragraph, but on the word. I feel like it stimulates a different part of my reading brain than reading prose does.
Is it sort of a recalibration of your reading mind?
That’s a good way to put it. I think it is that.
When do you need to recalibrate?
I still read submissions and everything my own clients write, which is a lot. I also read a lot for pleasure, and I encourage all the agents here to read for pleasure, which is paradoxical in an industry in which we’re just absolutely overwhelmed with work reading.
In the same way that you use a different critical faculty reading poetry, I think you use a different critical faculty doing pleasure reading than work reading. You can turn off bits and pieces of the critical apparatus that, when you’re reading for work, are saying things like, “Can I fix this? Can I sell this? What’s the editor going to make of this?” You can dial those down and think, “I’m just a reader engaging with a good book.”
Poetry serves a parallel function. I can’t say that I reserve any particular time of day to read poetry or manuscripts, but as you can imagine, I have an apartment littered with books. Sometimes it’s just a question of picking up one that’s been lying there for a while.
What was the last truly magnificent book that you read that is not on your list?
That’s not on my list?
If you want to choose, okay, but I figured you would say, “I couldn’t possibly. All of my children are tall and handsome.”
I was blown away by Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Wow. It’s both very sly and readable but packs an unbelievable emotional punch. I think everything he writes is incredible.
Anything else?
There’s an amazing biography of Talleyrand by Duff Cooper, written in 1932, that biographers still talk about. I just read that, finally, after years of meaning to, and it was phenomenal. I was tweeting about it.
In your pleasure reading, how far back do you dip? Do you ever go back and say, “It’s time for my Milton fix?”
Absolutely. I have a thing for Dante, so I read a lot of different translations and attempt the Italian. I finally read Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary translation last summer, which was fantastic. I’m never finished with the past, but I like to mix it up between what’s coming out now and what came out some time ago.
Are there any books that you’re embarrassed not to have read?
Sure, don’t we all have books that we’re embarrassed not to have read? Do you want me to name some?
Well, it might be interesting.
I have never read The Faerie Queene. And I’ve never read The Golden Notebook. How about that?Have you?
No! I haven’t read either one.
OK, then I feel a little bit better.
But then again I’ve been around for a lot less time.
[Laughs.] That’s true, I’ve had more time to catch up.I haven’t finished Proust. I’ve only read three of the six, I think. How volumes are there? Six? I don’t know. Someday.
I ask because some readers expect gatekeepers like agents and editors to maintain an extraordinarily vast knowledge of letters from the beginning of recorded time. Yet few of us could live up to that expectation. Do you see yourself as a gatekeeper?
Yes. I think we all are. And I would argue, without any grandiosity, that agents, editors, and publishers are performing a public good. I’m sure that one of your questions is going to be about self-publishing, and I think the opportunity that digital self-publishing offers writers is enormously to the good in terms of breaking down those barriers. But I think that most consumers are actually looking to gatekeepers, though I think gatekeeper is probably the wrong word.
What word would you use instead?
The word I would use is “curator,” in the same way that, coming from outside the music industry, I’m looking for people who spend all their time listening to music to help me identify which bands I want to listen to. People who read for pleasure are looking to people who spend all of their time reading books to tell them what books they might be interested in reading. It’s not crazy to expect that people who have developed expertise over many years as to what makes a really good read would be in a position to help consumers make that decision.
I often hear the word “curator” in context of someone arguing that books are merely “content.” Would you say that we’re in the book business, or the content industry?
Well, they’re certainly not mutually exclusive. I’ve been at WME for four years and part of what’s thrilling about it is being a part of a much larger entertainment industry and field. There are so many creative people passing through this office. Some of them write books and some of them write plays and some of them write music and some of them write movies and some of them direct movies. But they’re all in the content creation business. I don’t see it as a pejorative at all, nor am I such a purist as to say that the only form of intellectual appreciation is that for books.
I wouldn’t much want to meet someone who only ever read books and never listened to music and never went to see plays and never saw movies. There’s no shame in contextualizing books as part of a larger content universe. And yet I think book lovers are sentimentalists. I know I am.
I love books, first and foremost. That’s why I’m in the book department at WME and not in the motion picture department. But I love interacting with my colleagues who are in those other businesses because they feel absolutely as passionately about what they’re doing as I do about what I’m doing.
You mentioned stacks of books around your apartment. Do you prefer to read print books, or digitally?
It’s funny, I went largely digital when the first Kindle was introduced however many years ago. I was really enamored of it, especially for work, and then my pleasure reading migrated to a device for four or five years. And then I went back.
I realized that I missed the experience of reading paper, and I missed having the trophy around afterward. I was also influenced by my kids, who are biased very much in favor of paper. They’re big readers. My daughter, who’s ten, will read on a device in a pinch, but still prefers the physical book. And my thirteen-year-old son simply refuses to read on devices. He will not do it. Do you read on a device?
I do, but mostly for submissions. It’s much easier to hold an iPad on the subway than it is to hold four hundred pages of manuscript. But the reading experience is something so richly textured, and the print book is a piece of technology so deeply refined, that an e-reader can feel rude in comparison to a print book for pleasure reading. It’ll do, but…
Yes, and I think there still is a divide for me, and apparently among the larger world of consumers, between a kind of book you feel you need to own, and a kind of book that you can perfectly well read on the device without missing afterward.
Do you have any thoughts on how magazines and newspapers have managed their transition online and on devices?
I exist on the periphery of the magazine and newspaper business, and our authors and clients interact with them much more directly. There’s probably not quite the degree of sentimentality around print newspapers and print magazines as there is around print books, in part because they’re less permanent objects.
I still own every book that my grandmother bought me at Gotham Book Mart, but I don’t own every newspaper I’ve ever read—otherwise I’d be one of the Collyer brothers. It’s the same with magazines, although God knows my parents had stacks and stacks of National Geographic that they never got rid of.
Having switched to reading TheNew York Times on the iPad, it feels different to me. I don’t have that feeling of starting at page A1 and looking at every single page in the newspaper until I get to the end, and knowing that I have at least read every headline. It’s a different engagement with the information.
From a business point of view, I wouldn’t presume to speak for the future of the newspaper and magazine industries, but as a consumer, it’s somehow more different engaging digitally with magazines and newspapers than I find it is with books.
There are lots of debates going on in the publishing business about e-book royalty rates, the value of digital editions, how e-books may be sold, and so on. How much should an author actually pay attention to?
It’s good to be informed about your business. If you’re a writer and you want to make writing more than an avocation, it makes sense to have some understanding of the industry. I don’t think writers should obsess about it. But it’s fair to know how all the different pieces fit together.
I’m always a little surprised by how much ink is spilled by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about our business, seeing as it’s dwarfed by other entertainment businesses. If a million people read a book in America, it’s a huge bestseller. If a million people go to see a movie, it’s a disaster. It’s just the nature of the numbers. There are many more moviegoers and TV watchers than there are readers.
It’s good to be informed about your business. If you’re a writer and you want to make writing more than an avocation, it makes sense to have some understanding of the industry. I don’t think writers should obsess about it. But it’s fair to know how all the different pieces fit together.
What about the upcoming merger of Random House and Penguin? What do you think the fallout’s going to be?
It’s impossible to know until it’s here, which is why we here spend very little time even thinking about it. Those of us who have been doing this for a while remember when Si Newhouse owned Random House, and when there was a separate company called Bantam Doubleday Dell. We woke up one day to discover that Si Newhouse was essentially selling Random House to “the Germans.” It was as if the sky was falling. Now, it’s inconceivable to think of Random House as anything other than Bertelsmann. In a very short period of time people will forget that Random House and Penguin were not always Random Penguin or Penguin Random or whatever they’re going to call it.
There will be a lot of difficult decisions and a lot of growing pains in the meantime. There will probably be other mergers. And there will probably be just enough competition for the really, really big books and the really, really good books to enable writers and agents to continue doing what they do.
Do you think that there’s a similar pattern in the agenting world? For instance, the merger of William Morris and Endeavor, but also the combination of boutique agencies. You moved from a smaller agency to a much larger one.
It probably is a trend, and it’s a trend across a lot of different industries. Many people credit the real motivation of the Random House–Penguin merger being less about market share and more about pushback against Amazon, who have such an enormous position of strength in the retail end of things.
We’re entering an era where being in a very stable, big boat with a very powerful engine, and with an extremely well-trained crew all pulling in the same direction, is a very nice place to be. When a multinational publishing company comes out of the blue and dictates unreasonable terms to its authors, it’s very nice to be able to say, “That’s nice, but you can’t do that to us, because we have too many of your authors. We’ll simply take the better part of your content and go elsewhere.” That position is a very attractive one, both for the agents and for the clients of that agency.
Let’s get back to relationships. An agent’s relationship to a book doesn’t end when you sell it.
Well, some not very good agents’ relationship to the book ends when they sell it.
What are the ways in which you end up being involved?
If you’re a good agent, it doesn’t end. You should be a part of the process every step of the way. And not an intrusive part of the process. A good agent is additive to the process.
I’ve heard editors say that working with an agent who is constructive, who actually contributes positively to the experience rather than merely as an irritant, is value added. They will pay more money for that agent’s books than they would otherwise—or at least more than they would for an agent who they know will be a distraction from the process of bringing the book to market.
A good agent is involved in all the major decisions, from the titling to the jacket to the marketing to the publicity. And in many cases, it’s merely the function of reminding the publisher that someone’s watching.
It’s very easy, especially if the author does not live in New York City—and most authors don’t—to forget that the author is even a human being. If you’re the editor, you have a direct relationship. If you’re the art department, or the marketing people, or any number of other people who are working in support of the book, there’s a chance you’ve never spoken to the author, let alone met the author, and it’s easy to depersonalize the process. Part of what the agent is responsible for doing is making sure that book and that author are not forgotten.
The best, most clarifying thing, to do is to ask for a marketing meeting several months before publication—to bring the author into the publishing house, sit down with the editor, the publisher, the head of marketing, the head of publicity, and say, “What’s your plan?” for the simple reason that it forms a connection between the author and the various people in the room, and it requires preparation before the meeting. The people in that room have to think, “Oh, Simonoff’s coming in with his author, I guess we’d better come up with a marketing plan.”
There have to be things that make you roll your eyes when you hear publishers say them.
I despair that the old line some publishers still trot out—“We don’t publish individual books, we publish authors”—is less and less true. Take Cormac McCarthy. He had an enormously supportive editor in Albert Erskine, who would publish almost anything McCarthy wrote. And McCarthy did not sell particularly well. For his first few books, I’d be surprised if he sold more than in the four digits. But the feeling was, “He’s our guy, and we will keep at it.” It really wasn’t until All the Pretty Horses that he blew up. The question is: Can you have a Cormac McCarthy today? Can you have someone who publishes even three, or four, or five brilliant works that don’t sell particularly well, and have a publisher hang in and say, “We can’t pay him very much, but he’s got a slot on our list regardless of what he writes”?
I’m sympathetic to what publishers are up against, but it’s harder for a publisher to make that statement than it was even ten or fifteen years ago.
Do you think that has anything to do with advances?
I would argue that publishers would rather spend $200,000 than $15,000. If they’re spending $15,000, they have to say, “Why are we bothering publishing this book if we think we’re only going to sell three thousand copies of it?” If they get up enough energy to offer $200,000, it means they are confident it’ll hit the list somewhere.
The problem with the Cormac McCarthy paradigm is that it takes years and years of faith in an individual writer over a long period of time without a great expenditure of money. It’s not a question of advance, in my opinion; it’s a question of slots. There are a limited number of slots on a publisher’s list. And the question is, “Are we ‘wasting a slot’ if we plug in one of our house authors?”
What changes in the business have made you grit your teeth?
Many of the tools that publishers used to get the word out are gone. In the olden days, and I’m talking about five years ago, you had print ads, print reviews, and co-op advertising—that is, stacks of books in stores. Since then, the newspapers are in free fall, which eliminates the efficacy of print ads. There’s been a collapse of something like eighty percent of column inches devoted to book reviews, and there’s only one freestanding book review associated with a newspaper left, at The New York Times. And there are no stores. Borders disappeared, and Barnes & Noble is closing them.
So the three main ways of letting people know about books have essentially been taken away from publishers, and they haven’t been replaced with anything yet. Some books are made by social media, but you still have books like Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra that are made essentially by traditional acclaim: the cover of the Times Book Review, named to the top ten books of the year by the Times, fantastic reviews in all the other places that still exist. When they coalesce around an individual title, they can still move the needle. And then, radio and touring. It was a notably beautiful book, with amazing full-color endpapers and enormous care given to the look of the thing. People still wanted to pick it up and own it.
This was two years ago. Can you make that book only with social media today? I doubt it. We’re still working on figuring out how to do what Little, Brown did for Cleopatra on a larger scale, more frequently.
Do you think that there’s anything to the argument that publishers should be extinct?
Not yet!
Saying yes would have been like pressing the nuclear self-destruct button.
Publishers still add value. Unquestionably, the most important thing they do is provide capital to writers. I would caution against moving away from an advance-based system only because it is the one absolutely irreplaceable thing that they do. You could argue that you could outsource the other things. It would be probably harder than it looks in the short term. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be possible to reinvent the publishing paradigm from the ground up.
The popular word for it in all media is disintermediation. Do we need the studios, do we need the networks, do we need the publishers? The answer in 2013 is, most of the time yes, all of the time, no. There are films that can be financed outside the studio system, there is television programming that can be created and disseminated absent cable networks and networks, and there are books that can be disseminated by self-publishing.
Is that where publishing is now for WME and other agents? Not really. We are still making the existing paradigm work, and I don’t see that changing radically in the near future.
I sometimes describe a book advance as an investment in a startup—the startup of the writer’s career. Do you think that’s a useful way to think about it?
I often tell first-time nonfiction writers who are trying to write a proposal that they are essentially writing a prospectus used to convince an investor to invest in their business, and their business is the book that they intend to write.
It’s a little bit different with fiction, which tends to be sold on a finished manuscript. So much of the initial outlay of capital has already been made by the author: nights, weekends, early in the morning, et cetera, while working a day job. That’s different.
Nonfiction tends to be sold on proposal, so it really is about trying to get someone to invest in your project. That said, publishers obviously need to do more than simply be venture capitalists. They need to be part of the creative process.
What makes you send a book to an editor you’ve never sent a book to before? Are you a closed shop?
No, I’m definitely not a closed shop. There are certainly people to whom I submit more than others, usually as a function of simply knowing them longer, and knowing them better. But there’s still something thrilling about meeting an editor you haven’t met before and talking about books.
You can have a publishing lunch in which you do nothing but talk about movies. You can have a lunch in which you do nothing but talk about your respective children. Or you can have a lunch in which you sit and just talk about books. The former two are not without their own satisfactions, but there’s something about engaging someone you’ve just met in what books really, really excite them. That’s how you determine who it is you have to send a book to.
The other thing we do here at WME is crowdsource it. Someone will send down an email saying, “I have an amazing novel that’s set in the world of opera. Who loves opera?” We collectively take the seventeen lunches we had that day, and among us, someone is bound to have had lunch with someone who loves opera. The same can be said for any number of different categories. Who loves dance, who loves dogs, who’s a birdwatcher? Part of it is relying on your colleagues to help curate a submission list.
Among the editors who are working today, do you want to single anyone out for exuberant praise?
That’d be terrible. No, I’d get in all kinds of trouble if I did that. One thing I will say is that, contrary to the old saw that no one edits anymore, it’s simply not true in my experience. There are a lot of really excellent editors.
I want you to try to reverse-engineer your list. Is there a line that connects, say, Jhumpa Lahiri to Bill O’Reilly to Edward P. Jones to Preston and Child? Is it voice?
I honestly don’t know, in part because the list of almost any agent accrues organically over many years. The ones you just mentioned all happen to be huge commercial successes in addition to whatever else they have in common.
The three things we tend to look at here are: Is this book potentially prize-worthy? Is it going to garner enormous critical attention and praise?
If not, is it enormously commercial? Is there a chance that this book will sell huge numbers of copies and be the book that you see everyone reading at the beach?
Lastly, is this book neither prizeworthy nor the book everyone’s going to read on the beach, but the first effort of someone who’s likely to become one of those two things?
If it’s none of those three things, we probably shouldn’t be representing it.
To pretend that there was some master plan in the creation of my list would essentially be a lie. If you think about Edward P. Jones, for instance, his first short story collection Lost in the City, is a masterpiece. It was a first book that garnered enormous attention but didn’t sell particularly well, although it won the PEN/Hemingway, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it garnered him a Lannan Foundation grant. But it was out of print for years afterwards, which is not that unusual for a very literary collection of short stories.
It was a decade later that he sent me The Known World. A year after that, it won the Pulitzer Prize and sold a million copies. I’d like to say that was my plan all along.
Did you feel the frisson you described earlier when you were reading The Known World?
Absolutely. Yes. One of the great privileges of the job is the occasion of being one of the first readers of a work of true greatness, and knowing it while you’re experiencing it. It was unambiguously a masterpiece in manuscript. And you typically still have the nagging suspicion that maybe no one else will recognize its genius other than you, but in that case that was an impossibility. It was too powerful a book not to become a classic.
What are some of the other high points in your career?
It’s hard to pick them—I wouldn’t want to leave anybody out. I have to say that seeing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list was absolutely thrilling. To me, not to Jhumpa.
Why was that?
Jhumpa is absolutely remarkable and is so completely focused on the work rather than what comes after. For her, the great satisfaction is in the process. She would tell you the same thing.
She was traveling at the time that we were waiting for the first week’s bestseller list. I called her and said, “Look, the list is going to come out probably around five o’clock. When I get it, do you want me to call you?” And she said, “No, it’s okay, you can just let me know tomorrow.”
Did you have some sense of how it would perform.
In advance of a big publication, and then the week of the publication, the publisher sifts through tea leaves and tries to get a sense of where it’s going to land. Is it going to be number five? Number two? The New York Times has their own impenetrable, opaque system.
It was reaffirming not only because Jhumpa is a friend and a client, but because she’s a truly great writer of short fiction. To have a short story collection debut at number one in this country was good news for everybody.
We’re entering an era where being in a very stable, big boat with a very powerful engine, and with an extremely well-trained crew all pulling in the same direction, is a very nice place to be.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand Twitter feeds that are all self-promotional. They’re boring. If you hook me by making me interested in what you have to say to begin with, and then slip one in every now and then, that’s palatable. But the people who post every single review they receive of their novels are very quickly unfollowed.
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Any low points you want to mention?
Oh my God, yes. I tell the agents here are that the list of authors I have passed on is far more impressive than the list of authors I represent. And they laugh and think I’m kidding and I wish that I were, but everybody misses something.
Every editor I’ve spoken to has an incredibly impressive list of bestsellers he or she has passed on, and every agent I know has a list of gems that they didn’t see, didn’t get around to reading, or weren’t in the mood for at the time. The only thing for it is to let it go. You have hold onto the ones that you were ready for, the ones that you did recognize, and especially the ones you nurtured and brought into the world.
And then the other thing: Every agent at some point fails to sell something. It feels like an enormous personal failure to the client. It’s an awesome responsibility to have someone entrust not just their baby over to you, but their literary life. To fail to find the best publisher for it feels like a very public failure. But it’s not nearly as public as it feels, because everyone’s much more worried about their own work than yours.
Some people think that if you’re Eric Simonoff or Binky Urban or Lynn Nesbit, this has never happened to you. But it’s happened to everybody. It’s the worst telephone call to make. There’s that call between the Paul Giamatti character and his agent in Sideways, where he’s standing outside the vineyard and she says, “We tried everybody.” That’s the worst.
Is there a circumstance in which you would advise a client to self-publish?
WME is actually positioned to publish an author’s works digitally if we deem that the best way to go. But without the marketing and publicity piece provided by publishers, you really aren’t doing much more than making the work available. This is the problem of self-publishing. Unless you have an enormous platform of your own, or a huge social media footprint, or a way to make your self-published work go viral, it’s like dropping it down a well.
The media stories that you hear about the wildly successful experience of self-publishing are usually three or four titles a year. Those are not great odds. They’re just not. The odds of being published by one of the mainstream publishers in New York and having your book actually sell a decent number of copies are pretty long too. Which makes you realize how much longer those odds are when you take out the marketing and publicity piece, or the triage of agents and editors, or all the other things that come from having a physical book in bookstores.
Can you describe what you mean by “platform?” How would you define a good one?
Platform is the ability to get the ability to get your message out to as many people as possible, who are already existing fans of yours in one form or another.
Bill O’Reilly has a very good platform. He has the highest rated cable news program on TV twice a day, every weekday. Every time he goes on television, he sells books. That’s a great platform, but it’s not the only platform. If you are a hugely committed tweeter, if you have an enormous following and people hang on your every tweet, you have a platform. You can reach a committed fan base, a committed readership. If you have a syndicated radio show, you might have an even bigger platform. If you have neither a radio show nor a big Twitter following but you speak to sixty speaking dates a year, you have a platform that is convertible into book sales.
Publishers find it enormously reassuring to think that they are not the only ones who are going to be drumming up business for a particular book, so “platform” is shorthand for that. Can you bring readers to us? Can you bring book buyers to us?
An agent once told me that the phrase she despises hearing an editor say the most is, “I just didn’t love it,” and that a close runner up is, “The platform just isn’t there.”
Well, we’re talking about different kinds of books, I think. Karen Thompson Walker, when we sold The Age of Miracles, did not have a platform. She was not on TV, radio, or social media. She wrote an amazing first novel. You didn’t read it and say, “I just didn’t love it.” You read it and said, “Oh my God, I have to have this book.” I said it before: Good isn’t enough.
Would you say that a platform isn’t enough?
Platform isn’t enough for a bad book. I think even with platform you need a good book. Consumers of all kinds of media care about content and quality. So it’s not enough to have a big platform. You also have to have a really good product to plug into that platform.
This is true of Bill O’Reilly’s books too, which have been enormously successful. If they weren’t good, if people didn’t love to read them, they wouldn’t be selling like they are, eighty weeks after initial publication. People really like them. Would they have been this successful without the platform? No, they wouldn’t have had the initial push to get them to a critical mass to explode the way they have. Nonfiction and fiction are very different in that respect.
I don’t resent either of those statements, “I just didn’t love it” or “the platform just isn’t there,” because it’s not fun publishing books that nobody reads. That’s not fun for anybody. It’s not fun for the author, and it’s really not fun for the publisher. And it’s not fun for the agent, because the agent has a second book from that author. If the first wasn’t read by anybody, that makes the second one impossible to sell.
A writer’s relationship with his or her agent is likely to outlast the relationship with any given editor. Such is the nature of the business. How can an author make the most of being inherited by a new editor?
It’s sadly and increasingly a fact of life, especially if it takes you more than a year or so to write your book, that at some point in your career you’ll be orphaned and inherited by someone else.
If at all possible, you should meet that person quickly and try to forge a feeling of ownership between editor and author. Editors are human beings and they like to take pride in their work. They would rather be instrumental to the process than peripheral to it. This is human, and normal. If they feel they are merely babysitting someone else’s author they will not have that feeling. And if they do not have that feeling, and they are given five minutes in a large marketing meeting to advocate for one of their books, they’re not going to advocate for your book.
It goes back to this question of relationships. The author-editor relationship, regardless of whether it’s the original acquiring relationship, the editing relationship, or the person who inherits the book merely to shepherd it through the remainder of the publishing process, is an important one. People work harder for people they are engaged with. And I hate to say it, but people work harder for people they like, and who they feel beholden to in some way. It’s also the agent’s responsibility to make sure that that book does not fall between the cracks.
How do you do that?
By being a pain in the ass. [Laughs.] And there’s a nice way to be a pain in the ass, and there’s a jerky way to be a pain in the ass, but sometimes it’s just a question of persistence and being a reminder. We all recognize that our actions have consequences. If an editor inherits a book and does a really good job, I’ll remember it. If an editor inherits a book and does a really bad job, I will remember it.
I think most editors still operate from a place of self-preservation and realize, if I do a good job on this person’s book I will get more business. You want to earn your acknowledgment in the book. You don’t want your acknowledgment to be obligatory. It’d be nice if you felt that you were acknowledged alongside the acquiring editor not because it was for form’s sake, but because you actually made a positive contribution to the book.
I get curious when an editor or an agent decides to get his feet wet and put his own name on the cover of a book.
Yeah, isn’t that amazing?
You’ve done it.
Only a little, really, and that was a fluke.
I’m interested in how it came to be, that book. [Sleepaway, a collection of stories about summer camp compiled by Simonoff, was published by Riverhead in 2005.]
I loved summer camp, obviously, and I noticed that a number of clients and other writers had written summer camp stories. Margaret Atwood, ZZ Packer, David Sedaris. I thought, “Wow, there are a lot of good writers writing about sleepaway camp.”
I was having lunch with Cindy Spiegel, who was then at Riverhead, and I said to her, “We’ve got to find someone to edit this thing, because it’s just lying there.” She said, “Why don’t you do it?” And she made me an offer to edit an anthology, so I edited an anthology. It sold hundreds of copies. [Laughs.] Still very proud of it.
It sold more than that! I looked it up.
It’s out of print, I think, but I’m sure there are plenty of copies floating around eBay. It’s a good book! Diana Trilling is in there, and Jim Atlas, and Lev Grossman.
What I’m curious about is if that experience changed your outlook. You were involved in a new way in publishing a book.
It certainly felt different—it gave me some appreciation for what authors go through. But I didn’t have the nail-biting, nerve-wracking experience of putting something out there and waiting for people to respond to it. That step was completely skipped.
I told Cindy and the publicist, “Just get me on one NPR show. That’s all I want. I want the experience of being in the studio, having someone ask me questions.” And they got me on one NPR show, and it was fun to be there with the headphones on.
One of the humbling things was that BookCourt, my local bookstore, offered a reading. And one thing I didn’t do was feel that I could invite every Tom, Dick, and Harry who I’ve ever met to this reading. I felt shy. I felt embarrassed about begging people to come. And as a result, very few people came. In fact, if the three authors who were reading and their editors and my family hadn’t come, it would have been a very, very sparse reading.
What role does groveling play in successfully publishing a book?
Every author has his own limits as to how much groveling he’s willing to do in the service of getting the word out about a book, how many and what kinds of favors to call in. I would never dictate to an author what I think she should do in that regard.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand Twitter feeds that are all self-promotional. They’re boring. If you hook me by making me interested in what you have to say to begin with, and then slip one in every now and then, that’s palatable. But the people who post every single review they receive of their novels are very quickly unfollowed.
What gets you excited about the way our business is changing?
I think there will always be some place for the physical book. There will always be a core group of people who are attached to the book as object, as my own children demonstrate. But I think the accessibility of books because of ebooks is enormously gratifying—to feel that we’re not losing sales.
I had an author, who will remain nameless out of respect for the publisher, whose book was selected by The New York Times as one of the top ten books of the year in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and was out of stock. Five years ago, you’d lose uncountable numbers of sales. When that happens today, especially with a novel, it’s hard to say how many sales you lose, because there’s the possibility that the customer will say, “I’ll read it on my device.” The feeling that you’re not losing a sale because your local bookshop doesn’t have a copy of the book is a great relief.
Eliminating the inefficiency of printing, binding, shipping, inventory management, and returns for everybody in the business is an attractive proposition—even as the notion of letting go of the look and feel and smell of the book is not attractive.
That authors and individual citizens are able to build up huge followings on social media from their living rooms and parlay that into book success is enormously exciting. And the fact that you can migrate from platform to platform, that you can write TV and film and books and you can lecture and you can be part of the larger media universe and still do what you do best, which is tell stories and string sentences together.
I remain an optimist. It’s a business for optimists. If you have a great book, you will find a readership for it. What else can I tell you?
When you’re looking to represent somebody for a book project, are you also thinking if it could be a movie or a miniseries?
I am always thinking that, but the answer isn’t always yes, and the answer not being yes doesn’t affect my decision one way or another.
Instead I’m thinking more in terms of what the client’s thinking. Does the client want this? Is the client looking to expand into other forms of storytelling? I recently began working with Stephen Chbosky, who wrote The Perks of Being a Wallflower, largely because he’s represented by WME for writing and screenwriting. He was finally able to take this novel he wrote in the late 1990s and put it on the screen in 2012. This book has sold incredible steadily since it was initially published, but the amazing thing was to watch it spike to number one, not when the movie came out, but when the trailer came out. You see what expanding into other media can do for a book, putting aside for the moment the author and the author’s career. It can give a book an entirely new life.
Do you have any predictions about the future of books?
I predict that people will continue to write them. I do feel that there is a persistent and insatiable desire for long- form prose—that there is something about the experience of disappearing into a long piece of writing that has enormous appeal to enough people in the world to maintain the publishing industry through the foreseeable future. It’s not replicable by film or television; it’s not replicable by video games or blogs. It is that experience of immersion, and the fact that it is both solitary and yet communal—that it requires quiet time alone in an incredibly hectic, overburdened world, and that the great satisfaction of it is talking to other people about what you read—that will never be replaced by anything else.
Let’s end on a high note. What are you grateful for?
Outside of a very happy personal life, I’m grateful to work in an industry in which all the people I engage with on a daily basis are involved in some way in the life of the mind. I’m grateful for the publishing community, the group of people who as I described essentially have grown up together in the business, and are all focused on the same thing, discovering great storytellers and bringing them to a readership. And I’m incredibly grateful to my colleagues in every one of these offices, all of whom are the best at what they do, and who allow me to glimpse their work in fields related to but different from the field that I’m in. I’m never bored. I’m always learning. I feel very, very lucky. I’ve got the best job in the world.
Michael Szczerban is an editor at Simon & Schuster.
Agents & Editors: PJ Mark
What makes a literary agent great? It is not necessarily editorial acumen, negotiation skill, or relationships with powerful editors, but rather the strength of an agent’s conviction about the writers and work that agent represents. Of course, being shrewd, tough, and connected doesn’t hurt—but the most important thing any of us in the publishing world can do is believe passionately in authors and their ability to communicate something real.
But where does that conviction come from? That is what I sought to discover by talking with PJ Mark, an agent whose clients are among the freshest voices in American writing, but whose path into the agenting business was anything but direct.
Mark made his way from Scottsdale, Arizona, where he played in a punk band, to New York City in 1990, where he founded Feed, an alternative literary journal, with his student loans. Soon thereafter he began to evaluate projects for Ballantine Books, and through a chance meeting while he waited tables at a macrobiotic restaurant, he became a book scout for foreign publishers. He later worked as a journalist covering the publishing industry, and since 2002 has been a literary agent, first at International Management Group (IMG), then Collins McCormick, McCormick & Williams, and now Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where he moved in 2010.
Mark’s list of authors includes five writers who have received 5 Under 35 honors from the National Book Foundation—Samantha Hunt, Grace Krilanovich, Dinaw Mengestu, Stuart Nadler, and Josh Weil—as well as many other notable writers, including Rachel Aviv, Rosecrans Baldwin, Jim Gavin, Shelley Jackson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Craig Thompson.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
I grew up in Arizona in the seventies and eighties, in what was then a small suburb called Scottsdale. I was the youngest of seven kids.
What was your first experience with reading?
I don’t have those memories of sitting in the back of the car reading or being in a library and borrowing books. I really struggled as a young person. I wasn’t a reader. I was a gay, poor, punk-rock kid in Scottsdale, and I fell into music instead.
That changed in high school, when I was the lead singer of a punk band. Through lyrics and music I began to understand the power of expression through writing. There was an album of spoken-word poetry released by Exene Cervenka from the punk band X and an African American poet named Wanda Coleman—literally a pressed vinyl album—called Twin Sisters that I listened to on a loop. They talked about cultural issues and outsider status, and that sort of alternative writing led me to the kind of people you would expect: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Those were the writers I fell into reading and really loved.
It took me a while to develop the skill to sit down with a book and to allow it to take me on a journey. With the vocabulary and reading issues I had when I was younger, I didn’t have the capacity to fully comprehend what I was reading, so I would just shut down.
What else was going on in your life? Were you acting out or involved in drugs?
Both of those things. I had a nihilistic view, and took a lot of risks and engaged in dangerous behavior. Then two things happened. The first thing was writing: learning to express myself creatively, and finding other creative people to engage with. That directed my energy toward something productive. The second thing was that my twenty-eight-year-old brother killed himself when I was eighteen. I saw that I was pointed toward a really self-destructive path. I saw that I had to get the fuck out of Arizona and change my life. I had to turn everything around.
I got into Arizona State University, but I was determined to get to New York, because it was the furthest place from where I was. I knew New York would allow the kind of creative exploration I was interested in. I wanted to write fiction.
Wow.
My mother was determined for us to have a different future than what she came from. We were first-generation college graduates, my brothers and sisters and I. She expected us to do something with our lives. I was good at working through the requirements of what was expected of me, but I floundered with traction and had to find my own way. That brought me on a path to publishing and directed me to make the decisions that I’ve made throughout my career.
How did you get to New York?
I applied myself and transferred to NYU as a junior in 1990. I was putting myself through school by working full-time, five nights a week, at Tower Records. It was hard to work until 2 AM, close up, and get to class at 8:30. I dropped out and decided that the best way to get what I wanted, which was then to be in publishing, was to delay my studies for a year and finish up at Hunter College. Hunter was a community of other students who were also putting themselves through school. There was no campus to lounge around in. You arrived and you got down to business and you left and you had the rest of your life, and that was very meaningful.
How old were you then?
I was twenty when I came to New York in 1990. And then in 1991, when I was still in school, I used my student loans to start a literary magazine that lasted a few issues.
Tell me about that magazine.
It was called Feed. The parenthetical was “Eat your critique,” which was just a preemptive fuck-you to anybody who had anything to say about it.
The idea was to encompass marginalized voices. There were some very cool queer-theory things happening at the time, and a lot of gay and ethnic and marginalized writers were finding traction. Cool stuff was happening at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. The Portable Lower East Side journal was being published. And Ira Silverberg had released High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings, which was mind-blowing for me.
At one point, I went to a poetry reading by David Trinidad at the New York Public Library. It was pouring rain, and Ira was there—he and David were partners at the time—and there was a writer, Rachel Zucker, who wound up being a student of Wayne Koestenbaum. David read to the three of us and then we had this four-person conversation. I told them that I was working on this literary journal, and Ira, in his infinite generosity, said, “You should come to my office and look at the CLMP,” which was a bound book of information about distributors and printers. Then he said, “If it’s useful, I can introduce you to people.” Ira was one of the first people I met in publishing and he really set me on a path. I’m very grateful for that.
Were you still playing in a band?
I had aspirations to be Ian Curtis, right? But I didn’t have a very good voice, and depressive music only goes so far. There was just no time for it, and there was no money in it.
I once auditioned for a band and lost my voice the next day. I thought it was a sign from the universe that it was the wrong thing to be doing. I was here to be in school, to be a writer, to be in publishing. So I redirected the energy towards curating a creative community of writers and friends.
I arrived as a young gay man in New York in the midst of the second half of the AIDS crisis. It is a very scary thing to suddenly have friends who were dying, and not know how to navigate a sexual world when you’re coming of age. But there were writers like Dale Peck, who was writing Martin and John. And a little bit later, Scott Heim was writing about this new queer coming-of-age.
After the High Risk anthology, Ira published a list of “High Risk” books and I bought and read every single one of those. They were voices of a very specific New York time, and they probably feel very dated now, but they were about rock and roll culture, drug culture, gay culture. Gary Indiana and David Trinidad and Dennis Cooper and June Jordan and Lynne Tillman—these were important voices at a very important moment for me. They crystallized what writing could be, and what books could be. They were seminal in the way that I viewed what was possible in fiction and nonfiction, and how one could express oneself.
These books became a part of you.
They did. Those writers became the rock stars for me. Those writers were marginalized, and that made me more interested in them. I felt that they were clearly saying something that needed to be said but weren’t given a larger platform to say it.
Tell me about the literary scene.
The community of reading was different in the 1990s. When something was reviewed in the New York Times, a new writer debuted, or someone was on the cover of the Book Review, it became part of the cultural conversation. It was your responsibility to read that book and to be engaged in that conversation. That was what you did. You read the New Yorker for their listing of readings, and looked at the Village Voice for what was upcoming. You went to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s and you saw those writers read and you were part of it in a way that just feels different now.
Alternative culture was different, too, because it wasn’t commoditized and it wasn’t gentrified. The East Village was rough. I was on Thirteenth Street between First and Second Avenues. Between Second and Third was a crackhouse and between First and A there were heroin dealers. Tompkins Square Park had been shut down. You also didn’t go much west of Eighth Avenue—that was also sort of scary. New York was grittier.
I browsed bookstores like I would browse indie record shops. I would browse through covers and see that an album was put out by 4AD, and buy it, or that it was from IRS Records, and think it would be amazing. I would see a book on the shelf from Grove, or Knopf, or FSG, and think that it must be important.
When did you realize that you could get a job in publishing and help bring those books into print?
In my senior year of college at Hunter, Ira introduced me to somebody who knew the assistant to Clare Ferraro, who was then at Ballantine Books. This was back when one publisher would publish a hardcover, and other publishers would buy the paperback rights. They would get these hardcovers in and evaluate whether they were viable as paperbacks. But there was such a volume that they needed readers.
I was paid thirty-five dollars per book. It would take me eight hours to read, and four hours to write a report on it. But I learned how to discuss literature in shorthand, and to identify what was viable and what was relevant. That was my first inkling that publishing is a business, and that there are decisions that go beyond art and have to integrate commerce. Sometimes it’s just art, and sometimes it’s just commerce, and that’s okay. But the beauty is in the intersection of both.
At that point, I was also waiting tables at a macrobiotic restaurant, so you can imagine how much money I was making. [Laughs.] A young woman kept coming in, and she would read galleys and the New York Times Book Review before it came out, and I thought that was astonishing. We would talk, and she eventually said, “I work at a company around the corner and we’re looking for an assistant. You should come in for an interview.”
That was Mary Anne Thompson’s scouting office. I was able to arrive at Mary Anne’s office with the reports I had written for Ballantine and a literary journal of writers I had scouted and published and say, “I’m sort of doing what you’re asking right now: I’m looking at contemporary writers and evaluating whether they can be published, and I’m also engaged in this conversation with a mainstream house.” Mary Anne hired me immediately.
Do you remember any of the books that you evaluated?
I wish I did. When you’re reading that kind of volume and you’re that tired, it all becomes a blur. I can’t claim to have recommended anything that was bought. I was probably getting the not terribly important books to decide whether they should be published. But it was a good exercise.
Would you talk a little more about how people inside the business determined whether those books were “terribly important” or not? Those decisions can seem pretty opaque to a writer.
At that time, when you were looking at a book for paperback publication, it was to see if you could grow the audience that had been established in the hardcover, blow out the amazing groundwork that had been laid, or find a book that had been overlooked and create a second life. That was when you could have a second life in paperback. Reinventing a book in paperback in the traditional way is not really possible anymore.
I don’t know why books were given to me, but I would assume there was a tier of projects that were considered very seriously because there was potential to make a lot of money off of them, and a lesser group of projects that were considered to see if any money could be made if they were published properly or differently. I’m assuming those were the books I was reading.
Clare Ferraro would never remember this, but I recall having a conversation or two with her and her assistant about why a book should be pulled from the stack for consideration.
What did you learn from those conversations?
That you have to trust your heart—that even if someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you are wrong. That was something I carried forth into scouting. That when I recommended a book to my clients, it didn’t matter if they disagreed. My opinion was true to me and the value of what I saw in the book was real. It might not be for them at that moment, or might not be for them for that list, but it didn’t negate my response.
That was very valuable to bring as an agent as well: to believe passionately in something, to be able to sell it to an editor, but also to recognize that it is not a failure if something doesn’t sell or doesn’t meet with the response that you hoped for. It just might not be the right time for that book, or there might be other factors that we can’t even see that are interrupting the process of acquisition.
A lot of people start out in this business in a tentative, indecisive way. But deciding that something is good is the first step to making others agree that it is good. I wonder where your conviction came from.
I have always felt that I want an emotional response to a work, whether it is a work of fiction or nonfiction or music. If I’m receiving an emotional response to whatever that work is, then I know it’s true. It’s operating with the capacity for honesty and generosity. That’s trusting the feeling you get when you’re reading something.
When you’re a book scout, you are reading a huge volume of books—eight to ten a week—and reporting on them. You have to be very clear, very quickly, about what you spend your time reading, and what your client should pay attention to. Your client is receiving not only submissions in their own country, but also international submissions from the United States and the U.K. You have to give them clarity about what they should spend their time on.
I was a junior person when I started with Mary Anne, and I was tasked with scouting the small presses. I was trying to find gems to break out, so my job involved seeing SoHo Press publish Edwidge Danticat, and saying, “Everyone should buy this”—and then seeing that happen, even before Edwidge had representation.
This was all pre Internet, pre e-mail. We heard about books that were on submission in hard copy and then called around to editors and their assistants to convince them to make a copy of a book and to leave it in a messenger bag for us to pick up. There was a series of steps that had to happen for us to even get the book in hand. And then we had to evaluate the stack and write a report, and then copy those books for our clients, copy the reports, copy all the scouting magazine reviews, and copy all the other reviews that were happening. We would send these huge packages internationally that would take two days to put together. That was every week.
You have to hone that skill very quickly: to say this is something engaging and fresh, this is not; this is going to sell for a lot of money and you should pay attention to it, and this is going to sell more modestly but has potential to break out.
The scout is probably one of the most invisible roles in publishing to an outsider.
Scouting has transformed tremendously since I was involved in it. I suspect there are different ways of doing business now, but basically scouts are hired by an international publisher in the U.K. or in another country to be aware of all of the material that’s being submitted at that moment. They have an ear to the ground to find out what people’s reactions are, what’s selling, and how much it’s selling for, and they try to secure that material and read and report on it as quickly as possible. They’re in competition with other scouts working for other companies, and they want their international publisher to get there first.
Scouting gave me a great bird’s eye view of publishing. I dealt not only with a range of publishers, but with agents of every scale, from independent shops to the bigger agencies and the more tony lists. It was a tremendous amount of exposure, and I formed relationships that have remained for the last twenty years. Stephen Morrison was a book scout with Maria Campbell at the same time I was scouting. Reagan Arthur was an editor at Picador with George Witte.
I also had the opportunity to travel to the book fairs, mostly Frankfurt and London, and got to see the world publishing community in action. It geared me towards recognizing what has potential internationally and what might be a harder sell.
How much do you interact with scouts now that you’re an agent?
I have some friends who are scouts, so I talk to them. But having been a book scout and then having also sold foreign rights at McCormick & Williams when I was there, I am okay with relinquishing the responsibility of the international market to my colleagues and working with them. They are on top of the movement of those markets and they are really the experts at this point.
I am eager to be involved in the selling of my books internationally to those foreign markets, but I don’t regularly meet with scouts and talk about my books. It’s hard when you’re friends with somebody to have them give a reaction to one of your projects that you don’t want to hear. To hear a scout not respond in the way that I hope is harder than to hear editors tell me that they’re turning something down.
So much of an agent’s job is hearing the word no and an editor’s justifications for it. Has the way you handle that kind of response evolved?
Oh, yes. As a new agent one can be devastated by hearing no. You’re putting yourself on the line with your taste, and you feel the responsibility of taking a writer on and that writer’s expectation for what you can deliver. It’s incredibly disappointing, but it can be devastating when you’re younger if you don’t understand that there are other factors at play. An editor can really love a book but not be able to push it through, and that is not a failure of you or of the project. It’s a moment in that publishing house.
We like to hear yes more than we like to hear no. But the other evolution as an agent is that the longer you do it, the more you understand what you can successfully sell. You gear yourself toward those projects that are going to make you money.
That’s interesting to hear from somebody who grew up in the punk scene.
The work I am attracted to is relevant and authentic and meaningful. It’s unexpected and creates a response. That can be something commercially minded, or it can be something strictly literary. But we are in a business and I have to earn my own keep, so I have to find projects that are going to get attention, find an audience, and sell.
I can’t sustain, and don’t want, a list of writers who are read by a very small group of people. It’s just not what I am interested in. I am interested in those voices exploring issues of identity and duality that can reach a broader audience, and sometimes they are more successful than others. My goal is to have books both in fiction and nonfiction that create dialogue and engagement as part of a larger cultural conversation. I don’t care about books that have no impact. Sometimes, though, I know that the impact is undetectable to me and to the writer, but the work is still reverberating because of its content or style.
I suppose it’s true, too, that even many popular books do not become a big part of mainstream culture.
That’s the problem of there not being as many readers as you would want. We have conversations within the publishing world about a book, and the larger cultural conversation happens externally. It’s always the hope that the book that we in publishing are all excited resonates externally in the buying world.
How long did you remain a scout with Mary Anne Thompson?
From 1993 until the very end of 1999. I had a good run, but I wanted to do other things, even though I didn’t know what those other things were. I had read a piece in the New York Times about Kurt Andersen founding an online company that would report on different media, like music and television and film and book- and magazine publishing, and politics.
I was familiar with Kurt because I was a Spy magazine reader, and because he had written a novel that I had read as a scout. But I was naive enough not to understand who Kurt Andersen was. I wrote him and said, “Hey, you’re starting this new online venture and I’m interested in exploring what that might be.” I told him what I did as a book scout and suggested that I could do that for him digitally. He really responded to that—the idea that I could report on Inside.com what submissions people were reading and what people were buying in real time blew his mind. I was hired. So was Sara Nelson, and we had a blast.
We worked together for a year and a half: Michael Hirschorn, Kurt Andersen, Sara Nelson, Lorne Manly, David Carr, Craig Marks, Joe Hagan, Todd Pruzan, Jared Hohlt, Greg Lindsay, Kyle Pope, Steve Battaglio. These key people within their industries all came together for this one venture, and we were for a year the white-hot center of media coverage. But it was the Internet version 1.0, and we couldn’t figure out how to monetize it properly. We launched as Publisher’s Lunch was about to launch. We had a lot of ambition about what we could do, and we disrupted things for a period of time, and then it ended after September 11.
That was my transition step. My reporting on projects about writers and auctions caught the eye of Mark Reiter, who was an agent at IMG. When David McCormick left IMG to start Collins McCormick, IMG needed a literary agent and Mark offered an amazingly generous opportunity to cut my teeth.
IMG’s literary department was unwinding, but it was an opportunity. It was just Mark Reiter, Lisa Queen, and me. I had not thought about being an agent until Mark asked me.
Had you thought about writing?
I wrote a terrible novel. A really, really terrible novel. And no, it is not discoverable. It does not exist in any form digitally. It is buried deep within a drawer in a remote undisclosed location. I discovered very quickly that real writers are those who wake up and believe that they cannot do anything else but write. That they will not survive if they are not writing.
In a way, writers are people who find ways to organize their lives to support their writing.
Yes, I think that’s a terrific way to state that. And very few writers can support themselves completely independently from their writing. That’s because of the nature of payout on a book contract. Even a very lucrative book contract is paid off over the course of two years, and when you’re taking 40 percent of that money to pay an agent and pay taxes, you are working with a very small margin. I do have writers who are fortunate enough to be able to survive on their writing. But most writers are not able to do that.
I didn’t have that drive. While I was writing that novel, it was what I wanted to do, but when it was finished, I saw that I didn’t really have anything to say—or if I did have things to say, I didn’t have the language or experience to say them. The book felt false.
I was able to recognize that and put it aside. But that experience reinforced that I do have this creative instinct, and that I could cultivate those impulses and ideas with other people who were more skilled, and who could actually execute them on the page. I could bring my own creative perspective into shaping the work with the writer.
IMG was an opportunity to be paid a really decent salary, take a lot of risks, and make a lot of failures. I didn’t have a clear mentor or guide, so I learned through trial and error. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. That can only last so long. You have to get it together and step up.
What sort of mistakes did you make?
I took on things that I thought would be financially viable, but which I didn’t really care about. I thought they would sell and that I was employed to make money for the company, and to that end I should just find books that were a commodity. But I quickly learned that if your heart isn’t in a project it’s very difficult to sell it, and people recognize that. I learned that agenting was going to be much harder than I expected, and that I have to really love everything that I take on. I have to be determined to go to thirty-five people even if they keep saying no.
My first writer when I was at Inside.com, Joe Hagan, and I became friends. His wife, Samantha Hunt, was starting to publish in McSweeney’s, and she sent me a seventy-page prose poem called The Seas. And I thought: “This is brilliant! And I have no idea what to do with it!”
Through a very generous relationship she had with Dave Eggers, she worked that book into a novel. Sam was my first fiction client, and her book was the first novel that I sold. We had a lot of firsts together. She was in the first group of writers to be named “Five Under Thirty-Five” by the National Book Foundation. She was the first writer whose work I sold to the New Yorker. We’ve had a lot of nice milestones in our growing up together.
And you just recently sold a big book by Joe Hagan—a biography of Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone.
Right! I have talked to Joe over the years about many, many projects. The great thing about Joe and our relationship is that we could talk out an idea and very quickly realize that he wasn’t interested in sustaining it over the course of writing the book. We have known each other for fourteen years. Patience is the story of my life.
How long were you at IMG?
A year and a half. And then the writing was on the wall. When [the founder of IMG] Mark McCormack died, it was clear that the company was going to go through a transition. Lisa Queen told me I should reach out to David McCormick. I met with him and Nina Collins, and they said, “You can be a part of our shop, but we don’t have any room, so you would have to work from home.” I did that for about a year, and then Collins McCormick moved to Bond Street and I had my own office.
Did you have a fire in your belly to prove yourself?
The fire in my belly was hunger for food. [Laughs.] I had to work my ass off to make a living. I was not paid a salary and every dime I made was self-generated. Once we moved to Bond Street, I took on foreign rights and that gave me a little bit of an income stream, but I was still unsalaried and trying to develop my list.
The dark secret about agenting is that it takes time to build a list and to get traction. It took three years to feel like I was on my feet. I started as an agent at thirty-two years old, so I already felt I was late to the game. But I had relationships with editors who were very patient with my early submissions, when they weren’t up to par or needed work. They would give my material a read because they wanted me to succeed, and would give generous feedback about what wasn’t working. I learned quickly, and by the time we moved to Bond Street, I had sold books for six figures. I was confident I was on track.
The beautiful thing about being in publishing is that it’s a little like gambling. You never know when your number is coming up and a book is going to hit. The Seas was a novel that was turned down by a lot of people, and MacAdam/Cage bought it for more money than they had spent on a novel previously. Sam got a tremendous amount of attention for that book, and we did well.
Whom did you represent early on?
It was one writer bringing me another. Samantha Hunt brought me Sarah Manguso. Then, because I was working with Sarah, Ed Park came in. People kept connecting me to their friends and my list grew. I took on Rosecrans Baldwin when I was at Collins McCormick.
Then, in 2005, there was a shift in the arrangement between David and Nina Collins and the company folded. It was right before the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was tricky. I went to Frankfurt to represent Amy Williams’s and David McCormick’s lists but I had no idea what I was going to return to. While I was in Frankfurt, I negotiated a deal over the phone, with David and Amy, who wanted to re-form the agency with me as a part of it.
I loved working with David and Amy. I learned so much from both of them, about instincts and business. When to talk, and when not to talk, in a negotiation. What to expect, what to demand. David and Amy were my real first mentors and the people I turned to for advice and for guidance.
One of the first novels that I sold was The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. I read that in June 2005. I had a sense things were tricky within the agency. Dinaw and I were going back and forth on some revisions for the book, and I decided that it would be good to submit it around Frankfurt. By the time the company was re-forming, I had sold Dinaw’s book. I was standing on the corner of 23rd Street when I did it, because there was no office. I was working with David and Amy in Amy’s apartment, sharing her living room on the Upper West Side.
That set the tone, I felt, for whatever the next step was going to be for me. There were lots of great moments after that. But then at some point my list was becoming bigger, and the work I needed to do as the foreign-rights agent was not sustainable—I couldn’t effectively do both. And that was the moment that an opportunity presented itself at Janklow & Nesbit. My next step was to come here in 2010.
Tell me about making the transition from one place to another.
Moving from an agency like McCormick & Williams to an agency like Janklow was about servicing my clients in the best way possible. I was aware that as my clients received more and more attention and acclaim, they were getting eyed by other agents. I needed to be able to provide them with the kind of attention they deserved.
Not just from you, but institutionally?
Exactly. This company had a history of doing that, from a contracts department negotiating terms that I wouldn’t be able to negotiate independently to a general counsel who is anticipating the changing landscape way ahead of what I could possibly anticipate to a foreign rights department of four engaged, really integrated agents who intimately understand the market.
Having the opportunity to work with Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit and Tina Bennett was really exciting. Tina became a very good friend and a terrific confidante. It was incredibly valuable just to run scenarios by her and to learn from her experience. And my list grew and exploded. That first year I think I sold twenty-three books.
What connects the work of the writers you represent?
There are a few loose associations. I’m interested in explorations of religious identity, probably because I came from a born-again Christian family. My brother converted our family during the seventies campus movement. We had Bible studies in our house and groups of teenagers came in to play the guitar and read Bible verses and converse. I was allowed to be a part of that, and I loved those times. Everything felt safe. It was, weirdly, a joyful part of my life, because it provided a sense of community and belonging. Children were valued in that community and I felt looked after. So, faith is a general theme of books that I like—and the subversive or not obvious ways that faith can be explored.
I’m also interested in sexuality. There is a blurring of binary gender roles, and a fluidity to gender and sexuality, that I’m interested in. There are people who explore that in their nonfiction work, like Maggie Nelson or Wayne Koestenbaum, whose beautiful collection of essays Farrar, Straus and Giroux published last year. He talks about how art and culture influence the man he became. But he looks through a queer eye at these things.
I’m interested in marginalized and underrepresented voices, whether that is related to ethnic or national or cultural identity. Dinaw Mengestu brings a perspective to what the immigrant idea is that subverts the idea of the immigrant narrative. Stuart Nadler’s first collection explored the relationship between fathers and sons and Jewish identity.
All of those books are having a larger cultural conversation and prompting responses, I hope, in readers. I look for that dialogue when I read something. If it doesn’t give me that response, I know it’s not for me. I see plenty of intellectually rigorous, smart, good, ambitious fiction that doesn’t have this kind of heart, and so it’s not for me.
Would you give me an example of a book that spoke to you?
Ismet Prcic is a beautiful example of a writer with a punk rock ethos, cultural ambition, and a pure heart. I read a piece of his in McSweeney’s and contacted him. He sent me a 420-page manuscript—it may even have been longer. It was a rant. It was parts of a novel. It was a story of war and coming of age and immigration and fear and damage and fracture. I flipped out over it. It was so ambitious and so smart, and it was making me happy and sad and I had a pure emotional response to the book.
I sent that submission everywhere, and that book freaked people out. They didn’t know what to do with it. We got so close with so many people and it just kept getting killed at the top. Then Lauren Wein and Morgan Entrekin at Grove recognized that there was real brilliance in that voice and that the book ought to be published. They took a risk. In the end, Shards won or was shortlisted for a long list of prizes, and we made money on the book and established this tremendous voice.
There are incredible, smart young editors who have their ears to the culture and can recognize the future in the writing they see. It is devastating to me when a young editor loves something, but hears “no” from the boss. My career has been because people have taken risks with me and allowed me the room to make mistakes and to have successes. It is very aggravating to see how afraid of taking a risk the corporate machine can be.
You’re talking about building a literary list, not just turning a profit.
A literary list needs to get critical attention and awards and have a conversation with a community of readers. It should also sell, and we hope that it sells very well. But a literary list also attracts other writers to it. It is magnetic. A more commercial writer is attracted to the literary merit represented on that list, and that will make a publishing house more money. And of course there are those literary authors who break out in a very big way, whether on their first or second books or even three or four or five books later. The returns on taking those risks are evident.
Who are the publishers who recognize the value you see in cultivating that kind of list?
They’re literary houses that you would assume that they are. Farrar, Strauss; Grove; Knopf; Houghton. They’re publishers who are saying that the market for a book might be modest, but they understand the importance of that book within the market.
Of course, all publishers take risks. If we knew the secret to making a book successful we would be printing money. The fact is that the cultural landscape and the interests of readers are always shifting. Trying to forecast that is a risk. It’s arbitrary. But there is some skill to it. The skill is in recognizing individual and collective successes and failures. You know, realizing that you do not publish this book this kind of book very well, and therefore this kind of submission isn’t right for you, or that you have had luck breaking out this kind of writer so you’re willing to take a risk on someone similar. The worst kind of publishing, and the worst kind of agenting, occurs when you throw something against the wall just to see what happens.
How did you learn to negotiate?
My relationships with editors in submission and in negotiation are always pretty transparent. I think it’s just through experience that you learn how to negotiate. You learn to trust your instincts about whether you’re working toward closing a deal with the right components: the finances, the editor, the author. All of those pieces have to fit. You know when it doesn’t, and when it’s going to be a problem. Sometimes there is no other option, but it just requires more work.
From your vantage point as an agent, what makes a great editor?
When I’m selling a book to an editor, I want that editor to have an intuitive response to it. I want that editor to love the book as much as I do. I want editors to call me and tell me they stayed up all night, or they freaked out, or they have been hand-selling the book in-house. Then I know they are not going to give up later on when things get hard. Because things are going to get hard! The book is going to be up against another book in-house that is possibly going to be getting more attention. Or the book didn’t get the review we hoped for, or the marketing money we want. Or the booksellers aren’t responding, or we’re having trouble getting blurbs.
My most valuable relationships with editors are ones in which I’m working very intimately with them through every step of the process through publication and beyond, to figure out ways for the material to move forward and get the attention it deserves. I remind them that they have a responsibility to the writer. I remind them when things aren’t going appropriately. I remind them that they need to be investing more money and remind them that they need to be doing more for publicity and remind them that their edits are overdue.
My job is to run interference between the editor and the author on difficult conversations that the author can’t have. One of my best skills is that I am able to back into difficult conversations very easily, and have those conversations end in a result that is beneficial to my writer. My hope is always that I’m working with an editor who understands that we need to be collaborative and that we need to figure out together how to make this work.
What are some essential components to breaking a book out?
It’s essential to understand how to talk about the book so that everyone is on the same page when they’re pitching it. How I pitch the book to the editor comes from my discussions about the book with the author. I have tried to articulate their intent as clearly as possible. Then that editor needs to take that information and have a response to the material and articulate that same intent to their colleagues. Once the book is acquired, it’s essential to make sure that we’re on the same page regarding what’s said to the sales force, what the sales force says to the booksellers, what the booksellers say to the customers, what the publicity department says to reviewers, and what the marketing department puts up for public consumption. You must figure out how to position the book apart from other titles.
There are many things that we do, and they’re all part of the repertoire, but everyone has to be doing them. Not every book is going to have the same response, and attention for a book isn’t going to manifest in the same way. Sometimes it’s just somebody hustling and getting a book out there.
What can writers do to make sure they get the best shot at success?
It is important for a writer to be a part of a literary community. A writer needs to read and buy books and attend readings and support fellow writers. It’s very difficult to engage others in supporting that writer’s work if that’s not happening. Sometimes it is the responsibility of the agent and editor to bring that writer into a community.
I don’t believe that Twitter sells books. But readers need and want to feel connected to a writer, so it is the writer’s responsibility to learn how to do that—whether it’s having a Facebook page or packing books in the back of a car and setting up readings if a publisher can’t pay for a book tour. Going to festivals, writing for online magazines, publishing work in journals.
Have you ever worked with somebody who was originally self-published?
I have not. I don’t know if I have a good viewpoint on self-publishing. I know there are success stories, but it just seems like a very hard road. It’s already very difficult for readers to discover new writers. I haven’t seen a road map for self-publishing success for the kind of writers that I work with.
I wanted to ask you about genre fiction. You represent some novels with dystopian, sci-fi, and fantasy elements.
Just as I was attracted to reading marginalized texts in my formative years, I was interested in books that experimented with form. A lot of time that meant science fiction or fantasy or comic books. I love the literary interpretation of those genres. Then, having Sam Hunt as one of my first writers—somebody who plays with form and time and reality—really laid the groundwork for attracting writers like Lucy Corin and Ramona Ausubel and Grace Krilanovitch. Now Josh Weil is playing with dystopian concepts in his new novel.
I love people pushing outside of what is typical. On the other end of the spectrum, I also love things really rooted in reality that are very clearly sincere and honest and generous, which was why Josh Weil’s novellas first blew me away. His characters were isolated men longing for connection, and the emotional components of those individual novellas were so strong that it was undeniable.
I’m not a genre reader, so I’m not one going for strictly sci-fi. I respond to the books that can cross over. Writers who play with form broaden their audience in a way, because they can hit a literary audience and also a genre audience. A lot of times genre allows you to get at the root of something through a narrative engine that couldn’t exist in a typical literary novel.
It can be a different way to show what’s actually happening in our world.
Exactly. It’s another prism, a spiky piece of mirror that’s reflecting the narrative in a different way. I love that.
What are the other things in the culture that your passionate about?
I love documentaries because I get immersed in a world very quickly and can digest it and feel like I’ve had an experience. As I get older, I get more interested in other cultural touchstones, whether that’s opera or experimental music or art or dance. I devour magazines all the time. I like media and stimulation and creativity. Television, too, but I don’t have shows I religiously watch. I would prefer to see a movie. I think the last real series I committed to was Battlestar Galactica. I find the commitment of time difficult.
That’s interesting. In another interview, the agent David Gernert noted that the Netflix series House of Cards called its episodes “chapters.” That made me wonder if soon people will feel the same sense of accomplishment after watching ten hours of television that I feel after reading a literary novel.
There is a sense of accomplishment. The requirement of sitting down and reading a novel is that the story is propelling you forward, and the same is true of sitting down to binge-watch a series. Both are narratively driven impulses, and there is probably an overlap. But I don’t sit down and read a novel from start to finish, in the same way I don’t sit down and binge-watch Orphan Black. I do most of my pleasure reading on the subway to and from work. A half hour a day, five days a week—it takes a long time to get through books.
It must be every writer’s aspiration to find out that the New Yorker wants to publish her work. Can you take me through what it’s like to submit a story to a magazine like that?
I submit to the top-tier journals for my clients: the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Zoetrope, Harper’s, the obvious places. I do this almost exclusively for fiction. I have relationships with those editors. I know what they are looking for, and I know that when I submit something, it’s going to be read and that I’m going to get a response. But if each client has a finite amount of time with me, it’s not a great use of our time together for me to submit to smaller magazines and journals. I depend on my writers to handle that on their own.
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Is sending a story to a magazine substantially different from sending a manuscript to a book editor?
No, it’s in fact the same thing. Success is often in knowing what’s appropriate for an editor and what’s not—what an editor has previously responded to, and what that editor may or may not be able to push through. It’s knowing your audience. And it is extraordinary when Tin House or The Paris Review or The New Yorker want to publish a piece of work by your writer. It’s an amazing thrill to be able to make that call.
What about the editorial work you do with an author? Are there any differences between stories and novels?
No, there aren’t. I read both as closely, and I give as many detailed notes as needed. I will read a short story and do a two-page letter if I think it needs the work, and I do the same thing with the novels that I’m reading. I’m very fortunate to have a colleague who reads along with me. To have a conversation with her before I have the dialogue with the author is incredibly valuable. It helps me articulate my response and things that I might not have seen.
A writer understands very clearly, very quickly, whether an agent understands her work. Sometimes I can really love something and my response to the work is not what that author wants to hear, and I’m not the right agent for that author. Sometimes I want work to be done on a book that the author doesn’t want to do. If I was to take that book on, and the work wasn’t done, and the work was rejected by editors, all I would think is, “What if we had made those changes?”
When I submit something, I know that I am right. Even when people are rejecting that book: I know they are wrong. The value of that book is the value that I see. It might not be appropriate for them, but their reaction isn’t my truth. I need to find the editor who mirrors my reaction.
I don’t want to interfere with a writer’s work or muck it up, but I want a writer to value our engagement and the time that I’m giving their work. Ultimately it’s the author’s book and he can take my response or not, and there are plenty of times when we’re in the process of revision that I want something changed and an author is not willing to do it. It’s his vision and his book, and it’s important for him to have it be his.
Do you have any guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilt about anything. I just have pleasures. [Laughs.]
Good for you!
I’m sort of unapologetic with my interests. I’m not ashamed of what I’m interested in because I feel it’s just a further expression of who I am. I like to watch television sometimes, I like to watch movies, I like to see Broadway shows, I like high art, I like camp, I like kitsch.
The flip side of that is that I don’t feel guilty or ashamed about the stuff that I don’t know. I always feel like I’m learning. There are plenty of books that I have not read. I’m not ashamed that I haven’t read them because I hope to get to them at some point. Part of the joy of being alive is exploring and finding those things that you don’t know.
Is fiction harder to sell than nonfiction?
I think it’s dangerous to say that nonfiction is easier to sell than fiction, but I think that it’s true. You can make an argument for an audience in nonfiction more clearly than you can in fiction. For fiction, you’re reliant on a lot of things lining up to find an audience. That’s what I was getting at earlier—that it’s imperative to position a novel with enough identity to break out from other fiction and to find that audience.
I don’t know the statistics, but I wonder if people read less fiction than they do nonfiction because they don’t understand why they should be interested in a novel. Of course, you can sell nonfiction on a proposal, but a novelist has to write the whole thing first. If a proposal doesn’t sell, you may just come up with a different idea and try again. It’s harder to come up with another novel very quickly, or with the same enthusiasm.
Can you imagine doing anything else with your life?
No, but at one point I couldn’t imagine being an agent. I think the kind of creative engagement that I have with my writers, and seeing the reaction from readers to their work, is immensely satisfying. It’s a privilege to be a part of the creativity of these writers and to feel like I’m helping change a writer’s life but also putting ideas forth.
Maggie Nelson sent me something just recently. She has a book, The Art of Cruelty, which was about representations of cruelty in high and low culture. She sent me an article from BOMB in which Matthew Barney talks about something that he’s working on in response to her book. That’s bananas. The conversation that Maggie started, and which I helped put forth, is having its own dialogue independent of us.
That’s what books do. That’s what’s exciting about not knowing the life a book can take. On paper it can look like a book is not successful, but that book could have changed the life of a reader. You may never know. That is amazing to me. The impact of that can’t be lost.
Do you get a physical sensation when you read something you want to take on?
There is a physical experience, and I want to talk about that. But each of us has his or her own truth. When we see that reflected in something else, that is authentic. But what is true to you may not be true to me, and what affects you may not affect me in the same way.
The experience of reading something on submission that speaks to me as authentic, or articulates something I have been unable to put into words, or surprises me, creates a feeling that is very hard to deny.
There is a physical manifestation of that. I felt it when I read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, physically shaking and knowing that it was a book that I had to be a part of. Talk about a book about isolation and loneliness and longing! I read that book right after my mother had passed in 2005 and I was numb. That was the first thing I had read in about eight weeks that sparked a response. I immediately recognized it: “Oh, right, this is what it means to be alive again.”
You represent Choire Sicha, who cofounded The Awl, and there’s a lot of other interesting literary activity happening online. Do you find writers on the web?
The web is a place where agents are finding interesting writers. I am not online enough to be finding writers there. I am so occupied with my clients and the material that’s coming in that it’s difficult for me. I’m not online during the day and I refuse to go online at night because it would be impossible to decompress. I am reliant on journalists and writers like Choire and Ed Park to tell me about writers who are doing interesting things.
A lot of new nonfiction writers are exploring their ideas online because that is the form and venue available to them. I see those stories when they reverberate widely, and hear about those pieces that could be the inspiration for something larger. The online form is just another way for writers to explore their work and get their work out there.
If you were to move to New York City today as a twenty year old, I see you starting a literary website rather than a print journal.
If I was a young person now arriving in New York and had all of the same instincts I had in 1990, I would start a journal online immediately and publish new fiction and photography and new-form journalism. I would absolutely find those writers and explore those options. And it would cost me nothing, by the way. It would not have been the student loans that I paid off for the next ten years in order to produce a bound literary journal to be distributed by Ingram.
I think writers feel isolated outside of New York, but writers are available to go online and to submit their work and to get readers for their work, and to be on websites where people are reading each other’s work and giving feedback and to be engaging in that way.
You’ve had a pretty varied set of experiences. Do you think you could have taken any shortcuts?
I know that everything that has happened in my life has led me to now. It is very clear, from meeting Ira Silverberg to reading for Clare Ferraro to working for Mary Anne Thompson and then Kurt Andersen, to agenting and arriving where I am today. I see the through-line. I see the evolution that was necessary at every step along the way. I don’t think I could have created a shortcut.
The interesting thing is: What’s next? How does my list evolve? How do I change? How do my interests continue to grow? Discovering that is the satisfaction of this work. The really exciting part of being an agent is that the book that will propel me to the next step is potentially in my inbox right now.
Michael Szczerban is a senior editor at Regan Arts.
Agent Advice: PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail agentadvice@pw.org or write to Editor, Poets & Writers Magazine, 90 Broad Street, Suite 2100, New York, NY 10004. Questions accepted for publication may be edited for clarity and length.
Areas of interest: Literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, journalism/investigative reporting, memoir, pop culture, graphic novels
Representative clients: Samantha Hunt, Sarah Manguso, Dinaw Mengestu, Ed Park, Andrew Rice, Craig Thompson, and Josh Weil
Looking for: Query letters
Preferred contact: Postal mail
Agency contact:
Janklow & Nesbit Associates
445 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022
(212) 421-1700
www.janklowandnesbit.com
About three months ago, I sent a synopsis of my novel as well as a cover letter to six literary agents whom I researched and found to be interested in the kind of fiction I write. I haven’t heard from any of them and I’m wondering when I should follow up with queries about my proposal. I don’t want to be pushy, but at the same time, life’s short.
Andy from San Francisco
It’s fair to follow up with them if you haven’t heard back after six weeks; it’s likely an oversight. Send an e-mail that says you are checking in to see if they had a chance to consider your query and that you look forward to hearing from them soon. Be emotionally detached, and don’t take it personally. If you don’t hear from them, move on to other agents. Your letter may be in a pile on an overwhelmed assistant’s desk, or stuck in his e-mail inbox or in his desk drawer. Or it’s in a stack the agent intends to get to, and feels guilty about not addressing more quickly. Unfortunately, most agents do a kind of triage on the volume of material that moves through their office—but most of them take queries seriously.
What do you look for in a query letter? How much do you need to know about plot versus potential marketing tactics in order to make the decision to request a partial manuscript?
Luke from Nashville
Here are the things I look for in a query letter: a distinct pitch, a short tease of the plot (set up the story and make me want to read more), and a comprehensive bio. I take notice if it’s a referral, or when a query suggests the author knows the kinds of books I handle. I prefer a short, clear letter rather than one that is overwritten or opaque. By which I mean, get to it: Know how to talk about your work succinctly. And, in general, keep it to one book per pitch. When I read a query, I am going with my gut in deciding if I want to see more material. There’s no real trick. Your pitch may remind me of a novel I loved, or one I couldn’t sell, or something I recently read and passed on, or one I wished I had represented.
I don’t care as much about an author’s explaining the potential marketing strategy, and don’t need quotes from friends and family or workshop or conference readers about how much they love your writing. As for the bio, I admit I am partial to queries that show some publishing history, that the writer has done the groundwork of sending writing out and getting it picked up by journals or magazines. This is especially true of short story writers. It’s not mandatory (though it almost is for nonfiction), but it’s nice to know, when considering someone’s submission, that the editor of a magazine, journal, or Web site also thinks the writer is doing good work. Still, agents want to discover something exciting, and I’m always up for being surprised.
Lastly, some turnoffs: jokey queries; queries written by hand; stationery that features images of quills and ink pots and books; e-mail queries with hundreds of agents in the “To” field; e-mail queries sent from companies that solicit agents on behalf of writers; queries that describe the work as “a fictional novel”; and especially that spam query I received almost every day for six months about a novel called “Elizabeth.” Also arrogance. And desperation. Just be confident in your work.
Agent Advice: The Complete Series
The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org
Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.
Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.
Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.
Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”
Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.
Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.
Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.
Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.
Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.
Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.
Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.
Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.
PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.
Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent's role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
Seventy-Eight Agents to Follow on Twitter
We did the work for you and found the most active and insightful agents to add to your Twitter feed. The seventy-eight listed below share with their followers upcoming pub dates, news, reading recommendations, and more. For more agents, visit our Literary Agents Database.
Noah Ballard @NoahBallard
Monika Woods @booksijustread
Ginger Clark @Ginger_Clark
Julie Barer @juliebarer
Amelia Atlas @ameliaatlas
Adam Eaglin @aeaglin
Caroline Eisenmann @CarolineMEisen
Ross Harris @rossharris1
Carrie Howland @ECarrieHowland
Allison Hunter @AllisonSHunter
Jeff Kleinman @FolioLiterary
Duvall Osteen @AragiAuthors
Renée Zuckerbrot @RZAgent
Danielle Svetcov @dsvetcov
Ayesha Pande @agent_ayesha
Alia Hanna Habib @AliaHanna
Alice Tasman @AliceTasman
Andrew Lownie @andrewlownie
Betsy Lerner @BetsyLerner
Brettne Bloom @Brettne
Carly Watters @carlywatters
Carol Mann @carolmannagency
Chris Parris-Lamb @thegernertco
Claudia Ballard @wme
Curtis Russell @CurtisPSLA
Daniel Lazar @DanLazarAgent
David Haviland @davidhaviland
Deborah Schneider @deborschneider
Brian DeFiore @DeFiore
Dorian Karchmar @DorianKarchmar
Elisabeth Weed @elisabethweed
Elyse Cheney @ElyseCheney
Emily Forland @EmilyForland
Emma Sweeney @EmmaSweeneyESA
Emma Patterson @EmPat222
Farley Chase @farleychase
Ryan Fischer-Harbage @fischerharbage
Christy Fletcher @FletcherChristy
Gary Morris @garymmorris
Katie Grimm @grimmlit
Jenni Ferrari-Adler @JenFerrariAdler
Jessica Papin @jkpapin
Joanne Wyckoff @JoanneWyckoff
Joy Harris @JoyHarrisAgency
Kate Garrick @kategarrick
Katherine Fausset @Kfauss
Kimberly Witherspoon @kwspoon
Laura Biagi @LauraJBiagi
Laurie Abkemeier @LaurieAbkemeier
Laura Dail @LCDail
Liza Dawson @LizaDawsonAssoc
Lucy Carson @LucyACarson
Mary Evans @MaryEvansInc
Melissa Flashman @melflashman
Meredith Kaffel @mere215
Miriam Altshuler @MiriamAltshuler
Peter Steinberg @PeterSteinberg1
Rayhané Sanders @rayhanesanders
Rena Rossner @renarossner
Sarah Burnes @sarahburnes
Samantha Shea @sb_shea
Seth Fishman @sethasfishman
Stuart Krichevsky @skagency
Sarah Levitt @slevittslevitt
Sarah Yake @slyyake
Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts @soumeya_b
Rachel Sussman @SussmanRachel
Sarah Bowlin @svbowlin
Michelle Tessler @tessleragency
Bill Clegg @TheCleggAgency
Tina Wexler @Tina_Wexler
Uwe Stender @UweStenderPhD
Vicky Bijur @VBLA
Joseph Veltre @veltre
Rachel Vogel @Vogelrachelm
William Clark @wmclarkassoc
Zoë Pagnamenta @zoepagnamenta
A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor
The following essay was adapted from remarks given at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner, In Celebration of Writers, on March 28 in New York City.
In my senior year of college, having discovered that I generally liked working on other people’s prose a great deal more than my own, I confided to a professor that I was thinking of trying to become an editor. “Pretty thankless job,” she said. The truth is, despite its moments of frustration and overwhelm and failure, I have never found the job thankless.
More than anything, there is this: the sublime moment—and it never stops being sublime—when you get to attend, as beautiful, meaningful, and original work emerges in the world. When I gave birth to my daughters, one of my sisters-in-law said, “It is one of the rare experiences for which ‘miracle’ is not an overstatement.” It’s not an overstatement for the birth of art, either. What’s most miraculous is the “let there be” of it—the way a new and unique something yet again emerges from the wordless deep.
The sense is that the book is trying to communicate what it wants to become, how it wants to incarnate itself. Masha Gessen recently spoke of this process in an interview: “I know what my objectives are and I know what the topic is, and then I’m just reporting. I walk around for a bit, literally, bike and walk, and then suddenly, I get an idea of what it should be, what the structure is. I can’t tell you how I came up with this.” Peter Matthiessen thanked John Irving for his comments on the sprawling early draft of what would become his monumental Shadow Country back in “the book’s cretaceous days, when the whole was still inchoate, crude, and formless.” And when Matthiessen died, just before we at Riverhead had the precious honor of publishing his final book, Irving mourned the loss of “a friend I dared to show what I was up to, when I was still unsure of what it was.”
At its best—and it is often this good—editing means getting to be such a friend, and entering into that strange and almost primal process of divining the shape the work is trying to assume. It was Matthiessen himself who gave me my first experience of being taken seriously as an editor, back when I was an assistant to the formidable Jason Epstein, and Peter was working on a collection of stories. One day he asked if I would look at one he’d been laboring over. Something was hampering it, but he didn’t know what. I read it and instantly saw—or rather, felt—what was off: The story was constructed on a hinge, and the hinge was stuck, much as an actual hinge might be.
It’s as if writer and editor have their eyes not on each other but on the shape of the emergent work, and this angle of approach is wonderfully liberating, breaking down barriers and kindling an immediate intimacy that may be my favorite thing about my job. This past fall, I was invited to give a talk at a conference on Ivan Doig, the great memoirist and novelist of the West. I puzzled over what to say. Writers and editors don’t talk about what a work means, I realized, we talk about how it’s made. Ivan and I began with Bucking the Sun, a novel that opens with a couple found drowned in a truck at the bottom of the Missouri River. Revisiting our correspondence of twenty years ago in the online archive, I was struck by how unceremoniously we got down to business: The mystery of who these characters were was a thread that needed to be pulled more firmly through the entire book.
When I think about the writers and books I have worked with, it’s the dialogue about shape that I most remember. A draft of a story in which a kind of sonic boom goes off at the beginning demands an answering boom at the end. Or: Rather than trying to launch six complicated characters at the outset, how about introducing them one by one, like a juggler putting balls into the air? Perhaps not surprisingly, all my career I have been drawn to writing and writers who are structurally inventive and do not fit into easy categories: fiction/nonfiction, narrative/essay, poets and writers. I love that the very name of this organization allows for the reading that they are one and the same.
What took me much longer to recognize—and is I think less recognized generally—is that the boundary between the “creative” enterprise and the “business” of publishing is worth challenging too. If we keep our focus on the work itself, keep taking our inspiration from it rather than imposing a grid of conventional approaches and expectations on it—the publishing process becomes an extension of the creative moment that gave rise to the book itself. My mentors in this have been my colleagues. The art director, looking to create a jacket that will become the outward expression of a book’s inmost explosive self, runs around for weeks exploding her hands until she finds a photographer willing to let her throw colored dust all over his studio and photograph it. The production editor nerds out on finding the mot that does justice to a magnificent sentence. The publicity director dreams up a campaign that involves pet treats or murals. The shape of a powerful pitch for a book comes to an editor while commuting on her bike. The publisher keeps the whole enterprise aloft, sometimes tugging us back into orbit but also challenging us to boldly go where we haven’t before. When we are doing it right, the work we are trying to put into the world focuses and fuels us, and we recapitulate its Big Bang in a series of detonations all the way through the process.
When work like this goes out into the world—when it goes out into the world like this—I think it is not audacious to say that it becomes, as the phrase goes, an instance of the change we wish to see in the world. This is not only because of the impact it may have, as its fullest and most coherent self, shown in the brightest possible light, presented like nothing we have seen before but a thing necessary, meant to be. It is also because, in putting it into the world this way, we, with our writers, become a community functioning as we would have the world function.
Rebecca Saletan is vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, a Penguin Random House imprint. Over her thirty-five-year career in publishing, Saletan has worked with a wide range of authors including internationally best-selling novelist and essayist Mohsin Hamid; National Book Award-winning journalist and social critic Masha Gessen; and National Book Award-winning writer and environmentalist Peter Matthiessen. She received the 2018 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.
Rebecca Saletan (front left, seated) at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner with authors (clockwise from upper left) Garnette Cadogan, Mandy Aftel, Danzy Senna, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Francisco Cantú, Casey Gerald, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Anna Badkhen. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Editor Jonathan Karp
For many writers, the world of publishing is fraught with so much uncertainty and anxiety that it can be helpful to take a deep breath and remember that, at the end of the day, we are all working in the service of the same simple and enduring thing: dreams. The writer sits in a room with a piece of paper and tries to spin one that is, in John Gardner's phrase, vivid and continuous. The agent sorts through the many dreams that are submitted to her in search of the most captivating. The editor does the same thing and then, if he's any good, tries everything he can think of to bring that dream to the widest possible audience.
Today there is probably no better expediter of literary dreams than Jonathan Karp, the publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. In 2005, frustrated by his lack of freedom at Random House, where he spent sixteen years editing acclaimed best-sellers such as Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, and Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, Karp quit and founded Twelve with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month. He acquires and edits each book himself (for the most part) and then works with his publicity director, Cary Goldstein, to craft a monthlong promotional campaign that is unique to the book. While this publishing strategy, which values intense focus over the toss-the-books-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach of many publishers, is not unique to Twelve, one thing has become clear: The model works. In a business where the conventional wisdom dictates that nine out of ten books will never make money, it's difficult to fathom how fifteen of the first thirty books published by Twelve have been New York Times best-sellers. (They include Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great, Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss, Dave Cullen's Columbine, and Christopher Buckley's Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, and Losing Mum and Pup.) This fall Karp added his latest: True Compass, the memoirs of the late U.S. senator Ted Kennedy.
Although Karp's hit rate is impressive, it is by no means his most noteworthy accomplishment. The thing that makes Twelve truly remarkable is the way it has managed to unite the dreams of any publisher's disparate constituencies: writers (who want nothing so much as a publisher's attention and effort), literary agents (who encounter fewer and fewer editors who are experienced, credible, and essentially autonomous), booksellers (who complain, rightly, that too many books are published with too little care), the media (which can only cover so much and is happy to be steered toward the few books that are important), and readers (who are, by and large, blissfully unaware of the mad sausage making that goes on behind the scenes but know a good thing when they taste it). To those who wonder what the publishing industry of the future will look like: It may be right in front of you.
Why don't you start by telling me a
little bit about your background.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey and I
was always interested in writing. I was the editor of my junior high school
newspaper, my high school newspaper, and my college newspaper. I was even the
editor of the newspaper at my summer camp. We published an exposé on leeches in
the lake. So I was pretty directed.
Do you remember certain books that
captivated you?
Absolutely. In around eighth grade, I
read Goodbye, Columbus, and
that spoke to me immediately. We had that second refrigerator in our basement
just like they did in the Patimkin household. Roth was from Newark. So was my
dad. So I really identified with that world and read Portnoy's Complaint shortly thereafter. I still remember that amazing
love scene with the liver. I went through a phase where I was reading all of
those Jewish American writers. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud was a particular favorite.
Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Then
I discovered John Irving. The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp really spoke to me. The Hotel New Hampshire.
Why were those books speaking to
you?
Garp probably just because it sounded like my last
name. My high school column was called "The World According to Karp." I think
Irving said that his first three novels were ironic, and he realized after the
third one that in any novel he would write in the future, he would admire his
characters. I certainly admired Jenny Fields in Garp, and I admired Garp. I thought they were
unconventional, romantic people. I remember being terribly sad, just like T. S.
Garp, by the time I finished that book, and feeling as if I had lived a
lifetime with those characters. When I read The Cider House Rules, it was a different feeling. I felt total
identification with Homer Wells—wanting to be of use, just the way he did—and
Irving's research into the lives of doctors performing abortions made me see
that issue in a whole new way. I just thought the novels had dimensionality,
and I was living in them in a way that seemed incredibly vivid and
powerful—more powerful than the life I was living at the time.
My mom actually turned me on to a book that had a lot to do with where I wound up working. It was a book written in the 1970s by Sara Davidson called Loose Change, and it was about the experiences of three women coming of age at Berkeley in the 1960s. It was all true—it was a memoir—and I learned a lot about women from that book because it was about their personal lives: the men in their lives, the career choices they made, and the compromises they made. I was probably seventeen or eighteen years old at the time I read it, and it really influenced me.
When I was applying for jobs, I saw Loose Change on the shelf of Kate Medina, with whom I was interviewing. I wanted to work for her because she had edited that book. It was probably a very strange reason for a twenty-five-year-old guy to take a job, but it's true. That was one of the reasons.
I also remember hearing you talk
about The Best and the Brightest having a big impact on you as a young guy.
Oh, yes. That was when I was working
as a reporter for the Miami Herald. I was twenty-three or twenty-four, and I read The Best and the
Brightest and The Power Broker right around the same time. It was quite simply
the best journalism I had ever read. I was in awe of both reporters and, being
a reporter myself at the time, I knew the incredible amount of work those books
must have taken in order to not just get the facts right but to put them into a
larger context and to reconstruct the lives of the characters and to convey
their points of view. I knew how hard that was. I was genuinely in awe of it.
And it was also a wake-up call because I realized that I was never going to
achieve that level of insight by writing for a daily newspaper. It just isn't
possible. You can't go that deep. You can't take those liberties.
So I quit. I quit and I moved back to New York City to work in publishing because I thought that being closer to that level of insight would make me a better reader and make me more knowledgeable about the world.
Did you enjoy being a journalist?
I did. I loved writing for newspapers.
But the problem with newspaper journalism, for me, was the uncertainty of it. I
really didn't like getting up in the morning and not knowing what calamity was
going to befall me that day. I wanted to learn one thing and learn it well, and
I didn't feel like I could go deep as a newspaper reporter. I was at the Washington
Post as a summer intern for two
summers, and I had an opportunity to stay there as a reporter. The metro editor
said, "You give me ten years and I can make you David Broder." But at the
time—I think I was twenty-two—ten years seemed like a very long time. I
thought, "I don't want to give you ten years. I'm not even sure I want to be
David Broder." [Laughter.]
I've always wondered what would have happened if I had stayed there for ten years. One of the interns who was there with me was John Harris, who has now started the Politico and done really well. I wound up editing one of his books. Another intern who was there with me was Jeffrey Goldberg, who's written an outstanding book on Israel called Prisoners. So I worked with some really good interns and probably could have had that kind of a career path. But I really didn't like that daily confrontation with uncertainty. When I started at Random House, I remember this incredible feeling of relief that I was going to get to sit on my ass all day—that I wasn't going to have to run off and cover some fire or some murder or some scandal.
But I love journalism and I love journalists. I respect the work they do. I think it's incredibly important, and I think the sensibility I have as an editor is basically that of a journalist. It's probably one of the reasons why I've done so much nonfiction. I love fiction just as much, but when it's ingrained in you the way it was for me—the who, what, when, where, why, how—it becomes kind of a discipline and a way of thinking.
How did you make your way to Random
House?
I answered a classified ad in the New
York Times. I interviewed at
Harper & Row, Doubleday, and Random House. I could type over a hundred
words per minute, so they were all very interested in me, but I went with
Random House because I was so impressed with Kate Medina. She's a great editor
and she was a great boss. She really taught me how to be an editor. I was her
assistant for about three years. I did all the things that assistants do, but
the most important thing was that I took dictation or, more precisely, I typed
memos that she had dictated. They were her editorial memos, and they were
extensive and brilliant. I saw the way she deconstructed a novel, or any
manuscript, and saw it holistically: structurally, thematically, etcetera. She
saw the big picture and the details at the same time. She was able to steer
writers, in a positive way, toward a better, more vivid work. It was largely
about improving the definition of the novels. And having typed dozens of those
memos over the years, I began to learn the discipline of being an editor. How
to see whether characters rang true. Whether the storytelling was paced well.
How certain language either did or didn't have an impact.
There's something about hearing a person's voice in your head. I would put on these headphones and hear her administering her editorial medicine, and it definitely shaped me. But there are a multitude of reasons why Kate Medina is a great editor. I would overhear all of her phone conversations, and I vividly remember being struck by the fact that she never raised her voice and was always pleasant to everybody. I was kind of an angry twenty-five-year-old guy at that point, and I remember going into her office and saying, "Kate, you never yell." She said, "Well, I've always found that there's a nice way to deal with everything." That really changed me. I saw her professionalism, her very positive and constructive way of dealing with people. I also saw her vision. I typed a letter that she wrote to Tom Brokaw suggesting that he write a book. It was not the first letter—she'd been writing to him for years before I got there. I think about ten years after I typed that letter, The Greatest Generation came out. That was a case of an editor pursuing a writer she was interested in literally for years. It all starts with somebody like Kate Medina, frequently. I think the world of her.
Tell me about the atmosphere of
Random House at the time.
Obviously you're overly nostalgic
about any place you grow up, so I apologize if this is a little sepia-toned,
but Random House really was an extraordinary editorial environment. I was very
fortunate. I still remember the people who were on the hallway when I got
there: Kate, Jason Epstein, Joe Fox, Bob Loomis, Sam Vaughan, Peter Osnos, Joni
Evans, Susan Kamil, Becky Saletan, David Rosenthal. And then shortly
thereafter, Harry Evans, Ann Godoff, Dan Menaker, and so many others. Julie Grau
was there as an associate editor. These were really some of the best editors in
the business. Just between Bob Loomis, Joe Fox, Jason Epstein, and Sam
Vaughn—that's over 150 years of editorial experience right there. And they all
talked to me. They were so generous with their time and their wisdom.
I was fortunate enough to be the young assistant who got to attend the editorial meeting and take the minutes. Only one assistant was allowed in, and somehow I got the gig. So I would listen to them talking about projects. I remember one week, one of them jokingly said, "So what's our view on Catholics?" Another one said, "We're in favor of them!" [Laughter.] It was a collegial place, even though I'm sure there was a lot of stuff going on above my radar. But they were seeing all of the best projects—this was when Random House was owned by the Newhouses—and I remember somebody saying, "They're like the Medicis. They just want to have the best."
Anyway, I was watching all of this. I rarely spoke up in meetings because I was so junior, but eventually some projects started to come my way. I had written to the best reporter I had worked with when I was a reporter at the Providence Journal, a guy named Wayne Miller. I encouraged him to send me any book ideas he had, and he sent me a proposal for a narrative nonfiction book about one of the great pediatric surgeons of our time. I showed the proposal to Becky Saletan, Joni Evans, and Kate. They all said nice things about it, and Joni let me offer twenty-five thousand dollars to buy world rights. This was at a time when people seemed to like medical stories. The Book-of-the-Month Club bought it. We actually did respectably with it. I think they let me do it because it was a good proposal and they wanted to give me a break. That was the first book I got to edit on my own.
And then I got a lot of really good opportunities along the way. Peter Osnos asked me to help him edit Tip O'Neill's second book, so Peter and I drove up to Massachusetts in Peter's convertible and spent a weekend with Tip, listening to his stories. It was just wonderful. Harry Evans asked me to help edit Colin Powell's autobiography, which was a great experience. I remember working on the captions for that book. There were some pictures of Powell with famous people, including the Pope. I had titled that section "Friends," and General Powell faxed me back, "Pope ain't my friend." [Laughter.]
When you look back and think about
those early years, what were some of the first acquisitions that you feel were
really important to you?
I was following my passions. We had
this magazine called At Random,
which I was writing for. I got to write about Richard Ben Cramer's What It
Takes. I read that book in
manuscript and it blew me away. It was by far the most interesting book I had
ever read about politicians. So I got to meet Richard and his literary agent
Flip Brophy. One of the most interesting characters in the book was Gary Hart,
and I had been a Hart supporter. I thought he was ahead of his time and somebody
who was trying to do something important about energy and defense issues. I
said to Flip, "I would really like to do a book with Gary Hart about why
political reform doesn't happen. Every four years we have politicians running
on a reform agenda, but we never get the reform they seek. Why is that?" So I
wrote a letter to Hart and we did a deal. That book did fine. It wasn't a
best-seller. It just sold respectably. But it was the first book I was able to
do with a major political figure. A few years later, when Flip was representing
another United States Senator, John McCain, she thought of me, and we
preemptively acquired that book, thanks largely to Ann Godoff's celerity in
dealing with it. Since then I've done four other books with John McCain and
several other books with Flip Brophy. I think that was a case of naturally
following my curiosity.
What other books?
My favorite story, and probably the
best opportunity I had as an editor, was with Mario Puzo. This is all true.
You're not going to believe it, but I swear that it's true. I was answering the
phones, filling in for the receptionist at lunch, and the publisher at the
time, Joni Evans, came back from lunch, walked out of the elevator, saw me
standing right in front of her, and said, "I need a guy to read this novel I'm
working on." And I was a guy. So she gave me the manuscript. It was a thriller
set in Washington called The Fourth K—Puzo's only Washington novel. It was about a son in a great political
family who is very unpopular as president. He's the second president in his
family and, to strengthen his popularity, he allows an act of terrorism to
occur in the United States, thereby seizing dictatorial power. This was in
1990.
I loved The Fourth K. I still remember sitting at home on my couch all weekend reading it. I wrote a ten-page memo about it—what was good about it, what I thought needed to be improved, etcetera. Joni showed it to Puzo and we all agreed that the manuscript still needed work. This was during a time when publishers sometimes traveled to be with their authors. I still can't get over this, but Joni, Julie Grau, and I flew to Las Vegas, where we edited Mario Puzo in person because Mario felt that he did his best work in Vegas. He liked to gamble. So Mario's walking around Vegas in his sweatpants. During the day we worked around the table and edited, and then at night he took us gambling. I had never gambled in my life, and he decided that he wanted to introduce me to the game of baccarat. He gave me a hundred dollars and said, "Have some fun." I proceeded to lose the hundred dollars. I felt horrible about this. You know, I've come to work with him and I've lost his money. But he gave me another hundred dollars and something remarkable happened: I began to win. I think I won about five hands in a row. I paid back the two hundred dollars, which was good, but what was really good was that Mario had been gambling along with me while I won my five hands, and he'd made about seven thousand dollars on it. So he felt very good about it.
Anyway, we finished up the editing and the book came out and did fine. But then Joni and Julie Grau left the company. There were no other people at Random House who Mario knew well, and a lot of more senior editors wanted to work with him. But Mario told the CEO, Alberto Vitale, that he wanted to work with me, not because of my editorial work but because he thought I was good luck. He'd made seven thousand dollars gambling with me. And that is how I became Mario Puzo's editor.
We worked together on The Last Don, and it was a huge best-seller. It was his comeback novel. Then we reissued The Fortunate Pilgrim, and I wound up editing his last novel, Omerta. Working with Mario was just a magical experience. He was the kindest, sweetest man. It was always so striking to me how gentle he was, because he would write these violent scenes full of revenge and bitter irony. But in person he was one of the nicest people I've ever met.
Did you become close personally
with him?
I felt that way, yes. I was actually
there when he died. I was at his home when he died and got to tell him that I
loved his new book. I said goodbye to him and held his hand. It was amazing to
me. He was really very good to me, and very generous to work with me.
Did he take editing?
Yes. He was a great storyteller. He'd
grown up going to the public library and reading about King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table, and he always saw these mafia novels as myths. It
was never a real thing to him. People didn't appreciate Mario's sense of humor
in those novels as much as they should have. Even The Godfather is a very funny novel. Mario cared about his
characters. He cared about the story being satisfying to the very end. I
remember him telling me that his great disappointment with most novels was that
they petered out at the end. Mario cared deeply about his endings. The Last
Don had a great surprise ending.
The only editing he would not take was when I begged him to bring back Johnny Fontane, the Sinatra-esque singer from The Godfather. I was sure that there was more life in that guy, and he just wouldn't do it. But he said, and this is a quote, "When I croak, you can do whatever you want." [Laughter.] So after he died we decided to do a Godfather sequel, and I got Johnny Fontane in that way. And I know that Mario would have been just fine with it, because he really wanted his books to be read. He cared about that, and he was glad that we were keeping his work out there. He actually asked us to.
Tell me about Ann Godoff.
I think Ann Godoff is one of the great
publishers of the last two decades. I learned so much from her and was so
inspired by her. To this day, rarely does much time go by without me thinking
of something I learned from her. I think that what distinguishes her from a lot
of other publishers is her conviction about the work. There is nothing cynical
about the way she publishes. She really taught me to look for the authentic
voices and the people who are saying something relevant and fresh.
Give me an example of something you
saw Ann do that taught you something about how to publish.
The first thing that comes to mind is
the way Ann published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was a midlist book that was not acquired
for a lot of money. I remember Ann's presentation of it. People don't realize
how important it is that an editor be able to articulate what is compelling and
different about a book, and Ann did that time and time again. I remember when
she published White Teeth. She
said to a room full of people, "We will remember this as the year we published
Zadie Smith." It was just the perfect way to get your attention.
What do you remember her saying
about Midnight?
What I remember about Midnight are the advance reader editions, which came a
full year in advance of the book and which you were immediately compelled to
pick up because the cover image was so arresting. Ann had a great eye for
covers. The look of the Random House books of that period was distinctive and
striking. And it wasn't too long before people around the house were saying,
"Have you read Midnight?" So
by the time we published it there was already a great deal of enthusiasm behind
it. Harry Evans was the publisher at the time, and he did some very brash and
ballsy things, too. They flew a whole group of reporters to Savannah to meet
the people in the book. That got a lot of attention. The New York Times Book
Review was very late to the party
on Midnight. They didn't
review it until it was already on the best-seller list. So it was publicity
like that trip that launched the book.
Everybody knows that books like that are rare, and you can't ever expect it to happen, but it was one of many midlist books that Random House launched at that time: The Hot Zone, The Alienist, Makes Me Wanna Holler, and later, when Ann was publisher, Seabiscuit and The Orchid Thief. These were all "make books" and really spoke to a tradition of publishing that Random House had always done, going back to people like Jane Jacobs and David Halberstam. Ann understood how to get people excited about books that weren't obvious. She often used to say in meetings, "We do it the hard way, and that's why it's fun." I just found that inspiring. There was nothing calculated about the way books were published by Ann Godoff. She was doing it for the right reasons, I thought.
What was your working relationship
like? How were you learning the things you were learning from her?
It's important to remember that she
was not just publisher but also editor in chief. Usually every Monday morning I
would bounce into the office having read ten proposals, and I would go into her
office at eight-thirty—she was there every morning—and I would say, "I liked
this, and I liked this, and I liked this." And she would say, "Well, that one
sounds interesting, that one I don't see the reader for, that one...I don't know
if that writer's really up to it." So she really was a true editor in chief.
She guided me and helped me winnow the projects. By the end of our relationship
at Random House, we had a wonderful sort of shorthand. I remember walking into
her office and saying, "There's this guy I read about in the New Yorker named Kenneth Pollack. He's a Clinton guy who
supports intervention in Iraq. I think that's interesting. I think we should do
a book with him. What do you think?" And she said, "Oh yeah, I read that
article. We should do that." I made an offer that day and we signed him up and
it became one of the most influential books on the war in Iraq. That was just a
simple conversation between an editor and a publisher with a trusting
relationship and a shared sensibility. Every young editor should be so
fortunate to have somebody that good guiding him. She really did help me see
which books I ought to devote myself to. I mean, let's face it. Every editor
has to acquire some clunkers in order to publish the ones that last. I think I
was perhaps spared more of the clunkers because of Ann's discerning eye. She's
a real editor.
It seems like you had a fairly
blessed rise. But tell me what was hard for you in those early years.
It wasn't hard. I'm not going to make
something up. It was fun. I think this is one of the great soft jobs in
America. What is hard about reading books and telling people what you think of
them? It's not hard. If anything it's too easy.
But you were an ambitious guy.
Didn't that create any sorts of tensions?
Okay, you know what was frustrating?
The seven associate publishers telling me what to do. [Laughter.] By the end, I didn't want any more people
telling me what to do, and that's why I started Twelve. So that was
frustrating. But with that said, the associate publishers themselves were all
very smart and helpful. It wasn't that their ideas were wrong. It was just that
I didn't want anybody telling me what to do.
There were also things I probably should have gotten the answers to faster. It took me a while to recognize all of the Kabuki. I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to win friends and influence people within the house, and in the end, while I think it's always good to be collegial, the book probably speaks for itself. I probably didn't need to spend so much time trying to curry favor. But maybe you don't realize that when you're a young editor. You think you're somehow negligent in your efforts if you don't make everybody read every page. I think that perhaps it was a necessary rite of passage. But knowing what I know now, I realize that if you have a good book, people are smart enough to discover it. And if they don't discover it, maybe you need to do more editing. And furthermore, even if they do discover it, its success is probably still up to things out of your control anyway.
Were you close with Bob Loomis?
I wouldn't want to say that I was
close to any of the great editors who were there because that implies that I
was significant to them, and I think I was a piker to most of them at the time.
But I would go into Bob Loomis's office, and Sam Vaughan's office, and Joe
Fox's office. I remember talking to Joe Fox about John Irving, and asking him
if it would be possible to bring Irving back to Random House, and being elated
when Joe gave me an early copy of Son of the Circus. I remember talking to Joe about his experiences
editing Irving. That was an incredible opportunity. Joe gave me one of my first
books to edit. He had acquired The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll and The Rolling Stone Record Guide, and, as a young guy, I was the perfect person to do all the scut work
on those books. So he handed me the contract and said, "Congratulations! You're
an editor." I'll never forget that.
Jason Epstein said things to me that I think about to this day. I talked to Jason a lot about Jane Jacobs, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities had influenced me a lot. Jason had also edited Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and I remember him talking to me about the decline of manufacturing in America. He had very astute ideas about that. This was in the early 1990s, and he felt that the diminishment of manufacturing was a sign of America's decline.
That's very poignant right now.
Yes, and he's been talking about it
for twenty years. I remember having conversations with Bob Loomis and Sam
Vaughan about a writer with whom I was obsessed at the time, Herman Wouk. Sam
had been the editor in chief of Doubleday, so he'd worked with Wouk, and he
told me some really good stories about working with him and about how Wouk was
so influenced by the nineteenth-century novel. After that comment, I began to
see fiction in that continuum and realized that a lot of things that I liked
about fiction really derived from the storytelling techniques of Victorian
novelists.
Bob Loomis's modesty as an editor made a big impression on me. He's so soft-spoken and so devoted to his writers. My favorite book that Bob edited was probably A Civil Action. We had many talks about Jonathan Harr and how he had edited that book. I believe I was in the editorial meeting when that book was acquired, although maybe that's my memory playing tricks on me. But it was a tough story—it was about children dying as a result of environmental abuses by New England companies. And Harr took years and years to write it. I think he put seven years of his life into that book and didn't turn it in until he was ready. The same thing happened with another book that Bob edited around the same time, Sam Tanenhaus's book on Whittaker Chambers, which I also read cover to cover and greatly admired. Both were case studies in writers taking as long as they needed to get it right. Bob never pushed a writer to turn in a manuscript. He was willing to wait ten years for Neil Sheehan, or however long it was, and he waited for Sam Tanenhaus and he waited for Jonathan Harr. The results were best-selling books that will be in print forever. Of the many lessons I learned from editors at Random House, that was one of the greatest. I still remember Jason Epstein joking, "Nobody remembers what day War and Peace was published." But I saw that changing in the industry as publishers came under increasing pressure to meet their fiscal year targets by rushing books out. I think that's antithetical to good publishing. The really important books are often worth waiting for, no matter how long you have to wait. I saw that again and again at Random House.
Wasn't A Civil Action published twice because it didn't work the
first time?
Yes, it was published twice within a
year. That was another example of really ballsy publishing by Harry Evans.
Harry just refused to take no for an answer from the public. He wasn't happy
with the original cover, so they redesigned it and brought out the book again.
And they eventually got out about a hundred thousand copies. They had a quote
from John Grisham, which helped, and then Vintage brought out the paperback and
it exploded. I don't think all that would have happened if Random House hadn't
published it so well in hardcover.
Tell me about some of the literary
agents who were important to you in the early part of your career.
Flip Brophy gave me a couple of breaks
that I'll always be grateful for. Binky Urban sat next to me at a Random House
lunch that Harry had set up, and we developed a very good relationship. She's
submitted many writers to me with whom I've worked very happily, starting with
the novelist Paul Watkins. Then we worked together on Jon Meacham, Sally Bedell
Smith, Christopher Buckley, and many others. Binky sent me the first half of Thank
You for Smoking, which was my
first best-seller and is still one of my favorite novels. The idea of writing
about the inner life of a tobacco lobbyist was inspired. Harry Evans was a
friend of Chris Buckley's—I was a young editor at the time—and basically it
was all set up for me. All I had to do was answer the phone, read the pages,
and laugh, and we were going to do the book. Chris and I have worked together
ever since. We've done eight books in fifteen years, and that's thanks to Binky
Urban. She was instrumental in helping me get started.
Kathy Robbins is another one. I inherited Ron Rosenbaum and began working with Kathy on Explaining Hitler. Kathy is a tremendously attentive and inventive literary agent. She always has good publishing ideas in addition to good editorial ideas. I was so struck by her commitment to every draft of that book. She read everything along with me. We would talk about it and then talk to Ron. Again, I think he spent ten years of his life thinking about Hitler. And it's one of the best books I've ever edited. Working with both of them on that was a foundational experience.
I looked in my database recently and I've gotten submissions from over five hundred literary agents. So there are a lot. Neil Olsen was great to work with on the Mario Puzo books. Always calm, always constructive. I must mention Peter Ginsberg. Peter submitted a first novel to me in 1993. I read it overnight and loved it. It was set in the financial world and it was basically a satirical novel about the absurdities of the information economy. It was a book called Bombardiers, and the writer's name was Po Bronson. Harry Evans let me preempt it for fifty thousand dollars, and we published Bombardiers very successfully. Harry did this thing where we actually sold futures in the book—we sold stock in the book—and had a party down on Wall Street. That got on CNN. The book was an international best-seller. Then Po wrote another novel, then a Silicon Valley book, and then he began to shift into nonfiction. Peter Ginsberg was with Po from the start. He was on top of everything. He was an incredibly tough negotiator. He got a better deal for Po each time—each time he made us up the ante. Each time I thought, "This is too much money. We're never going to make it back." And each time we made it back. I remember once, I was in the middle of a negotiation with Peter, and I said, "I can't deal with this now. I have to go to the dentist." He wrote back and said, "I bet you're looking forward to the dentist." And he was right. [Laughter.] But, you know, he was involved in all of the marketing of Po in a really constructive way. He's a great literary agent.
Similarly, there's Suzanne Gluck. Not only is she as savvy as they come, but, in terms of pure entertainment value per pound, I'd have to put her very high up there. We worked together on another first novel—probably the most successful first novel I've ever edited—The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. That was one I read over the weekend. I came in on Monday and said to Ann Godoff, "This is great," and we preempted it before anyone else could. It was a huge international success. I haven't looked lately but I think it's sold well over half a million copies. And Suzanne was involved in every aspect the whole way through. I remember we had an author photo of Matthew and she called me and said, "Jon, we can't use this author photo. It's a thriller, and this looks like his Bar Mitzvah picture." [Laughter.]
Tell me about the acquisition of Seabiscuit.
Tina Bennett and I were at lunch at
the Four Seasons—not the fancy Four Seasons, the Four Seasons Hotel—and she
said, "Have you ever heard of Seabiscuit?" I said, "No." She said, "Well,
Seabiscuit was a horse." I said, "I'm not interested." She said, "Well, there
was actually more written about Seabiscuit in the 1930s than Hitler, Mussolini,
and FDR combined." I said, "Really?" and she said, "Yeah." I said, "All right,
send me the proposal."
[Laughter.] You know, if Tina hadn't pitched it to me that way, I never would have wanted to read it. She's a brilliant agent. And the proposal came in and it was great. We won the auction.
For a pretty modest amount of
money, right? Five figures?
Five figures and we were the
underbidder. Laura Hillenbrand wanted to be with Random House because Random
House was the best publisher of that kind of nonfiction at the time, thanks to
Ann Godoff. The proposal was really very strong. I remember showing it to a
bunch of people. Bob Loomis read it, and, obviously, Ann read it. The thing
that's interesting is that I often hear people say, "Well, Seabiscuit worked, so we should publish x, y,
or z. Anything can work if Seabiscuit worked." But actually, what I think people might
be overlooking is that structurally, Seabiscuit was a great story. It was almost a perfect story
in the way the horse kept overcoming expectations and hurdles. You couldn't
tell from the proposal that Laura would have been able to write it as deeply
and richly and beautifully as she did. The proposal was only about twenty
pages, and there wasn't very much characterization there because she hadn't
begun to do that yet, so all we really knew at the time was that it was a
really good story. We figured that it might just be a short book—we didn't
know how much was going to be there. It was only when the manuscript came in
that we realized what an extraordinary book we had.
When you look back on that book, is
there anything that happened on the way to publication that you think of as the
turning point?
People read it. It's as simple as
that.
When you say "people," who do you
mean?
First of all, I read it. I have the
editorial memo I sent her after I read the full manuscript. I said, "This is
the best manuscript that an author has ever delivered to me." After we were
done editing, I began to give it to people at Random House, and their reactions
were similarly off the charts. At sales conference, the sales rep from Maine
raised his hand and said, "We're going to sell a million copies of this book."
And it wasn't because it was such a commercial subject—everybody knew that
horse racing was not a big category. It was about a feeling that the book gave
people.
What I learned from editing that book was just how important it is for a book to actually leave you with a feeling. I had been a very analytical guy up to that point, in terms of my editing. For nonfiction, I had always assumed that if it made sense and was well written and had an important point to it, people would respect it and like it. But that isn't what it's about, ultimately. People have to be moved by it. And there was something going on between the lines in that book, from beginning to end. I could give you lots of reasons why I think it's moving. It's a terrific transformation story: The horse is transformed by these three men, and the three men are transformed by the horse. It's about winning. It's about overcoming adversity. And the writer's reasons for writing the book were pure and personal. It was infused with a kind of passion that you very rarely encounter in nonfiction—and that passion was augmented by a degree of focus and precision that you rarely find. So the book worked on every level. It worked on a prose level, it worked on a story level, and it worked on an emotional level.
I've heard you talk about the three
main reasons why people read, and how the best reading experiences combine all
three. I think readers would find that interesting.
If I'm remembering it right there are
three Es. People read for
entertainment, education, or the expressiveness of the language. The best books
combine all three, and Seabiscuit combined all three. It was an expressive book that was wondrously
entertaining and educational in terms of bringing to life a period in American
history. It was published as a work of history even though it was about a horse
winning races.
So you feel pretty strongly that it
was nothing that happened along the way except for people reading it?
That book was on the best-seller list
before there was any media or any advertising. It was an immediate best-seller.
I mean, Talk magazine had done
an excerpt, but when has an excerpt ever sold a book? I really believe that it
was because we printed about five thousand galleys, people read it and loved
it, and book-sellers were hand-selling it. It was publishing at a time when
there wasn't a lot of competition. We were very good at publishing in that
window—I think it was March. So that's why I think that book worked. It was
just a great book to read. And it was different.
What do you mean by "different"?
There wasn't anything else like it. I
was so amused that right after Seabiscuit, people began publishing all of these books about horse racing. They
completely missed the point. The book didn't succeed because people were dying
to read about horses. It succeeded because it was a beautifully written story
that was emotionally satisfying and interesting from beginning to end. And
let's give Random House some credit for publishing that book so well. Random
House is a great publishing company. The sales force was wholeheartedly behind
it. I remember that before sales conference, somebody had suggested that we
change the title to "Dark Horse." At sales conference the reps kept coming up
to me and saying, "Jon, please don't change the title to ‘Dark Horse.'" Before
we presented the book, I said to Ann, "They really don't want to call this book
‘Dark Horse.'" And she said, "You know something? I don't either." And she started
the presentation by saying, "I have some news. We are calling the book Seabiscuit." The room broke out in applause. Everybody had
already read it. Even before the book had been presented, it was known as
something that people were going to love. It's just one of those things. It's
alchemy, and you can't reproduce it.
On the flip side, tell me about a
novel from that era that still breaks your heart because it didn't achieve what
you'd hoped it would commercially.
There are a number of them. I'm told
by many people that fiction breaks your heart, so I should just accept it. But
when I look at my bookshelf at home, I just wish more readers had been able to
discover some of those books. There was a novel called Cheat and Charmer by Elizabeth Frank. She's a professor at Bard and
she'd spent twenty-five years writing the book. It was a contemporary variation
on Anna Karenina set in the
McCarthy era. We got some great reviews, but we just didn't push it hard
enough. I still regret that.
There was a novel called The Baker by a writer named Paul Hond, which was my attempt to publish a next-generation Malamud. It involved Jews and African Americans in a burnt-out city, post-riots, and it was about people seeking redemption and love. It was a retelling of The Tenants and had a little bit of The Assistant in it as well.
A novel called All the Moneyin the World by Robert Anthony Siegel. It was about the son of a greedy lawyer who winds up in prison. It eerily foretells the Bernie Madoff story. There are a lot of them.
What do those experiences teach you
as an editor?
They taught me that you're going to
fail more often than you succeed. They taught me that you have to pick your
shots. It's one of the reasons why we've been very careful about the fiction
we're publishing at Twelve. I really want to be able to tell people, "This is
rare. This is special. This is significant." I think it's much harder to get
people to read fiction. We're only publishing one novel in 2010. It's called Rich
Boy and it's by a creative
writing teacher at the University of Michigan named Sharon Pomerantz. She's won
four Hopwood Prizes. Again, she's been working on this book for ten years, and
it's one of these novels where characters reveal things that, in your own life,
people never say out loud. I was completely caught up in it. It's got great
verisimilitude and feeling, and I just love the way secrets are revealed. I
think it was Ian McEwan who said that the key to successful fiction is the way
in which you reveal the information. In Rich Boy the information is revealed quite artfully.
But I think literary fiction is the toughest to publish. The other thing I will say, which I don't think people talk about enough—not to complain—is just how hard it is to be a guy publishing fiction. Because there is a gender gap. I think more than 70 percent of fiction is bought by women. It ties you up in knots, in a way, because you want to publish the books that you can identify with and relate to. I'd like to believe that I can identify with and relate to the things that women care about, but I can never be sure. [Laughter.] And, at times, I'm trepidatious, because I think, "Well, if this is a man writing about a woman, then we've got two strikes against us." If it's a woman writing about a man, which is actually the case with Rich Boy, I'm all set to go. I read it and thought, "She's writing about a lot of guys I know. I know that it's real because I feel like I know these people. And the fact that a woman can do it makes me think that other women will agree and appreciate it." But I do think it's tricky because obviously there are so many more women in publishing, and so many more really good fiction editors who are women, that you're almost immediately at a disadvantage if you're a guy who wants to publish fiction. It all comes back, I think, to my very first experience editing fiction, with Joni Evans coming through the elevator and basically picking me because I was the only guy she could find. I think about that a lot.
I also think there are a lot of complexities to fiction. The kinds of novels that many discerning editors want to publish are not easy to sell. They're not sure things. I mean, a lot of my favorite recent novels—The Corrections, Middlesex, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Emperor's Children—are not books that are immediate or natural best-sellers. So you really have to get very lucky, and you can't count on review attention to the extent that you used to. Even if you get the review attention, you can't expect the same kind of consensus that I think you get with nonfiction reviews, because, for some reason, it just seems easier to be objective about nonfiction.
Ideally I'd like to publish big social realism that is relevant to the moment but has enduring value. I wish that I could find a Garp or a contemporary analogy to something like The Jungle, a book that influenced the political debate and had lasting cultural influence. I think that Christopher Buckley, in his own way, is doing that with books like Thank You for Smoking and Boomsday. I wish I could find more writers in that vein. But I also think there's only so much the culture can absorb. I started out by telling you how much of an influence Philip Roth was on me. I loved the Zuckerman trilogy. I loved American Pastoral. But here is a confession: I can't keep up with Philip Roth. This is a guy who was a seminal influence on me, and I can't keep up with everything he's written. I've got three Roth novels on my shelf that I just haven't gotten to. So I can't help thinking that if I'm having trouble keeping up with all the really good fiction out there, a lot of other readers are, too.
I have a prediction. I predict that the new Lorrie Moore novel is going to be huge. And here's why: pent-up demand. This is a woman who has held her tongue, and I am dying to buy that Lorrie Moore book. I will buy that book the first week it comes out. I will pay the full retail price in cold American cash. And I predict big best-sellerdom. I don't know Lorrie Moore and I'm not involved with the book. It's just an opinion.
You've also edited a lot of
celebrities. Any good stories?
I don't know if you would rank him as
a celebrity, but when I was growing up, one of my heroes was Rupert Holmes, who
is best known as the creator and singer of "The Piña Colada Song." But he's
also won practically every award known to man: the Academy Award, the Grammy,
the Emmy, Tonys. He wrote the book, music, lyrics, and orchestration for The
Mystery of Edwin Drood.
My very first day at Random House—I was twenty-five years old—I wrote a letter to Rupert Holmes that said, "I will publish anything you want to do." Several years later, he called me up and said he'd like to write a book. So we met, and Ann Godoff and Harry Evans let me sign up Rupert Holmes without a single word on paper. He had come up with an idea for a novel about a serial killer, I think. I didn't know what it was. I didn't care. I just wanted to publish Rupert Holmes.
Seven years went by before he turned it in. But when he finally did, it was wonderful. It's really, to this day, one of my favorite novels of all time. It's called Where the Truth Lies, and it posits a theory that the real reason why a comedy team like Martin and Lewis broke up is because there was a dead girl at a casino in Vegas where they were playing. And it goes off from there. It's just this elaborately devious, rococo tour through 1970s celebrity culture, with an utterly suspenseful mystery plot that keeps you wondering who the killer is until the very end. And it got great reviews. It became an Atom Egoyan movie. And I wish more people would read it. It did respectably, but I think people would love this book.
Rupert has said so many funny things over the course of his career. Whenever he describes a person he doesn't think much of, he says, "She has unexplored shallows." He describes life as "a rat race heading for a mousetrap." He's my favorite celebrity, and I'm still working with him.
On a new book?
On a new novel. Which I expect him to
deliver some time in the next seven years.
You left Random House briefly to go
work for the film producer Scott Rudin. Why did you leave, and what happened
there?
I worked in the movie business for
seven weeks. I left because I was bored. I'd been at Random House for twelve
years, and I wanted a new challenge. I was under the impression that movies had
more cultural influence than books, and since I saw myself as basically
somebody who was editing storytellers, it didn't seem to matter what medium I
was editing the stories in. I had worked in journalism, which was a kind of
storytelling. I'd worked in publishing. I just thought, "I'd like to learn how
stories are told cinematically."
Scott Rudin was the best producer in New York. I'd liked a lot of his movies. So when I heard there was an opening, I went after the job and he said, "Just come here and do what you did at Random House." When I got there I was very surprised to discover that, actually, in terms of writing, books are more culturally central. Maybe that shouldn't have come as such a surprise to me, but I learned pretty quickly that film is a director's medium and that, as an editor working with writers, I wouldn't be able to do what I did at Random House. I wouldn't be able to sign up people as easily and develop their work and really have it wind up on the page and ultimately with the public. Once I realized that, I decided to get out of there and go right back to Random House, where I still had my authors.
But I knew I would be back at Random House. At my going-away party I said, "I'll be back." I didn't expect to be back in seven weeks. [Laughter.] I thought I would be back in five years, or ten years, after doing movies. But I fully intended to come back. I was embarrassed that it didn't work out, and I was also a little bit surprised by the result of my leaving and coming back. I was worried that people would take me less seriously as an editor because I'd done this frivolous Hollywood sojourn, but, in fact, I got even better submissions once I got back. I think maybe it reminded people I was alive. Maybe they respected the fact that I'd taken a chance. But the bottom line is that it actually turned out to be a great thing for my time at Random House. And I never looked back after that. I never thought seriously about movies or Hollywood again.
The other thing about it is that I thought—because there's such public fascination with movies and Hollywood, because more people see movies than buy books, because it's easier to absorb a two-hour story visually than it is to read something for ten or fifteen hours—I thought I could have more impact. I also thought that writers would gravitate to film and that I'd be able to learn more because so many people are attracted to it. What I was surprised to learn was that it's not a curiosity driven art form, for the most part—documentaries are the exception—and because the storytelling has to appeal to a mass audience, you can't necessarily go as deep or explore your curiosity as much as you'd like to. And again, maybe that sounds naïve. But I was surprised by it.
The other thing I realized is that the creative decisions on the business end were being made with a very young demographic in mind—largely teenage boys or men in their twenties. I was in my early thirties at that point, so I was already edging out of that demographic, and I realized that the need to serve a demographic that you didn't necessarily identify with might be one of the reasons why Hollywood can seem like such an irrational, capricious place. Because people are fundamentally insecure about serving an audience that they are not a part of. When I thought about why I loved Random House so much, it was because I was publishing books for people who shared my sensibility. And I think that's what will always remain great about publishing as an endeavor. Although certain books can achieve great mass influence, most books are published by people for people with whom they identify. That's a big thing. That's what gives you the confidence and the passion to do what you do. And I have to say, the publishers who are not publishing from that interior place, I'm not sure what motivates them.
Was working for Rudin a traumatic
experience?
No. Well, negotiating my exit was
traumatic because I had a contract and he didn't want me to leave, and then he
didn't want me to leave until a specific date. And I wanted to get back to
Random House. There was one very long week where I was sitting in an empty
office watching MTV. I remember thinking, "This is very strange." But in Scott
Rudin's defense, I let him down, and I quit on him. But it just wasn't the
right place for me.
Did you have help negotiating your
exit?
Yes, I had a lawyer. It was very
expensive. I remember that bill, too. That bill was traumatic. [Laughter.]
Eventually
you left Random House for good. Why?
I'd been there for sixteen years.
That's like going to the same college four times, and I was ready to graduate.
I had this idea for Twelve—I wanted to edit the books and publish the
books—and that just wasn't going to be possible within that corporate
structure. And with the benefit of distance, I think it was the right reason to
leave. I'm also incredibly grateful for the sixteen years I had there. I carry
the editorial values of Random House with me every day, and I'm close to many
of my former colleagues. I think that Random House is the great American
publishing company. Well, the great German-American publishing company. [Laughter.]
How did you come up with the idea
for Twelve?
There were a number of ideas behind
it. Let's start with the real impetus, which is that I want to publish the best
books. And I really believe that writers want to be read. Maybe this is not
that profound, but I think that sometimes we lose sight of the fact that, all
things being equal, an author is going to want to be with the person who he or
she thinks can sell the most books. So the goal was to attract the best talent.
I can give you several moments along the way to the idea becoming clear. When I was at Random House, an agent named Larry Weissman sent us a nonfiction proposal that we all loved. It was the book that eventually became The Billionaire's Vinegar, which is a great historical story involving wine. We thought that it was a classic Random House book. We put on the full-court press—I was the editor in chief at the time—and brought the author and Larry in for a meeting. There were eight of us in the room. We enthused. We said all the right things. We showed up at the auction and made an offer, and it was the same as Crown's. And they chose Crown. I was mystified. I called up Larry and said, "Why did you choose Crown?" He said, "They promised to make us the lead title." And I thought, "You know something? That was the right decision." And then I thought, "What if every book I published were the lead title?" And then I thought, "How many lead titles can you have?" And then I thought, "Well, the fact of the matter is, if you're thinking about how much the media can absorb, being able to say, ‘This is the one book you should read this month' has some credibility to it."
A second moment was when I was at Random House and two books I'd worked on for several years were both scheduled for release in the same month. They were books I really liked—one was called The Lady and the Panda and the other was called The Genius Factory. I believed in both of them equally and wanted to proselytize for both of them equally. I was suddenly tied up in knots—I was flummoxed—because I didn't know which book to talk about, and I didn't control the schedule. That was another example.
So I was thinking, "Okay, I want everything to be the lead title. I want to have at least a month to put it across. And I want to have the best talent. What's the best way to do that?" It's to make a promise to the author and to make the promise so explicit that it's on the spine of the book: Twelve. That's it. One a month. You get your launch and, although we can't guarantee that the book's going to be a best-seller, we can at least guarantee that you will have our full attention, focus, and commitment for a sustained period. We will talk about your book until people will not listen to us anymore.
One of the things you said in the
run-up to Twelve's launch was that you wanted to bring authors and agents more
into the process of publishing the books. What are you trying to do differently
in that regard?
Let's start by taking a step back. I assume that a lot of writers are
reading this, and I sincerely believe that literary agents are essential to the
process and that authors should gladly pay the 15 percent. Here's why: Every
direct interaction that an author has with his publisher is so fraught with the
power dynamic—and with the fact that the author's economic livelihood is
involved—that I just don't think an author can always process all the
information that's coming from the publisher. So I think it's really important
and helpful to triangulate with an agent. That's something I've learned over
years of working really closely with authors and agents on everything from the
title of the book to the editorial shape of the book to the cover of the book
to the marketing and advertising of the book. I just can't imagine doing it in
any other way.
When I said that I wanted to involve them more I think I just meant that, before we set a marketing plan, I say, "What would you like us to do?" For all I know, publishers are doing that already. But I really do ask them very early in the process, before any budget numbers are set, and I try my very best to make them true partners in the endeavor. But it's even things that are as simple as giving them as many galleys as they need—I'm not sure that publishers even do that all the time.
Your Web site has twelve bullet
points about the imprint, one of which is that you will publish books that
matter. That's a very subjective phrase. What does it mean to you?
It means books that are relevant to the
national conversation. Books that advance our understanding in some way,
whether it's our understanding of events or the human condition. Books that
have redeeming cultural value.
Books that are not "ooks," as Bob
Giroux used to say.
Yeah. But at the same time, I don't want to be holier-than-thou about it.
Look, I believe in escapism. I just think that even when you're escaping, there
can be a point to it. It doesn't have to be revelatory—it just has to have, I
hope, some larger truth or purpose to it. Purpose is a great word. I don't think it's a coincidence that [Rick Warren's]
The Purpose Driven Life sold all
those copies. I think that people gravitate to purpose. I think we seek it, and
I want each book to serve a purpose. I can't understand why you would do it any
other way. I really can't. Even if the purpose is to make a lot of money,
that's still a purpose. [Laughter.]
What else
are you trying to do differently?
I would say
acquisitions. In fact, I don't think that's given enough emphasis when people
talk about publishing. When I first started out in the business, Jacob
Weisberg, a writer I greatly respect, wrote a very influential piece about how
editors don't edit anymore—all they do is the deal. I think that implicit in
that assessment is an underestimation of just how important the deal is—how
important the decision to publish the book is. I think that a majority of the projects
that are acquired by major houses never have a chance of breaking through. They
are flawed in their conception. What I learned from Ann Godoff was to be a
discerning acquisitions specialist. The most important decision that anyone
makes in a publishing house is the decision to buy the book in the first place,
and I'm amazed by how often that decision is made with very little sustained
consideration.
How do you make those acquisition
decisions? What are you looking at and thinking about and turning over in your
mind?
Well, first of all, "Is it different?
Is it distinctive? Is it singular?" I would've loved to have called this
imprint Singular Books, but it sounded too much like a wireless phone company.
Because I want the books to be like nothing else. I think exclusivity
matters—if the journalist has contacts that nobody else has or if the author
has stories that only he or she can tell. Something I haven't heard before.
Every Sunday, Chris Matthews says on his talk show, "Tell me something I don't
know." That ought to be where every editor or publisher starts. "What didn't I
already know here?"
I really am amazed by how often publishers decide to do something because a similar book succeeded. That is flawed reasoning. Books catch on for any number of reasons, and it's not a mathematical formula that can be reproduced. Even more insidious is the idea that sometimes creeps into acquisition decisions in a really cynical and negative way, where people say, "Well, that nondescript work caught on, so this nondescript work could too." I just don't understand why you would want to go down that road. It makes no sense to me. I would think that you would feel as if you were going through your life just imitating other people, doing something you didn't really believe in. I'm genuinely mystified by that.
Then I look for an originality of expression. If I see a cliché, it's out. Any writer who uses clichés is telling me, "I am not original." So that's easy, and I think most editors would tell you that. But I'm surprised by how many editors seem to be willing to acquire books with clichés in them. I've never understood why. It seems to me it's the first sign of a pedestrian work.
I think a lot of the things I think about come from my journalistic background. Would you want to talk about this? Would you want to spend time with this person? There are certain things that will always get my attention: somebody who, like Jonathan Harr or Robert Caro or David Halberstam, has spent years on a work, really trying to figure it out. In an age in which nobody's held accountable for anything, and information comes and goes so fast, there is great power in the idea of a person who has concentrated and rigorously worked to make sense of things. I don't think you can place enough emphasis on that. It is the single thing publishers can provide better than anybody else: authority. So if you show me an author who has taken the time to really wrestle with a subject, in fiction or nonfiction, and figure it out and unearth the truth, and if that subject has some kind of a constituency, and I can envision enough people caring about that subject to gravitate to the book, I'm going to be very interested. I think those books are hard to come by. It's hard to expect a writer to spend years on a subject.
Once you
find those things and sign up the book, what are you thinking about with regard
to marketing? What are you and Cary trying to do differently than other
publishers?
It's the same
thing. We're trying to make each marketing campaign specific to the book. We're
really trying to do each book differently. But I stand by what I was saying
before: that the things publishers do, in terms of marketing, are marginal when
compared to the primal aspects of the book. Those aspects are simply, "Do you
care about this?"
Let me give you my negative example, which I wrote about in a piece and got into a disagreement over. I went to my local Barnes & Noble and I looked at what was out. There was a book on the shelf called The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. I was agog that somebody would think that that book would sell and that it even needed to be a book. Now, I haven't read the book. For all I know it is the most brilliant argument ever made about the pernicious aspects of virginity. But it just seems to me that, on the surface of things, virgins aren't going to want to read a book telling them that they shouldn't hold onto their virginity, and I can't imagine why anybody who's lost their virginity would care. So I see no audience for the book at all. It's a polemic, so it could probably be five thousand words—there's no narrative there. It makes no sense.
I look at the Publishers Lunch deal memo every day, and almost every day there's some book that I can't conceive of more than a handful of people ever being interested in. I just don't understand why publishers go for this stuff. Now, I think the major publishers are a little more discerning, and I understand that there is a wonderful diversity of readers and that the whole point of certain kinds of books is that they appeal to niche audiences. But there's a niche audience and then there's, you know, fractal niche.
I still want
to try to get a better sense of how you guys are approaching marketing. Everybody's
trying to figure out what to do to sell books anymore.
Well, this
probably isn't very interesting for readers, but we have a great director of
publicity in Cary Goldstein. This guy is extraordinary. The best decision I
made was hiring Cary. I mean, here's an example of why Hachette is a good
company. They hired me and they gave me a full year to ramp it up. No pressure.
You don't have to publish a book in five months. Take a full year, do a real
launch, and hire the right person to do your publicity. So I had a full year to
hire the best person. I did research. I called up the people at the New
Yorker and asked them, "Who do you respect?
Who do you listen to?" And Cary Goldstein's name kept coming back to me.
If you're speaking with a credible voice, and you have the right books, why shouldn't people listen to you? I mean, yes, I think we've done some good ads. The advertising department of Hachette is first-rate. I think we've done some clever online promotions. But I think that, for the most part, it has largely been publishing books on subjects that appeal to people and that people are able to find out about. And they find out about them because the publicity department is really good.
Now let me say something else. I go to my local bookstore and see books that I've never heard of. I haven't heard a thing about them. I think, about ten years ago, the idea crept into the conventional wisdom that if you simply paid for display, people would find the book. This is false. People have to know about a book in order to buy the book. Just reading the flap copy and looking at the same generic blurbs is not going to sell the book. You need endorsements from reviewers, you need people talking about the book on the radio, you need the online component. And we're just trying to do it extensively and intensively for every book. A very, very good publisher, Ivan Held, has said that there are only six things you can ever do for any book. You can name the six things: You can advertise, you can do co-op, you can do galleys, etcetera. There are a finite number of things. Our goal is to do one special, original, out-of-the-box thing for each book. But beyond that, it's simply about execution.
Tell me
about a clever online thing that you think has worked.
We're doing a ton
of smart online outreach for NurtureShock
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, thanks largely to Po and Ashley. They have
given us extensive lists of bloggers who have written about parenting or
science or the science of parenting. We've approached people to have them speak
at parenting conferences and we've got something like thirty dates lined up.
We're doing a kind of open source book club where people will be able to
comment on chapters publicly. We're doing very targeted online advertising on
parenting blogs. So it's a multipronged marketing approach that really speaks
directly to the people who we think are going to be the first buyers of the
book: highly engaged parents.
Another example involves a book we've got coming out right now called The Liar in Your Life. Rather than putting blurbs on the back cover, we solicited the lies that people tell most frequently and used those in place of blurbs. Then we hired a polling firm to poll the lies to determine which ones are the most common. We're going to release that information online and we think it might generate some attention. So that's our one out-of-the-box idea.
The Hitchens example really is the best. But again, that's about a really creative director of publicity. Cary Goldstein had this idea that Christopher Hitchens should debate Al Sharpton at the New York Public Library. And I have to tell you, when Cary told me he wanted to do this, I thought he was nuts. I mean, Al Sharpton? Who would take him seriously? Well, they had the debate, and Al Sharpton stepped right into a big morass when he brought up Mitt Romney's Mormon beliefs. That event got picked up on cable news and was all over TV for two full days. That's all because of a really good publicity director.
One way of
looking at what you're trying to do with Twelve is that you're trying to get
away from disposable books, which you've written about and called a syndrome in
the Washington Post. You
acknowledged that there's nothing new about the syndrome and that it's driven
by the need for growth in a business that is essentially flat. But what is at
the heart of the syndrome, in your opinion? What is the fundamental reason for
it?
First of all,
there are many ways to publish good books, and I don't believe that our way is
the only way. I've thought about this a lot and I've said this in every
interview, but it hasn't gotten picked up. I think that you can have a backlist
model or a frontlist model. The major publishing companies have a legitimate
reason for publishing as much as they're publishing. If you're trying to
accumulate the biggest and best backlist, it makes sense to put more out there,
and you can even make an argument that letting the market decide what sticks is
viable and actually makes more sense in the end. There are publishers who are
activists—who want to make their work known—but there are also publishers who
want to publish a broad range of books, let the public decide what they want,
and then give the public more of that. I think that's a legitimate business
decision, and it can work. It can give you the capital to do things on a big
scale and to market books, when you want to, very aggressively.
My criticism of the publishing industry and the major publishers is not specific to companies. I've seen what a great publishing company can do for worthy books. I mean, Random House put Seabiscuit and Shadow Divers and The Orchid Thief on the map, and it wouldn't have been able to do that if it didn't have real leverage in the marketplace—if it didn't have the marketing prowess and marketing resources to do that. So I think it's completely legitimate that certain publishers would seek hegemony through volume. I really believe that.
That sounds
like a hedge to me. In your heart of hearts don't you have to believe that the
way you're doing it is the best way?
Look, it's not
for me, at this point in my career.
Why?
Because I think
that there are enough really good authors who want focus and attention and who
want it promised and guaranteed. And that's harder to do at a big company.
You honestly
don't believe that what you're doing is the best way?
I think it's
the best way for me in the year 2009. I've really thought about this a lot. And
I've written this before: I don't think that people who live in glass
publishing houses should throw stones. I don't think it's right for me to get
up on my soapbox and say that my way is the best way. What I do think is that
the Twelve model makes a great deal of sense for unknown authors or authors who
want to break out. I think that's true. I think that this is the best way to
publish a midlist author or an author who's on the way up.
Let me put it another way: I think it would behoove the major publishing houses to publish fewer books with more focus. I think that everybody would benefit from that. What I don't know is whether the companies can meet their targets doing it. I'd have to be a CFO to know that, and it would be arrogant of me to say that a major publisher can get by without disposable books. I don't know the answer to that. What I know is that I'm working for a company that publishes a lot less than the other major publishers with a more concentrated marketing approach and seems to be making a lot of money doing it. One of the reasons I came to this company was because it was in the DNA of the company to do fewer books with more marketing force. That was what the Time Warner Book Group had always been about, that's what Hachette is about, and that's what Twelve is about. I wanted to be here for that reason.
When I was at Random House, I felt like I was missing out on something because I thought that Larry Kirshbaum and Jamie Raab and Maureen Egan and Michael Pietsch were publishing books in a really smart, aggressive way. I saw what they did for writers like David Sedaris and Malcolm Gladwell and David Baldacci and Nicholas Sparks, and I really respected that. I thought, "They've got cojones. They're putting their full force behind these books. I want to be a part of that."
I saw this
remarkable statistic on your website that you've published twenty-five books so
far and thirteen have been New York Times best-sellers. People in the industry know that having a book hit
the list isn't necessarily an indicator of profitability. Of the books you've
published, how many have made money?
To be honest, I
haven't actually counted them one by one. I can't give you that off the top of
my head.
But what's
your sense?
I know that the
imprint is profitable.
You're in
the black?
Yeah, I know
that. And off the top of my head I would say that roughly half of the books
have been profitable.
That's
incredible to me.
But it is
minimal compared to what other people within Hachette are doing. You know, it's
very flattering that you're talking to me, but you should talk to Megan
Tingley, who discovered Twilight. That
is carrying the company. Talk to Little, Brownabout the way they've built up Malcolm Gladwell over
the years. That's been an extraordinary job of publishing. Jamie Raab has
arguably the best track record of anyone in the industry: Nicholas Sparks, Jon
Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Michael Moore, a number of Oprah picks. It's an
incredible track record. So this is a company that has a lot of acuity,
specifically with regard to acquisition and marketing.
I have a
highly original question for you. In the first few years with Twelve, what has
surprised you the most, what has enchanted you the most, what has humbled you
the most, and what has troubled you the most?
Wow, that's a
long one.
It's the
question Jeff Zeleny asked Obama after his first hundred days, and Obama took
it seriously because he was on TV and didn't have any choice. But you can dodge
it if you want.
No, I'll answer
it, although I'm worried that I may lack Obama's introspectiveness. I guess I
was surprised that it took me as long as it did to get books into the pipeline.
When I started the imprint, the idea was to do four discoveries, four midlist
books that could take off, and four books that were so obvious that a monkey
could publish them. I had no trouble with the discoveries or the midlist books.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of other people who wanted to publish the monkey
books.
Big surprise
to you? [Laughter.]
I was surprised. I thought there would be enough of those
obvious books that I would acquire them very easily. But it turns out that this
simian mentality is pervasive. So I was surprised by that.
I was enchanted by the success of God Is Not Great, because it came from such a sincere place. I was having lunch with Steve Wasserman. He was a new literary agent and I was a new book publisher. He told me that he was working with Christopher Hitchens. I said, "I've been a fan of his for years." In fact, I'd gotten his email address from Christopher Buckley and was going to propose that he write a book about Congress. Steve said, "Well, no, he doesn't want to do that. I think he's going to write a book about the case against religion." My eyes lit up. Because ever since 9/11, I've been one of these people who was pointing the finger of responsibility at religion—all religion—for inculcating violence in the culture and, at least in politics, a false sense of piety. After lunch I came back and talked to Jamie Raab about it and we decided to just put money on the table, right then and there. He didn't talk to any other publishers. He didn't do a proposal. We just bought that book based on a lunch conversation. I don't think I even talked to Christopher about it. The manuscript came in and it was one of those books that you read and want to go out and tell everybody about. You want to proselytize. "You've got to read this book! It'll change your view of this!" And it immediately took off. So that was an enchanting experience. Any time you have a number one best-seller, it had better be enchanting. [Laughter.]
I was humbled when we published a book called The Film Club, because we did everything right. The sales force loved it, independent booksellers loved it, the media loved it. We got rapturous review attention, we got the author on network TV, we had him all over the radio, we toured him. And it still didn't break out. It sold well—we made our money back and I think it's going to have a long life in paperback—but The Film Club was one of these books that I thought could have sold a million copies. I felt like it had everything. It was a really well written, engaging, and moving story about a relationship that I thought almost anybody could relate to, and yet it was also unconventional. I mean, the idea of a father agreeing to let his son drop out of school if he would just watch movies with him? It was a story that stuck to me, and I was sure I could get it to stick to other people. And it humbled me because it reminded me, once again, just how hard it is. At that point we'd had a few best-sellers in a row. Everything was working. I was sure that this one was going to catch on, and it just didn't make the best-seller list. I wish it had.
I was troubled, like everybody else, by the layoffs in the industry. I was troubled by the number of really good, hard-working editors who were let go for no reason other than a bad economy. I was deeply troubled by that, and there but for the grace of God go all of us. But then again I'm an atheist so I guess I should put it another way. There but for the grace of Hitchens go all of us.
Can we talk
briefly about the piece you wrote for Publishers Weekly that offered twelve steps for better book
publishing? One of your suggestions was "imprints for everyone."
Yes, I believe
that. I think that the editor is the best publisher of the book.
So why don't
more publishing houses do it?
Some of them
do. Penguin has that model, to some degree. Reagan Arthur has an imprint. Megan
Tingley has one. I think that it may become more prevalent. But why don't more
companies do it? I suppose that you need to have entrepreneurial editors. And
when I say that the editor is the best publisher, I should expand that to say
that I think the editorially driven publishers are the best ones. I think you
can be a marketing person with a great editorial sensibility. But I think it
has to begin with what's on the page.
I think that some editors may not want the responsibility. And some editors may not be ready to assume that role because they're more interested in the text than in the world into which the text is launched. It requires a certain kind of sensibility. But I also think that the principal reason there aren't more imprints is probably because a lot of publishers are reluctant to let go of their power and trust it to other people. That's a difficult thing to do for some people. When I was a senior editor at Random House, working for Ann Godoff, I felt like I was the publisher of those books as much as she was—because she had the confidence and the generosity of spirit to share in that endeavor.
Another idea
you talked about in the piece is that if a book that is bought on proposal
doesn't deliver on its promise, we should give the author the chance to take it
elsewhere. If that isn't possible, we should publish it as an e-book or print
on demand with no marketing. Did you hear from agents about that idea?
I didn't hear
any criticism from agents but that's because—with all due respect to
agents—to their eyes I am a human ATM machine. They need to push the right
buttons for the money to come out, and telling me that I am moronic might not
serve their best interests. However, I would like to say to all those agents
that I'm happy to be called a moron. I welcome criticism, and I actually
respect people even more when they tell me the truth. The only criticism I got
from an agent was from someone I deeply respect, Heather Schroder at ICM, who
called me up and said that she didn't agree that there should only be one
bidder at each company. And I respected her for having the candor to say that
to me.
Another thing you wrote somewhere
is that all good stories are about transformation. What else would you add to
that in terms of your ideas about storytelling in the big picture?
The thing I drill into writers all the time is this idea of deep
immersion into your subject, and real command of it, and authority. That's the
quality that any discerning editor immediately cottons to. Beyond that, I don't
think writers often enough appreciate just how important it is to be
conceptually distinct. If you're talking about fiction, it's always struck me
as elemental that a novel should be novel.
So I've never understood why somebody would write a novel knowing that the
story has been done millions of times before. If your work is not novel on the
conceptual level, I'm not sure why you should expect somebody to stop what he's
doing and pay attention, given the vast opportunities for distraction in
society.
I was struck by something I read years ago in an interview with Norman Mailer, who said that if he'd gotten started later in life, he probably would have been a movie director so he would have had more influence. He also said that he thought novelists would eventually have the cultural influence of landscape painters. I'm not saying that I agree with that. I just think it's interesting that a writer of Norman Mailer's stature would recognize how difficult it is for fiction to maintain its cultural centrality or impact.
So if you're setting out to write a novel, or literary nonfiction, for that matter, I think you have to have very high standards. Now, I say that—and I mean it—but I also understand that not every reader is coming to a book with the very high expectations that I seem to have for just about everything I read. I suppose if you're just looking for something to escape with on an airplane, you can set the bar a little lower. But I would still ask the same question: Why your airplane novel rather than the five thousand others that are published every year?
This is the magazine's MFA issue.
Do you have an opinion about MFA programs?
I think they're great, and here's why: Writers need a support system for
developing their work. I also think, to be realistic, writers need economic
support. These MFA programs provide it for both graduate students and teachers.
I don't know very many novelists who support themselves solely through their
fiction. Even the most successful novelists I've worked with usually have other
jobs, either in academia or in the media. I think that's very useful. It
provides balance and keeps you from losing touch with a certain aspect of life.
It also probably makes you happier. It's funny, I read an interview with Tom
Clancy in which he described his life as a miserable existence of time in
solitude confronting the limits of his imagination. Now maybe he was just in a
bad mood the day he gave that interview. But all the research on happiness
indicates that social interaction is to our benefit, and, therefore, it might
behoove writers to get out into the world a little bit more. I think it results
in better fiction.
You have a unique perspective on
editors. Put yourself in the shoes of a beginning writer who is lucky enough to
have multiple offers and has to decide which editor to go with. What advice
would you give her about
navigating that situation?
I think you should reduce it to the
simple question of "Who can you best imagine yourself conversing with on a
regular basis over a sustained period of time?" If you're intimidated or bored
or uninspired by the editor, those are easy reasons to eliminate people.
Obviously it always helps if the editor says something that is meaningful or
significant about your work. That is usually a good indication of a shared
sensibility. You also might want to think about what happens if that editor
leaves, because that happens to a lot of writers and I think it's good to deal
with it up front—to know that there's at least one other person at the company
who's a real advocate for the work. A lot of authors get orphaned and
think it's the reason their book hasn't succeeded. It usually isn't the reason,
but that's what they think. It's important to know that somebody else at the
company will stand behind you if your editor leaves.
Tell writers something you know
about agents that they might not know.
I would say to listen to them. I'm surprised at how often authors, even
published authors, fail to hear the nuance in what their agents are telling
them and are too quick to follow their own needs rather than what their agents
are telling them to do. I have very rarely seen agents give authors bad advice.
The longer I've been doing the job, the more I realize that usually the agent
knows that the book doesn't work or the proposal doesn't work but they've had
to submit it because they didn't feel they could put the writer through another
draft—because either the writer was balking or they didn't think the writer
could handle it.
Writers probably think that agents have all the power and they have to do what their agents say. But the reality is that a lot of agents are very sensitive to either alienating the writer or causing a crisis of confidence. So the agents begin to walk on eggshells. I think that writers should be very aggressive in seeking the truth from their agents. I'm always struck by what authors tell me about their work. They'll say, "My friends tell me they love it!" I feel like saying, "Did you really, really drill down and ask your friends what they really thought? Did you force them to tell you one thing about it that they didn't like? Can you handle the truth?" Frequently, the writer hasn't done that. It's hard to tell the writer when something isn't working, and some agents don't always articulate it quite as clearly and forcefully as they should, largely because they know they're dealing with a delicate ego. So my advice to writers would be to aggressively seek the truth—forget about your ego—and do one more draft than your agent asks you to. The writers who I have noticed being successful are the ones who are making their agents wait for that next draft. It's the authors who don't pursue that next project until they're sure it's the right one for them. It's the ones who turn down the easy overture from the publisher for the quickie book and wait to do the book that they can really commit to.
page_5:
Considering the fragility you just
mentioned, do you ever pull your punches when you're editing? What's your
philosophy on that?
I believe in complete honesty, and, as
I learned from Kate Medina, there is a good way to deliver any news. The way to
do it is usually through an appreciation of what works followed by a very
clinical deconstruction of what doesn't. And it needs to be done in writing so
the author has time to absorb it, curse you, go through the fifteen stages of
mourning, and then address it. I remember a few times when I was starting out
as an editor, I gave the criticism verbally, and the writers simply didn't hear
it. It wasn't that they didn't understand it. They just didn't hear it. They
were so overwhelmed by the sensory experience of receiving feedback on something
that they cared so much about, from somebody who would be so instrumental in
determining the future of the work, that they were not equipped to process the
information I was giving them. It has to be in writing.
What do agents do that frustrates
you?
The auctions are frequently
frustrating, and I think some agents could learn a thing from Bob Barnett, who
is not an agent but a lawyer. Bob is a joy to work with because he sends you
the material, or has the meeting, and tells you when the auction is going to
be. There's no running around and there are never any preempts. Then he has the
auction. It's always in rounds and it's very clear what's going on. And when
it's done you feel as if everything made sense. I wish more things worked that
way. I wish that agents had enough confidence in the work they're representing
to just say, "This is the date. These are the terms. Go at it." The problem is
that every submission is different and that, in reality, you have to handle
every situation differently. But I wish that literary agents were less eager to
try to sell the book within five minutes. Give people time to think about it. I
mean, the reason that some of them probably don't give people time to think
about it is because they have a responsibility to get the best deal and there
is a legitimate reason to be concerned that the deal could go away. So I'm not
blaming them. I just wish that the auctions could be conducted in a more
orderly, thoughtful, and deliberative way.
Another thing that frustrates me is when they submit widely and ask us to spend a lot of time reading when the odds of its winding up with us are slim. I wish the submission lists were smaller. I don't see any point in submitting to four people within the same company and making all four of them run around and talk to one another. I think you should know the editors you're submitting to well enough to have a sense of whether they might want it. I would just rather avoid this pack mentality of having a lot of people chasing the same thing. I think it's bad for the soul. [Laughter.] And I'm not even sure it's good business for the agents. I think they would be taken more seriously—and would get faster reactions—if the editors to whom they were submitting felt that the project was really special and they were coming to them for a reason.
Another
editor I interviewed thought that it was their way of generating excitement
because everything has gotten so difficult with acquisitions by committee.
Which you're not subject to anymore.
But I get less excited when I know ten people have had it. It's
actually gotten to the point now where I want other people within the company
to read the submission first. If they want it, they can have it. It's only
after they've rejected it that I may read it and make my own determination.
It can also
make things easier for editors who are not as autonomous as you to acquire
something.
Sure. But if
that's the case I would say that the publishers those editors are working for
are behaving in a craven and irrational manner. They should think for
themselves and make their own decision about whether or not a book is worthy
and not be looking over their shoulder at what Publishers B and C are doing.
Because Publishers B and C might be even kookier than Publisher A. There are enough
really smart people in the publishing industry that we can all afford to think
for ourselves.
You are not
known as somebody who overpays wildly. I'm curious about the decision to go as
high as you did for the Ted Kennedy book. Eight million dollars is a lot of
money.
I can neither
confirm nor deny the size of the advance. It was a story that nobody else could
ever tell. It's by a central figure in the last fifty years of American
political history with a unique vantage point into one of the most storied
families in American history. It was simply irresistible. On top of that, when
you look at the eventfulness of the man's life, the enormity of his life, the
unbelievably compelling aspects of his personal story, combined with the impact
he's had on the country through the years, it's simply a book like no other.
I've never, in my twenty years, encountered a story like this.
But it's a
lot to pay.
Well, by the
time this interview comes out, we'll know whether we got it right.
Did you
worry about spending as much as you did?
Look, I worry
about ten thousand dollar advances. I worry about everything. There is no limit
to the things that I will worry about. It's my favorite form of exercise. If I
were ever to write an advice book I'd call it Sweat the Small Stuff. I even wrote a song called "I Worry": When
I hear about the rain forests,I
worry. It just isn't smart to turn the jungle into Wal-Mart. I worry.I'm recycling everything. I'm even
listening to Sting.I worry.
You do a lot
of political books. Do you evaluate them the same way you evaluate any other
book, or are there different things you think about?
If it's a book
by a politician, I think the politician has to transcend the moment and be an
individual of real substance and character. I'm very proud to have worked with
two of the great senators, John McCain and Edward Kennedy. I also approached
Henry Waxman to write this book on how Congress really works. I'd wanted to do
a book on Congress for years, and the more I read about Henry Waxman, the more
I thought he was the person who could really take me inside the chamber and
show me how it gets done. He has a thirty-year record, and his legislation has
made a difference in basic aspects of our lives, from food labeling to smoking
laws, and now health care. So I felt like he was the right person to approach.
In terms of issue books, I try very hard to imagine that the book could actually move the needle—in terms of public debate—and that there isn't anything else like it.
Are there
any recent political books that you wish you could have published? Or editors
you're admiring for their taste in political books?
I think that
Sara Bershtel and the people at Metropolitan Books are doing extraordinarily
good work. A number of their books have made an important contribution to the
debate and are books I wish I had published. I'm thinking of The Limits of
Power by Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers
Johnson's trilogy—especially The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis—and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Several of those books grew out of this American
Empire Project that two editors named Steve Fraser and Tom Engelhardt started.
Their books are also significant because they're expanding the parameters of
debate in this country. I'm personally frustrated by how one-dimensional the
conversation is with regard to America's involvement in the world and our
foreign policy—what Chalmers Johnson refers to as the cost of empire. I feel
like these books are shining a light on America's use of power and questioning
what our national priorities should be. You hear very few politicians
questioning our military spending, and these writers are doing that. So those
are all books I wish I'd published.
I had a shot at publishing Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and I didn't offer enough. I deeply regret that. I knew Eric. I'd taken him out. I saw him a mile away and knew he was doing important work. But I just wasn't sure we could sell enough copies of a book about fast food.
I also acquired, with Peter Bernstein, Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize–winning book on genocide. When I left Random House for my seven weeks in the movie business, she got reassigned. Then I really didn't do the right thing, and I wish I had gotten her back.
How about
mistakes you've made in a broader sense?
In several
instances I have acquired books where I thought I had a particular insight into
the subject that I was going to bestow upon the author. In every one of those
instances, it didn't make the book any better. If I had it to do it over again,
I would not have acquired those books. Because I think it's a mistake for an
editor or publisher to think that he knows more than the author or has
something to teach the author. Jason Epstein, the great editor, said that, at
best, an editor is a valet, bringing the work into the world and taking the
dust off of the garment. The work is truly done in the margins, and, from this
point on, I will only acquire books by writers whose writing doesn't need my
help. Because even under the best of circumstances, a writer is going to need
editorial feedback. But if you enter into the relationship knowing they need
your help, I think you've probably already made a fatal mistake.
But you're
also in a position where the best writers come to you.
But you know
something? If you don't hold out for great stuff, you won't get great stuff.
I'm not saying that everything I've done is great. I've made plenty of
mistakes, and sometimes my judgment is wrong, just like everybody else's. But I
really am trying. I've never, in recent years, signed up somebody who I thought
I was going to have to drag across the finish line.
What are the hardest decisions you
make as an editor and publisher?
The acquisitions. I'm only publishing
twelve books a year, so I really anguish over these manuscripts and proposals.
I really do. I read them all. I take the submissions very seriously. I take the
agents I deal with very seriously. If they think something is good, I think
there's usually a reason for that. I try to have very good reasons both for
doing books and for not doing them. There have been a lot of projects that I
would have done if I were publishing more than twelve books a year—projects
that interested me and were worthy.
What disqualifies them most often?
It's usually that I just don't feel a
strong enough connection with the work. That's often code for "I don't see
enough relevance here" or "I don't think it's special enough" or "It didn't
really intrigue me."
Why do you
think you've been more successful with nonfiction than with fiction?
I think it's
because I'm a guy. It may have something to do with neuroscience and the
logical part of my brain. It may have to do with my journalistic background and
my nose for a story. I guess I just love it when things are true. I think the
truth is so powerful. Some people even say it sets you free. [Laughter.]
Does it
bother you?
Yeah. I don't
think any of us like to be put into a box. At least half of the books that made
me want to get into the publishing business were novels. I would love to make a
greater contribution to the culture by publishing some more great novelists.
If you could change one thing about
the industry, what would it be?
The thing I care the most about is getting the
word out about the books, so I wish we had more avenues for publicizing our
works to the readers who care most about them. I think this could be done in a
number of ways. The most intriguing to me right now would be working with
independent booksellers and book-specific media in major cities to create new
forums for local discussion of books and authors. The reason why most
publishers are not touring authors to the extent that they used to is because
there's less local media to talk about books. I don't think that all media has
to come through the Internet. I still think that people experience books in
their local environment and that publishers should find new ways to create
media locally. Maybe that needs to come through investment, either through the
American Booksellers Association or through some kind of new consortium of
publishers who create a fund to spread the seed of book coverage. I don't think
that enough people know about books. It's as simple as that. There
aren't enough ways to let people know about really interesting books. I have
published many books that I think a lot of people would have benefited from,
enjoyed, and been better for having read, but they just never knew about them.
I think that's a tragedy.
Do you worry
about the future of publishing?
I don't. I
don't worry about it at all. I have an idealistic hope that as more and more
media becomes disposable, books will be increasingly regarded as the permanent
expression of thought and feeling and wisdom. So publishers who can offer
definitive material will thrive. Now, as I say, that's idealistic. Plenty of
publishers are going to continue to do well publishing derivative material that
they don't really believe in. But I think it's going to be harder for them.
It's going to be harder for them to survive. I think there will be some
displacement—some houses will shrink and other houses will grow. I could see
some pure play digital publishers who aren't encumbered by the weight of
overhead and the history of their business relationships becoming influential
factors in the publishing world. So I think it's a transitional time and a
transformative time. But it's always been that way. I don't think anything
should be regarded as permanent. All we ultimately have is our belief in the
particular books. And as long as you have that, you're fine.
Tell me a little
more about where your head is at with the electronic stuff. I saw a Times piece about the $9.99 price point for the Kindle
where you were quoted as saying, "Let's just take a breath and see how long
this lasts."
There's more
heat than light at this point, but there are going to be changes. Publishers
are going to have to rethink price points and distribution and all aspects of
the publishing process. But that's always been the case. There was the same
kind of hysteria when the big-box retailers became a force in the business. I
just don't think it's wise to be fearful about it. I think we should embrace a
new mode of distribution—it's simply a new way of getting books to readers. I
find it funny that e-book buyers are demanding instant gratification when, only
a few years ago, their needs were perfectly well met by traditional books.
With the
Kennedy book you made the decision to not release the electronic version
simultaneously with the hardcover. Do you want to talk about why?
Not really. [Laughter.] The thing I would emphasize is that this is about
distribution, and just as indoor plumbing was a wonderful advance in society,
so is the digital delivery of reading material. But we're still just talking
about distribution. It's the content that matters. Now, if you want to talk
about the ways in which content is changed by the distribution, that's a
different conversation, and perhaps a more interesting one. But I remember
when, back in the 1980s, people were writing about hypertext and how computers
were going to change the way stories were told. I don't really think that
happened very much. I do think that as attention spans continue to become
shorter, and we're stimulated so much more by the constant influx of
information, we must certainly be reading differently and experiencing
information, on a cognitive level, in a different way. But I still think it
ultimately comes down to one writer telling a story to one person. I don't
think that's going to radically change.
But the
thing people seem to be worried about is that it could have huge business
implications on the industry.
Yes, but I
remember when Random House and William Morris were at loggerheads over CD-ROM
rights in the 1990s, and that obviously never happened. [Laughter.] So, yes, this is important. This is significant.
This is transformative. But I think that putting too much focus on it is
misleading because it's ultimately still about the authors. I just keep coming
back to that, and unfortunately that's not a story that you can keep writing in
the newspapers every day—nobody would read it. But the publishers who thrive
will be the ones who have the best authors. It's as simple as that.
Who do you
admire in the industry, and what makes you admire them?
I admire a lot
of people. I admire the editors at Norton. I think they have very high
standards and are very focused and publish a lot of interesting books. They've
given us Michael Lewis and Mary Roach and Fareed Zakaria. Obviously I think
Knopf is the gold standard. What more can you say? They have the ability to
publish across the spectrum, from literary fiction to high-quality nonfiction.
Penguin Press, of course. I'm really impressed by Algonquin and Workman. I
think the Workman books are so unique and cleverly designed. My daughter loves
that Gallop! book of theirs with the
Scanimation effect they seem to have created. I already mentioned the people at
Metropolitan. I think they're doing really important publishing and giving the
left a voice it has lacked in the culture. Paul Golob at Times Books is also
doing really smart, interesting books.
There are too many people at Hachette to name, but I owe everything to Jamie Raab for bringing me here and being such an incredibly supportive colleague. I think Michael Pietsch and Geoff Shandler have done an incredible job with Little, Brown, and I am in awe of what Megan Tingley has accomplished with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
How about
agents?
There are a lot
of agents that I admire—too many to name. It's funny. I really enjoy working
with literary agents, but I'm not socially friendly with any of them. I kind of
feel like it's a business relationship. But I enjoy their companionship at
lunch and I love talking to them about their projects. Even when I pass on
their projects, I genuinely enjoy talking to them, the give and take. There are
literary agents who I've known for fifteen years who I'm just finally doing
books with. Molly Friedrich was one who I'd wanted to work with forever and
finally found a novel we both loved. I've known Stuart Krichevsky since I was
in my late twenties, and he's trusted me with Sebastian Junger, for which I am
eternally grateful. Rob Weisbach is incredibly creative and he's going to do
great things. I could talk to Tina Bennett and Heather Schroder forever. There
really are a lot.
What makes
you admire these people?
To bring it
down to one word, it's conviction.
Simple as that. Every single person I mentioned believes in what he or she is
doing, and they are engaged by it.
Are there
any younger or less established agents who you've been impressed by lately?
There are a
number of them. Larry Weissman. Eric Lupfer at William Morris. Jennifer Joel at
ICM. Gillian MacKenzie. Everything they send me is fascinating, and I think
that's the mark of a good literary agent.
What are the most rewarding
experiences in your life as a publisher?
I think the most satisfying has been
working with Po Bronson. From the beginning, when we were both
twenty-eight-year-old guys, I felt like his work was speaking for me and for
our generation. Over numerous books, we've grown together and pushed each other
and learned from each other. And he keeps surprising me. He never writes the
same book twice, which sometimes makes them a little harder to publish, but I
respect the creative impulse there. [Laughter.] It's really satisfying to see the way he has
built a readership, and to see that his life has been improved through our
working together. I've published a lot of first novelists and a lot of new
nonfiction writers, and to be able to give those people a chance, and to help
them realize their dreams, is incredibly gratifying.
How about the most exciting
experience?
I would probably say having dinner in
Hyannis Port, at the table where John Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Edward
M. Kennedy and the rest of the family sat, and talking about American history
and politics with Senator Kennedy. Listening to his stories. I don't think it
can get much more exciting than that. If I were a journalist or an academic, it
would have been the opportunity of a lifetime. As a publisher, it was just a great evening. And it was one of many. I'd tell you
more but I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. [Laughter.]
What are your darkest moments as an
editor and publisher?
It's when a book doesn't catch on. I
die a death along with that book. The single worst moment may have been a bad
review by Michiko Kakutani of a novel that I truly believed was a classic. I
read the review and I was sick to my stomach. The only time I've ever felt
worse was when I found out that Ann Godoff was leaving Random House. Those are
probably the two darkest moments.
But more broadly it's whenever a book is perceived as being flawed or just doesn't catch on. I'm still terribly depressed by that—terribly, profoundly, irrevocably depressed. And I'm not saying that I think that's a good thing. My happiness and self-esteem should not be wrapped up in the commercial and critical reception that a book receives. So I'm not proud of that. I think I should be able to transcend it by now. But I also think that maybe the fact that I care is one of the reasons why authors still want to work with me. If I ever do start to transcend it, I might find writers leaving me in droves.
You've
thought about leaving the industry and trying other things, and you even have
left briefly. What is it that keeps you coming back and makes it something you
can't get away from?
Look, I'm forty-five years old. This
is my twentieth year in the business. If I keep at it and manage not to get hit
by a bus, presumably I'm at the halfway point. For the first twenty years,
what's kept me coming back is simply having good books to look forward to. I'm
so excited to be publishing Sebastian Junger and Senator Kennedy and Po
Bronson. I'm looking forward to those books and all the others. I just signed
up this superb journalist, Evan Osnos, who's the China correspondent for the New
Yorker. He's only getting started
on his book now, so it may not come in for a couple of years, but I can't wait
to publish Evan Osnos and
introduce him to book readers. Because his journalism is outstanding.
So, unfortunately, my answer to your question is microscopic and quotidian, and it's one of the reasons why I wanted to publish one book a month: to always have something to look forward to the next month. I get a little bit antsy when I don't have a really good book to look forward to. So that's what's kept me going so far, and I will only keep doing it for as long as I'm challenged and growing and nourished by it. I hope that continues. I don't, at this moment, have a Plan B.
But I have always felt that you should never feel trapped in a job. I've heard other good publishers say that they were ready to do the next thing, if they had to. If you start making decisions out of fear or insecurity that you might lose your job, or that there's nothing better out there, I think you make bad decisions. I am incredibly happy and grateful to be here, and I hope it lasts forever. And if it doesn't, I hope there's something else even better.
Jofie Ferrari-Adler is an editor at Grove/Atlantic.
Agents & Editors: Jonathan Karp
In the final installment of his long-running series of interviews with publishing professionals, Jofie Ferrari-Adler talked with Jonathan Karp, the publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Among the many topics they discussed in Karp's office were the editor's ideas about great storytelling and whether the late U. S. senator Ted Kennedy's memoir,True Compass, published by Twelve in September, was worth the reported eight-million-dollar advance they paid for it.
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The Art of Publicity: How Indie Publicists Work With Writers
This winter, as I resurfaced after a long sabbatical during which I was able to disconnect and work, head down and solitary, on new poems and essays, I found myself thinking about publicity. Maybe it was that, after a flurry of two books and two babies, and after extended time to focus on my writing, I finally had a chance to think holistically about my career. I’d never really thought about publicity strategically before. I’ve had good luck with two books of poems, including Work & Days (Red Hen Press), which magically appeared on the New York Times Best of 2016 list. But even so, my own attempts at publicizing my work have felt a bit haphazard at times—a last-minute scramble of hurried lists and harried galley mailings, carrying packages to the post office—often, it seems, with a baby strapped to my chest. If I’ve occasionally hit the mark, my process of getting work out in the world has mostly been a mixture of luck and happenstance. I wanted to learn to work smarter.
If you want to learn about publicity, talk to a publicist. I thought longingly of a dear novelist friend whose in-house publicist had crafted her a killer press kit, helped her line up freelance articles to dovetail with publication, and arranged a great deal of her national book tour. But not many authors are fortunate enough to work with an in-house publicist. I wondered what independent publicists might have to offer writers who don’t have access to that kind of institutional support and what advice they might give to writers who may not have the resources to hire them. As a book reviewer I deal with publicists all the time. I decided to contact a few indie publicists with a gift for putting writers on the map. I asked about what writers should be doing for themselves, what indie publicists do on behalf of their clients, and how they’d advise me to think about shaping the way I approach getting my own work into the world.
My first call is to Lauren Cerand, a highly sought-after independent publicity guru who exudes an easy bookish glamour. As we chat, Cerand tells me about her early training moving stories through online and traditional media. She had always wanted to be a change agent: She began her work in publicity shaping stories about the labor movement for the AFL-CIO, then the garment workers union. “I began in this really mission-driven sector,” she says. “I believed that the stories I was broadcasting could help change lives.” A few years later, she had a job publicizing programs at the 92nd Street Y in New York City when her then boyfriend published his first book. “The in-house team wasn’t doing that much with it, and I felt like it was going to fall flat, so I decided to leap in,” she says. She pitched the book to Jon Stewart cold, sending over information about the book by fax. To her great delight, the book ended up on TheDaily Show before spending four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Cerand felt she was onto something, and apparently she was. Since striking out on her own in 2004, her clients have included poets Chris Abani and Eileen Myles and fiction writers Tayari Jones and Daniel Handler.
When I ask Cerand what she does for her clients, she demurs. “I actually want to be invisible,” she says. “I’d love for nobody to know that my clients have a publicist.” Instead, Cerand says she works with writers to refine their own goals for success. “What success really looks like to each of us is actually radically different from person to person. You have a big goal for your life as a writer. My role as a publicist is to help align you with that vision.”
I had naively imagined that publicity was something a publicist just did, a process that involved ticking off the boxes in a list of already established steps for success. Cerand immediately encourages me to think otherwise. “I always ask writers, ‘What do you want that you don’t have?’ And I ask my writers to name not only, say, prizes, but also the principles behind the recognition they want,” she says. “There’s an idea that everyone wants to be successful in the same way, but that’s not true. You might be a food writer who wants to change the way we talk about how we eat, or a poet whose dream is to have your poems on the subway.” Cerand leans into each specific vision, using it to drive a campaign. “What I aim for is a sense of ubiquity, an electric jolt of familiarity and intrigue that appears over and over through media, through experiences, through the way that the authors themselves express their art in the world.” Put simply, Cerand is after more than just book reviews: She’s hoping to create the conditions under which the artist’s practice becomes visible to a wider audience.
I’d also imagined, incorrectly, as it turns out, that a publicist is someone you might easily hire, but Cerand’s services don’t come easy—or cheap. Not only do her campaigns cost $7,000 a month for a minimum of a three months, but she also often begins plotting a course or taking on a client up to two years in advance of a book’s publication. In addition, Cerand takes on just four to six clients a year, working only with books she thinks she can do great justice to. “Everything I do has to be perfect,” she says. “I want to pick books that feel ready to be part of a wider conversation—whether that’s political, or intimate, or just revelatory—about the texture of the world.” She also wants to believe that an author is ready to use her services fully. “Sometimes people come to me when I think that they just need to make their own mailing lists,” she says. “I want to work with people who I know I can create new opportunities for—people who have taken their own journey as far as they can.”
I speak at length with Cerand about social media, about how burned out it can make me feel these days. Instead of a means for connecting, it has become another distracting workspace where everyone clamors to be seen. She encourages me to step back, and spend a day at an art museum or reading a book I love. “You want to think about how to break out of established channels. Social media can be a lonely place,” she says. “You might be wiser building really key human relationships, with editors and other writers and readers, things that are more solid and less ephemeral.”
After digesting my conversation with Cerand, I connect with Kima Jones, who, like Cerand, arrived at book publicity after traveling a roundabout path, starting her career as director of marketing for a drug rehab center in Beverly Hills. Although she’d been writing poems since she was a girl, she was hesistant to join the literary world. Having grown up as the oldest of eight children, she felt a need to be financially self-sufficient. “I grew up poor, and I didn’t want to be poor,” she says. “It did not seem reasonable to me to have a life in publishing. I didn’t feel that I could sustain myself as a poet.” Jones is an avid reader, however, and it irked her that significant books, especially those by black authors, were being overlooked. “They’d come into the store and then just drop out of view after maybe a week. There was no conversation,” she says. “I wanted black work to be taken seriously.” She started to realize that she could create the conditions for those conversations to be both ongoing and highly visible. A nascent dream took shape; Jones’s background in marketing and her love of literature came together when a friend, author Cole Lavalais, asked her to get the word out about her debut, Summer of the Cicadas, which was forthcoming from Willow Books. “The idea of doing publicity for books just clicked,” Jones says. Within months she’d begun to build a business, working eighteen-hour days out of her studio in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Three years later, Jones and two associates work together as Jack Jones Literary Arts, representing four to six books every three months, no more than twenty-four books a year.
The mission of Jack Jones Literary Arts is to enlarge and transform the way the publishing industry represents women of color. Although Jones did work with Tyehimba Jess on his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Olio (Wave Books, 2016), 97 percent of her clients are women—a balance she prefers. “I’m aware that my practice looks not a little different but a lot different than the rest of the publishing industry,” she says. “Publishing is overwhelmingly white, and it can be really uncomfortable for emerging writers of color. Working with me takes that off the table. They know that I’m an ally.” Part of her role, Jones says, is a willingness to be a strong interlocutor for each of her clients. “You’re not going to be given a cover that makes you feel tokenized. You’re not going to do events that make you feel played,” she says. “We are going to work together toward new media and new models of representation.” Because Jones herself is relatively new to the business, she often takes on young or first-time authors. “The idea is that our careers are growing together,” she says. “When I worked on Rion Amilcar Scott’s Insurrections, we were simultaneously talking about book two because book one needed to set up those platforms.”
Jack Jones Literary Arts offers a variety of services, from a forty-five-minute consultation that costs $500 to packages for supplemental and primary publicity that start at $10,000. In addition, Jones works with literary nonprofits that serve marginalized communities, and she hosts an annual writers retreat for women of color.
I talk to Jones about gravitas, and public-intellectual status, and about what an author can do to achieve it. My conversation with Jones challenges me to think more deeply and more precisely about my own work and what I am trying to say with it. “In Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat talks about how artists create their bodies of work out of the mythologies and hauntings that follow them from their young lives,” she says. “When I’m thinking about a client’s campaign, I’m asking her, ‘What are your obsessions?’ Sometimes she’s not even aware.” Jones adds that this awareness needs to translate into a sense that the arc of a book or project will leap into the national conversation. She reads with questions ready: “Is there something provocative here? If I put my client in conversation with, say, Robin Coste Lewis, is my client going to be able to hold her own?” Jones tells me that before making an offering to the world, it is the job of writers to clarify and hone their own contribution to the wider conversation. She reminds me that the first step in breaking out is actually taking the time to turn inward and look within.
My final call is to Michael Taeckens, the kind, soft-spoken cofounder of the highly regarded Broadside: Expert Literary PR. Taeckens, who studied poetry with Jorie Graham and Robert Hass at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent twelve years doing publicity for Algonquin Books, then two years for Graywolf Press, started Broadside with Whitney Peeling and Kimberly Burns three years ago. He represents authors on an independent basis and also helps add steam to in-house campaigns. Taeckens, who is representing books by Ada Limón and Natasha Trethewey this spring and who recently represented Kevin Young for his work on Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017), sees his role as creating the conversation. Like Cerand and Jones, he is judicious about what he takes on. “I want to read the book and feel like I know how to sell it,” he says. “I need to feel that I am able to tell the story of the book with original and authentic passion.” He adds: “Creating buzz happens through hard work, but I’m not performing magic tricks. I’m sharing my enthusiasm and I’m building relationships between authors and gatekeepers and also, eventually, readers.” Taeckens’s work is powered by his own genuine excitement. “There’s something that happens when our conversations and passions sort of bubble up together,” he says. “Things do reach a place where they can cascade.”
Taeckens, who charges $4,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the genre and scope of the project, for a six-month campaign—and who takes on only six to eight projects per year—wants to remind authors that it’s important to be extremely cautious when making the deep investment in publicists. How proactive are they? How much do they understand your vision? What track record do they have landing print, TV, or radio spots? Do they really know the players? Can they help take your book beyond reviews and into lifestyle pages, or find the stories that surround your book? Do they know how to do the investigative work to find the reviewers who will respond to your book? Taeckens says that a good publicist doesn’t promise the moon. “I’m realistic with authors. Sometimes people just want to be on Fresh Air and we have to think, ‘Well, what really is the story for them here?’” He says that he and his clients talk for a long time so that he can approach the book and the author from many angles. “My goal is that your name becomes an integral part of literary culture,” he says. “I go down a lot of rabbit holes. I have to really think about what will resonate.”
Taeckens slowly draws me out about my third book of poems, which is set in my hometown, a place I’ve left and returned to, a place now undergoing radical transformation. He also gets me to talk about how I’m thinking of shaping a book of essays that I’ve been working on for some time. We begin brainstorming about my dreams, where I’d like to see my work reviewed or placed, what cards I should turn over next, where the next part of my path should lead. Who inside the book world did I dream would read my book? Who outside the book world might want to read it too? While talking with Taeckens, I start jotting down new ideas of publications I want to read more closely, writing phrases like “Book launch at local history museum” and “Make a better national list of favorite bookstores” and “Do more events at wineries” and “Read with geologist or scientist.” I tell him that I can feel the buzz already, and he laughs. “That’s how it starts,” he says. “It becomes a kind of consuming passion.”
As I make new lists and maps, one of Cerand’s questions sticks with me: “What do you want that you don’t have?” A week or so later I write a heartfelt note to Cerand in which I tell her that I want to feel more visible. I also write about wanting to be an ambassador for a kind of poetry that would make us feel more connected and more human, that provides something I think we’re all deeply hungry for now. I write that I want to figure out how to feel a heft in my own work that will get me out of the cycle of posting and retweeting and gabbing online. “I want poetry that brings us back to the body, back to the breath, back to each other,” I write. Cerand calls me back, ready to talk.
I suppose when I began this article, I’d imagined that I might be told to pitch certain great magazines, or to refine my website, to hone my elevator pitch. I was told these things, of course, but when Cerand and I follow up, she has a much simpler, much more down-to-earth suggestion. “Why don’t you find a church or public space in your community and try to host a really simple family-friendly reading? Once a month, a kind of deeply community-inspired poetry outreach?” she asks. “You could include music and food. People could relax.” The idea at first seems deceptively simple. I’ve run reading series before, but in Cerand’s hands, this advice—to slow down and gather real community in real life—seems different. I love the idea of curating a family-friendly space to unplug and just be with the joy of words. Whether or not this will lead to great fame, or be a huge press sensation, it feels right.
“When you want to change the way you’re seen, you also want to work differently, and you want to work out of your principles,” Cerand says. The idea is at once challenging and profound. In this difficult time, when so much news is hurtling toward us online, how can I slow down, ground myself, and connect more deeply to the community around me? Cerand brings me back to thinking about publicity in a way that can nourish me. “You don’t want just to think about the book launch,” she says. “You want to think about the life’s work. What is irreplaceable about this work? What is irreplaceable in a life?”
Years ago, as a somewhat shy college graduate trying to get my first nibbles in publishing in New York City, I was exhausted by the blithe charge to go out and network. At a certain point, I stopped and read a goofy but sweet book—I still remember it—called Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. He proposed that networking was not meant to be scary but is really about actively and lovingly cultivating friendships that can sustain you, and in which you also can offer others something that is most genuine about yourself. Remembering that the best “networks” are really made out of only acts of deep humanity was a relief to me.
That feeling of humanizing the process comes back to me as I finish my conversations with Lauren Cerand, Kima Jones, and Michael Taeckens. Sure, there is work, and press, and mailing, and kits, and social media, but what has amazed me while talking to these publicists is that each has reminded me how much more holistic those processes could be. These publicists are, like me, avid readers, passionate about creating conversations, hungry to pass on the gift of great writing, working in the service of connecting people and ideas. Like me, they are idealists—wanting to further the reach of books and ideas they love and perhaps even to change the world with them. As Cerand puts it: “Think about publicity as something that connects you. Try to be as tender about publicity as you have been about making the work—put the work into the world as lovingly as you made it.”
Ten Quick Tips from the Publicists
1. Your writing comes first. “Don’t do things that make you anxious about your health or your time,” says Taeckens. “You have to keep making work, and you have to keep making the work that’s most important to your vision.”
2. Focus on real relationships. “Your virtual network might be fun, but really knowing editors and other writers, and caring about them, is so much more valuable as a time investment,” says Cerand.
3. Always be brainstorming. “Go ahead and dream big, and early,” says Taeckens. “You might want to keep a list of any publications you might write for, or do freelance pieces that would go along with your book. That way you’re generating ideas that you can pitch even a year out. Keep in mind that many media venues plan coverage as much as four to six months out.”
4. Remove obstacles. “Your website should be clear. You should have a really easy link to getting to your book,” says Cerand. “You need to remove any obstacles to actually finding your work.”
5. Be a good literary citizen.“Think on the local, regional, and national level,” says Taeckens. This might mean supporting the writers in your city, planning community events, developing a fundraiser for your local library, or serving on a board. “Make a point of showing up for others,” Taeckens says. “You must build your ecosphere.”
6. Refine your elevator pitch. “Having an intriguing one to two sentences about your book is so simple, but so many people don’t quite have it down,” Jones says.
7. Think beyond the press release. “Robust press materials can give the media ideas for ways of approaching and discussing your book,” Taeckens says. “In addition to press releases, consider adding a pitch letter (a more personalized pitch for the book), talking points (a list of topics covered in your book that you can discuss in interviews), Q&As, an extended bio, and a praise sheet.”
8. Envision entering the conversation.“Good solid advice is always to look for tie-in news and trends that will prop up the book project,” says Jones.
9. Mix it up. “When you feel that you want to be seen differently, work differently,” says Cerand. Maybe you need a Facebook sabbatical. If you feel like you’re tweeting too much about yourself, spend a couple weeks promoting the work of others. Maybe you need to organize more events in your city or consider working in a different genre.
10. Pay it forward. “Always support the work of your contemporaries, your peers, and the next generation,” says Jones. “Today’s debut writers will be writing tomorrow’s blurbs.”
Tess Taylor is the author of The Forage House (2013) and Work & Days (2016), both published by Red Hen Press. She is an on-air reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and this spring she is the Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
(Photos: Cerand: Jason Rice; Jones: Kayla Reefer; Taeckens: Linwood Hart.) [Corrections: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the number of projects that Michael Taeckens takes on each month; the number has been updated to reflect how many projects he takes on each year. Additionally, a quote by Kima Jones has been corrected to accurately reflect her perspective on the need to be financially self-sufficient.]Decisions, Decisions: Three Paths to Publication
Late last year we realized that, through some strange sort of serendipity, all our fiction debuts were slated for publication within just months of one another. Although we are all friends—connected by the various shared histories of our education, employment, and writing lives—our individual experiences getting to this point in our careers were quite different. Alethea’s agent had sold her collection of short stories to a commercial publisher, Céline had signed a contract for a novel with an independent press, and Michelle was launching her own press to self-publish her novel. So we decided to sit down to compare notes on the distinct paths that brought us all to the same place—on the verge of our careers as authors. Here’s what we learned.
CHOOSING A PUBLISHER
Keating: “Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been” goes the Grateful Dead lyric. That’s certainly how I feel about my path to publication. I suspected my novel would be a tough sell to a commercial publisher. Although it has a suspenseful plot,Layla is also a political novel, and politics and commercial publishing often don’t mix. I had secured an agent who loved the book and who wanted to try the mainstream publishers, and I saw no harm in trying, but in my heart of hearts I suspected my book truly belonged with a small press.
Fast forward a couple of years and many “almosts” later: I lost my agent, who decided to get out of the field, and I was confronted with the choice of putting the manuscript in a box under the bed—or in the shredder—or starting to send it on my own to small presses. I didn’t think I had the energy to go through the submission process, but when I saw an ad in this magazine for “issue-based literary” Plain View Press, I changed my mind. The press was also described as a “cooperative of writers,” and that, too, appealed to me. Another advantage of going with a small press is that they typically keep their books in print forever. I wouldn’t have to worry about the publisher remaindering my book if it didn’t do well out of the gate. Susan Bright, the publisher, responded not only with enthusiasm but also with great insight into my thematic intent. I felt my book was being embraced for the reasons that meant the most to me, and so, without even considering another, I decided on Plain View.
Black: Some of the decision of choosing what type of publishing path to follow was taken care of for me: My agent queried several houses, and we went with the one that felt like the best fit. “Best fit,” as you know, doesn’t necessarily mean the most money; in some cases, it’s a matter of wanting to work with a particular editor, and there can also be intangible elements involved. When we left the official meeting at which Broadway Books first made an offer on my book, my agent, Lisa Bankoff, turned to me. “There was a lot of enthusiasm in that room,” she said. “You don’t feel love like that very often.” Lisa has been at ICM [International Creative Management] long enough to have learned a thing or two, and as we crossed West Fifty-Fifth Street, she told me that things usually work out best when you follow the love. So that was it: I decided to sign with Broadway.
Toth: My thought process was so different. While Alethea and Céline were deciding big or small, commercial or niche, I was deciding whether it was worth it to even try to break in to traditional publishing. Calculating the time and focus it would take to query, find an agent, and from there a publisher, and multiplying each step by the probability of success, then comparing it with the appeal of control, speed, and e-book economics for a category like mine—commercial fiction—all led me to self-publish my first novel.
This is not to say I didn’t try the traditional, proven path. I did, sort of. My writer friends scoff when I tell them I amassed only four rejections and three nonresponses to my querying efforts. They report their number of rejections before landing literary agents with a certain survivors’ pride (seeming to average around twenty-five to thirty, except in the case of one outlier who queried only her dream agent, successfully). But for me it was eye opening to see what happened over the period of time that I did query: I got depressed. Really depressed. The world was changing in unbelievably exciting ways that I had been trained for—as an Internet entrepreneur, in business school—and there I was, pursuing the status quo, an approach to producing books that I feared was falling far behind the times.
I absolutely see the benefits and the appeal of having a publishing house behind you. In fact, now that I’ve been at this awhile, I think that in most cases if you can get a publishing deal, you should take it. But if you find the business side of books almost as creative as the writing side, then self-publishing is a viable, exhilarating option—one that successful “crossover” authors such as Boyd Morrison, Brunonia Barry, and Lisa Genova have shown can actually lead to stellar deals with established large publishers.
EDITING AND PRODUCTION
Black: At the start, I got lucky—my editor, Christine Pride, was a peach. Like the best of editors, she saw both where I was aiming and where I failed and gave me feedback that was sensitive but persuasive. “How tied,” she asked, “are you to the title of your story collection,” which was then “Wise as Serpents, Harmless as Doves”? She was concerned that that title, while interesting, might give the false impression that the book was a religious book. “But,” she said, “some authors are very attached to their titles. Changing it can be as traumatic as changing your name.” Instead she suggested “I Knew You’d Be Lovely,” the title of a story that’s been an audience favorite. I hesitated for a few hours before realizing she was absolutely right.
Keating: The publisher felt my manuscript needed minimal editing, and I went through the galley-correction stages very smoothly. But the press did not have an in-house proofreader, and in hindsight, I should have hired one rather than rely solely on myself. I had to go through an extra round of corrections because I learned it’s really hard to spot errors in your own work.
Toth: One of the biggest downsides to being a self-published author is not having the rigorous review of an agent and editor who have tied themselves professionally to you and your book. When a literary expert has attached his or her reputation (and paycheck, to some extent) to your work, interests are fully aligned. Without such comrades, I’ve needed to personally ensure that Annie Begins meets expected standards of quality. To do this, I hired a manuscript consultant through Grub Street (which cost, in total, about eight hundred dollars) and relied on the advice of a close friend who is a former literary agent for input. I hired a freelance copyeditor (six hundred dollars) and then, after my mother caught eight typos, learned the difference between a copyeditor and a proofreader. I found one through LinkedIn and hired her (for another six hundred dollars). Coincidentally, she was in Alethea’s network so I was able to check her credentials, and she proved to be superb.
In contrast to Céline’s and Alethea’s relatively smooth sailing on the production front, this is where a self-publisher (especially if she has a perfectionist streak) can get tripped up, or at least get sucked into the black hole that is interior book design. While my avowed strategy was to hire experts wherever possible, in this case I found that I couldn’t find freelancers who could work to my standards, timeline, and budget, so I ended up doing most of the print and e-book design myself. I thought it would be a good learning experience, and it has been. I have learned it is exhausting and unbelievably time consuming. I will hire someone next time around.
COVER DESIGN
Black: When my editor first e-mailed me a PDF of what the cover would look like, I opened it and knew it was right. I wrote her back two words: Love it. I loved the way it felt both classic and modern simultaneously; I loved the black and teal coloring; I loved the uncomplicated lines and elegant font. There was just one thing: What was that white silhouette in the lower left corner? A lion? A sexually aroused poodle? The devil? No—it was a couple embracing, with the woman kicking one leg up behind her. Well, this was not exactly clear, in part because the figure appeared to have only three legs—or, rather, two legs and some sort of tail. So Christine sent it back to the art folks with a request that they articulate the image.
Meanwhile I showed the cover to several colleagues, and everyone loved it—except for that white silhouette. Not only was it somewhat inscrutable, they said, but even if you could scrute it, it was too conventional an image for a book of inventive and unpredictable stories. So when the new art arrived, several weeks later, I asked Christine if we could substitute something else entirely (although to this day I have no idea what that would be—a piece of fruit? a guitar? a blender?). This was when Christine informed me that I was working with a publisher who did hundreds of covers a week, and at this late stage in the game, no, they could not send it back and make it a toothbrush. Later we laughed about it, and she said that cover discussions in particular can border on the absurd; she once had an author ask her if she could move the cloud to the left, which has become my personal catchphrase for asking for something I know is unreasonable but I just can’t help myself. (In an interesting twist, a version of that cover remained in place until just weeks before the publication date, when my publisher, based on some early enthusiastic feedback, decided to go with a simpler, more timeless design.)
Keating: One of the biggest benefits of going the small press route, and something crucial to me, was getting to have a say about the cover and the interior design. Authors with mainstream publishers rarely get cover approval in their contracts, while self-published authors have total control in this area. With Plain View, I felt I had the best of both worlds. I would be able to choose the art that would be the basis for the cover and have a say in the book’s interior appearance. At the same time, I was glad to let the press handle design and production. I knew it would be fun to search for the perfect image to represent my book, and when I saw the photo of a strikingly beautiful desert landscape, evocative of the setting of a pivotal scene in the novel, I knew it was “the one.” It had everything I hadn’t known I was looking for: the hint of a young woman, an ambiguous figure in the distance, a sense of longing. Little did I know that it would take two months, and a turn as a detective, to locate the photographer—in Iran! By that point I was more than happy to shell out five hundred bucks for the permission to use it.
Toth: As Céline points out, I had the joy and pain of total control of producing the cover for Annie Begins. Some self-publishers do their own cover design or rely on the templates provided by the author-services companies. Both can be fine options, but I wanted a truly great cover, not something I could produce on PowerPoint. I discovered the Book Cover Archive and became an instant devotee—poring over page after page of fantastic, inspiring design. I clicked my way to a boutique that would create an original cover costing between twenty-five hundred dollars and thirty-five hundred dollars. Yowza.
Then I lucked into finding Tangent Covers, which would allow me to customize from a selection of twenty-one extremely well-designed template covers for much less than a custom option (about three hundred dollars). I thought it over for a day and, as precious as my project is to me, I concluded that Annie Begins is not a baby, it’s a book, and hopefully the first of many, and I needed to start making smart economic decisions with my calculator and not just my heart. I decided to go with Tangent. It’s worth noting that I chose an option that demanded similar constraints to the ones imposed upon Alethea by her in-house designers. However, I don’t think that author in Alethea’s story was wrong to want to move the cloud to the left! I could easily see moving a cloud to the left. Or right. And back again. And I am glad that I retained that option.
I love the cover of Annie Begins for its clean lines and simplicity, but it does lack some of the oomph of the best truly custom designs (and I regret the mostly white cover, which disappeared against the all-white background of Amazon and other online retailers’ sites until a gray line was added). Still, I’m glad I didn’t overinvest, and next time around I might just use crowdsourcing via either crowdSPRING or 99designs.
From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. (Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)
FINANCES
Keating: By “cooperative,” Plain View Press didn’t just mean working together in terms of submissions or publicity—it meant taking a financial stake in the book, in the form of pre-buying my first one hundred fifty books. I was uncomfortable with this—it felt a bit like one of those scary vanity presses one hears about. At the same time, I understood the positives: By working in this manner, the press was able to take bigger risks on books that would be shunned by other presses. Royalty and other terms were more than generous. I also liked the fact that the press had been around for more than thirty years and had published award-winning books (including The First Thing and the Last by Allan G. Johnson, which was praised by Publishers Weekly and was chosen as a “Great Read” by O, The Oprah Magazine in April 2010). I was sold when I spoke with another Plain View author, a poet, who had had very positive experiences with the press and had recouped her investment within two months of her book’s publication.
Black: My advance wasn’t life changing (just under twenty-thousand dollars), but it was a good number for a first book of short stories. Of course, if you factor in the cost of building and maintaining an author website and other expenses (this spring I flew to L.A. so I could be at a WordTheatre performance of one of my stories), it’s a little less impressive, but I try to avoid making such calculations. I am fond of saying (and still want to find a T-shirt that says): “Uh, I was told there’d be no math?”
Toth: About Alethea’s advance, I say at least it was a positive number! My expense-laden strategy for self-publishing is to try to replicate everything great about traditional publishing by utilizing top-notch freelancers—manuscript editor, copy-editor, proofreader, book-cover designer, and publicist. (The one thing I cannot realistically replicate is a sales force, so my distribution is almost entirely online.) All of this costs money—lots of it—although plenty of other self-published authors are far more DIY and are producing profitable books for a fraction of what I’ve invested.
MARKETING AND PUBLICITY
Keating: My experience working on marketing and publicity fell somewhere in the middle of the continuum between mainstream publishers, who do most of the heavy lifting, and the self-publishing model. Plain View would be handling distribution and sales, which I absolutely didn’t want to do, as well as presentation of the book at some conventions and book fairs. The press also would prepare a flyer for me and share a mailing list for sending the book out for reviews. But while this was significant support, I knew it was just a fraction of what would be needed to make the book a success.
I contemplated doing the publicity work on my own, but even minimal research—and the advice of my publisher—convinced me that I needed help navigating the thickets of all that should be done in this arena. I’m now aware that I would have been paralyzed by indecision without my publicist, Molly Mikolowski at A Literary Light. Molly, who had headed up marketing for Coffee House Press before setting up her own agency, worked out a plan where I did the easy stuff (such as researching blogs), while she brought her expertise to bear on the more complex aspects of media and bookseller outreach. Expense aside, the actual details of a publicity campaign are probably similar for all three of our publishing models—getting the book into the hands of those who might review it favorably, securing interviews, and setting up readings. These days social media plays a big part, and much of that is up to the author no matter which path to publication is taken. I felt less lonely having someone in my corner day to day.
Black: I agonized over whether to hire an outside publicist. I’d been given the names of some terrific ones, including Jocelyn Kelley at Kelley & Hall Book Publicity and Promotion, whom my agent personally recommended to me, saying, “I don’t think she sleeps.” But I just couldn’t decide what to do. It’s difficult to gauge results—since there’s no control group for a book, it’s hard to know to what to attribute success or failure—and publicists can be expensive. The strongest argument in favor of spending the money (which can range from thirty-five hundred dollars to over ten thousand dollars) was that this book was the culmination of fifteen years of work, so why not do everything in my power to help it reach an audience? In fact, I probably would have gone ahead and hired a publicist had my meeting with the Crown publicity team not gone so well. There were six people in the room, all gushing about the book and what they were going to do to help it—one in a British accent, another in an Australian accent—all of them seeming to have read the stories and to genuinely love them. But to be honest, what I discovered is that a short story collection from an unknown author is just not going to be the top priority at a major publishing house. When three months before the pub date I saw that there were no readings booked, and we didn’t yet have a review from Publishers Weekly or Kirkus, I decided to treat publicity for this book as very DIY. I started e-mailing everyone I knew, offering to be an “opening act” for writers who had books coming out around the same time as mine; alerting contacts at writing conferences that I was willing to be a substitute if they had any last-minute cancellations; querying bookstore owners and artistic directors. It’s a delicate business, though, because in my opinion it’s better to do nothing than to annoy people. It’s also a lot of work, and on many days it feels a bit like operating a lemonade stand on the side of an interstate! But it also feels worth it.
Toth: Céline has talked about the lonely parts of being with a small press and I have to concur—the isolation can be even more pronounced when you wear all the hats. This was one of the reasons I decided to hire a publicist. I needed someone officially on my team. I didn’t have the skills or the contacts to do the publicity in the way I envisioned, and many other writers I know have needed to supplement the in-house publicity teams of their publishers, so I thought it wasn’t such a stretch to do it for my indie project. I have now been working with Jocelyn Kelley (coincidentally, the same person recommended so highly to Alethea by her agent) since late last fall, with a brief hiatus when Jocelyn, who is an Oprah Book Club correspondent, traveled to Australia with Oprah. Although a significant financial investment, publicity is something I cannot do for myself.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE
Keating: Because Plain View is a very small press among small presses, it doesn’t have a sales force, and I didn’t appreciate the significance of that drawback when I made my decision. Getting copies of Layla on bookstore shelves will be difficult—maybe not as difficult as the obstacles that exist for self-published books, as Michelle mentioned, but hard enough. That will be a big consideration for me the next time around.
But the toughest thing for me occurred just before my advance readers’ copies were about to be sent out for review. Susan Bright, my publisher, died unexpectedly. Susan was a special person, the press very much her creation, and her death brought home the reminder that small presses, even one with a thirty-year history, often rest on somewhat precarious foundations. I was extremely lucky that other wonderful and talented people picked up the reins and that my book’s publication was only slightly delayed.
Another surprise for me was how much I enjoyed the collaborative aspects of working with my publicist and also with a web designer, Andrew Beierle. Molly and Andrew made what could have been a very anxious time, before publication, a lot more enjoyable.
Black: A week before Christmas I received my biggest surprise. My editor was taking a job at Hyperion. This was a promotion for Christine, which she was happy about, but she was distressed to have to leave all her authors. Another harsh reality of the publishing industry, as we all know, is that there’s a lot of turnover. Christine was apologetic and kind as ever. But my book, a friend explained to me over the phone, had been orphaned. Fortunately, Lovely didn’t stay orphaned for long. An enthusiastic, equally wise, and equally gorgeous editor (disturbingly, both of my editors have looked like professional models) stepped in. Alexis Washam has been wonderful, and I’m grateful to this day: They say you’ll be lucky to get one good editor, and I was lucky enough to get two.
Toth: I can’t quite wrap my head around how much has happened in self-publishing in the six months I’ve been at it. Barry Eisler recently turned down a half-million-dollar advance in order to self-publish, while indie darling Amanda Hocking is going in the other direction. Everything is shaking out now, and on the eve of my arbitrarily defined self-publication date, I’m pretty happy to be in this position. But talk to me in six months—especially if by then I’ve only sold books to my relatives and Facebook friends.
Keating: Ditto for me!
Black: And me!
Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books this month. A graduate of Harvard University, she lives in Pawling, New York.
Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June. She earned an MA in creative writing from City College in New York and lives in New York City.
Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in April by (sixoneseven) books, an indie press that she founded in 2010. A graduate of Harvard Business School, she lives in Boston and New York City.
After the Book Party: Three Different Paths From Publication
Last year, after we realized that all our fiction debuts would be released within a few months of one another (Alethea’s story collection was due to be published by a commercial publisher, Céline’s novel was scheduled for release by an independent press, and Michelle planned to publish her novel with an independent company she founded herself), we got together to compare notes about everything from working with an editor and choosing a cover to marketing and publicity. Our discussion was published as “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different Paths to Publication” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.
Now, after a year filled with successes and failures as well as constant challenges and continuing rewards, our books have made their way into the hands of readers. A debut novelist once told Alethea that having a first book come out is like lighting a firecracker that doesn’t go off. While having our debuts published was undoubtedly an exciting event in each of our lives, it didn’t happen precisely the way we had planned. Of course we knew there were no ticker-tape parades for published authors, so the three of us arrived at our publication dates with relatively sober expectations; nevertheless, the postpublication journey was full of surprises. Here’s what we learned.
ON AND OFF THE SHELF
Black: I think the greatest advantage to being with a large publisher was the power it had to get my book into the hands of people who could really help. The best thing to happen to I Knew You’d Be Lovely was that it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and the lion’s share of our sales has been from Barnes & Noble. My publisher also made sure to reach out to independent bookstores, and even had me write a personal letter of introduction, which was then enclosed with the ARCs sent to bookstore owners. The most surprising thing my editor did was ask me for a list of “tastemakers” whom I’d like to receive my book. I didn’t understand. “You mean, like Michelle Obama?” I don’t know who ended up receiving surprise copies of the book, but it was encouraging to feel the publisher was going to bat for me.
Toth: As a self-published author, I knew it made no sense to invest time or resources trying to break into bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional publishers dominate that important sales channel because they have the necessary scale, distribution capabilities, promotional dollars, and stra-tegic partnerships, and if that weren’t enough to dissuade me (it was) the very thought of having to manage returns from bookstores would have. On the plus side, these constraints helped to make my strategy clear: Focus on online distribution via e-books and print-on-demand paperback books. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory. The online sale triggers production of the book, which is then shipped to the consumer. For my paperback I used Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will accept and ship orders not just from Amazon but also from other retailers such as BarnesandNoble.com) and for my e-book I used Kindle Direct Publishing in combination with Smashwords, an independent e-book publishing-and-distribution platform that produces e-books in multiple formats, including those for the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.
Keating: My favorite appearance of Layla on a shelf was in the Occupy Wall Street library at Zuccotti Park. As the novel centers on youth activism, this was perfect. One reason I had chosen to go with a small press was because mainstream publishers found the novel noncommercial. I wanted the thrill of seeing it on bookstore shelves, and the chance at serendipitous purchases. Plain View Press lacks a sales-and-marketing staff, and encouraged me to hire a publicist for outreach to independent bookstores. Although this was somewhat successful, most stores that carry Layla are not in New York City, where I live. Still, I get a charge when I do come upon it in libraries and bookstores.
PUBLICITY AND REVIEWS
Toth: My goal as an indie publisher is to replicate as closely as possible the way a traditional publisher produces and markets a book, so I hired a publicist who secured reviews and mentions from a number of online sites as well as Library Journal. Annie Begins was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and reaching that round of the contest resulted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having positive reviews lent credibility and support to my indie effort, and likely made bloggers and other reviewers more open to the book. I also had some excellent exposure in Bookmarks Magazine. My luckiest break was being picked up by Amazon for an e-mail promotion that introduced Annie to a much wider audience. I believe this resulted from the combination of being categorized as a genre book (contemporary romance), garnering a lot of early five-star reviews on Amazon, and my decision to price the e-book at $2.99. The only problem was that a few members of the contemporary romance audience would have appreciated a steamier book, and I did generate my first negative reader reviews after that!
Keating: Layla garnered good reviews and articles, was named a Huffington Post pick, and drew invitations to such blogs as the Quivering Pen and Words With Writers. Overall my marketing efforts felt a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I tried giveaways, offering fifteen books each on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where two hundred and six hundred people signed up, respectively. More than a hundred people added my book to their To Read lists, and sales jumped. A mistake was paying for inclusion on book club sites. Given the huge number of books listed on such sites, I found it’s best to skip them if you can’t also afford an ad. There’s no shortage of work you can do for your book, and it’s hard to choose where to put limited resources. I wish I’d done more personal outreach to book clubs, bookstores, and libraries. But the path to publication is really a path to a writing career. Rather than put much energy into marketing, I focused on my next book.
Black: Reviews are pivotal when it comes to reaching a larger audience, but even a big publisher can’t force anyone to give your book coverage; in fact, I know a couple of reviewers who feel it’s a turn-off when a book is pushed on them too aggressively. I was up against some steep odds—paperback original, first book, short stories—and I did not get a lot of ink. In fact, one of my reviewers opened by saying she was surprised the book wasn’t being given more attention. Now that I’ve seen how things played out, I do think I might have benefited from an outside publicist. But at the time, I couldn’t justify the cost; I figured I should get health insurance before I got a publicist.
READINGS AND EVENTS
Toth: I did readings and events in only three cities: Boston, New York, and San Francisco. I had a launch event cohosted by Harvard Book Store (where Annie is available on the Espresso Book Machine) and Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. It drew an overflow crowd, and I sold all my preprinted copies (which felt good but is really a rookie-publisher mistake, as my writer friends pointed out). I did a round of literary festivals and book clubs—for Annie and also on the topic of self-publishing. I found that Skype book clubs can be a blast, and that when you figure out your core audience and connect directly with it, there’s nothing better. I could have done more and, as an extrovert, would have enjoyed it, but the demands of my day job had increased thanks to an unexpected promotion, and it was a struggle to do just the basics. This is an inherent challenge for any writer with a day job—and surely any self-published writer.
Black: I wanted to take the show on the road, and at one point told my in-house publicist that if she’d book the events, I’d pay the expenses myself. But no events were booked; book tours don’t seem to happen these days, even at a big publisher, unless you’re already well known. Of course, there’s a reason for that: Such efforts don’t typically have a large impact on sales. Nevertheless, I love to give readings—I love the smell and the feel of bookstores, and I love talking to book people—so I put together a small tour myself. You know the Onion headline “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just Three People or a Crowd of Nine”? I drove from New York City to Chicago to give a reading to about twelve people. But the math of finding your audience isn’t linear, and even if you read to only two people, one of them might host a radio show, or be an influential blogger, or fall in love with your book and buy copies for friends.
Keating: At first I considered asking friends to be my public-speaking avatars, as I’m an introvert—but I knew readings would be one of the best ways for Layla to reach readers. Unlike Alethea, I live in dread of a small audience and put in enormous effort to make sure good crowds showed up at every venue. My first event was at Montauk Bookshop on Long Island, where I spend weekends. Although my husband embarrassed me by papering the town with flyers and telling everyone he ran into about the event, that personal touch really paid off. It was the bookstore’s biggest crowd ever, and the owner’s enthusiasm garnered some terrific press coverage after the fact. With personal postcards, e-mails, and Facebook invitations, my book-launch party in New York City was packed to overflowing. Then the timing was right for an official tour—vacation road trip! I traveled throughout the Northeast, where friends generously hosted events and lined up readings. By the fall, bookstore owners, book clubs, and librarians who had actually read Layla were sending me invitations to read, attend book club meetings, and even run a writing workshop. One of the most memorable events was reading with Alethea and Michelle at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. There’s nothing like combining forces with writer friends to fill a space, not to mention to share the anxiety—and the wine.
From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. (Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)
ADVERTISING AND SALES
Black: Crown Publishing Group, the division of Random House whose imprint Broadway published my book, placed AdReady network ads on sites such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Goodreads. Print ads are more expensive—the smallest ad in the New York Times Book Review, a two-fifths-page spot, costs $6,688 for black and white and $12,731 for color—so they didn’t go that route. I personally paid for an ad on Narrative.com and one in Poets & Writers Magazine; both places give you a healthy author discount, and it felt like money well spent. Lovely was in its fourth printing this past April, but that number doesn’t tell you much—we could be in our one-thousandth printing if each print run were ten books. My initial print run was eighty-five hundred, and each of the subsequent runs was under two thousand. When my first royalty check arrived earlier this year, at first I didn’t know what it was; I wasn’t expecting to have earned out my advance. I was surprised that only one e-book was sold for every ten p-books (and I was surprised to learn the term p-book).
Toth: Annie Begins was an Amazon Top 100 Kindle Best Seller and Top 10 in Kindle Contemporary Romancefor a time during the summer of 2011, and in the first year of publication e-book sales of more than five thousand dominated paperback sales of around five hundred. I recently elected to participate in an Amazon e-book giveaway that generated more than fifteen thousand downloads in less than a day and drove a significant jump in sales momentum. I also experimented with Facebook ads, which did not pay back the investment in terms of sales. The most effective thing I did was to focus on e-books and Amazon. Controversy aside, Amazon is by farthe most important site for e-book sales, and I suggest to all self-publishers that they should not only have an online strategy, but also an Amazon strategy.
Keating: I had modest expectations, as I knew going in that Plain View Press had limited marketing capability. Then the publisher died, throwing the press into turmoil from which it is valiantly recovering. So I’m thrilled that ten months out, Layla is still selling, which I assume means it’s being hand-sold. Sales are actually picking up, and Layla was Plain View’s top seller for 2011. My wildest dream was to sell a thousand books the first year, and it looks like that just might happen. My publisher put out an e-book version of the book recently, so I look forward to taking Michelle’s advice about e-book strategy.
NEW MEDIA
Toth: Part of the approach my publicist and I agreed on was for me to blog and speak on self-publishing, both because of the momentum of the self-publishing path and because I have a business background. It’s been gratifying to help empower authors by spreading the word about independent publishing, but such exposure does not necessarily translate to book sales. I also put up a Facebook page and did updates when I felt there was real news, believing that readers don’t need more than a couple of reminders to know if they want to buy your book. Mostly, though, I’ve reassessed the trade-off of taking time away from writing my second novel and developing the (sixoneseven) books platform, now structured as a micro press that has published three additional authors—two novelists, one memoirist—and counting. While I appreciate the value of social media, I think the best way to achieve my creative goals is to write and publish more books—of my own, and of other writers!
Keating: I dove into social media feet first (as in, less brain) and tried everything: Facebook, Twitter, Gather, Goodreads, LibraryThing, She Writes, and Red Room. This was SM—as in sadomasochistic, not social media—overkill. Like a bee amid flowers, I flitted from one site to the next, sipping nectar but producing only exhaustion. But gradually I began to make meaningful connections and tap into a wealth of useful information. And I got a real charge when I put an invitation on She Writes to anyone who lived in a town where I was giving a reading and didn’t know a soul, and a blogger and short story writer showed up! There’s no magic about social media. Just as with connections in the real world, you can’t expect tangible results without a significant investment of quality time.
Black: I’m no good at coming up with real-time 140-character-long observations that would be worth anyone’s attention. My publisher requested that I join Facebook, and I did; but I’m not on Twitter and I’m only minimally on Goodreads. Instead of putting my time into those venues, I tried to continue to write. I wrote a piece for Writer’s Digest about how I wished my dad could read my book, an essay for Narrative Magazine about why I write at night, and I published a new piece of fiction in One Story. I also told a couple of stories onstage for the Moth. The Twitterverse serves a lot of people well, but I think you should play to your strengths. If you’re a fish, don’t try to ride a bike.
LESSONS LEARNED
Keating: Readings not only helped me get past my shyness but also brought me back to my reason for writing in the first place. At a book group in Staten Island, New York, I had the overpowering experience of listening to women quote favorite lines from Layla and describe the metaphors that moved them. There’s nothing more rewarding than that, no matter which path takes you there. But while I’m thrilled I seized the reins by going with a small press, I learned that I don’t have Michelle’s energy and entrepreneurial savvy for DIY. I think it’s really tough to find your audience without adequate sales-and-marketing muscle. So formy new book, which aims for a more commercial audience than Layla, it looks like I’ll be shopping for an agent.
Toth: I’m not at all shy, but I still find self-promotion uncomfortable. One trick that helped me was to separate myself a bit from my book: I talked about what was happening for my character Annie, not myself. I rallied family and friends to join “Team Annie” to help in various promotional activities. And I surrounded myself with supportive writer friends who would understand the unique challenges of willingly subjecting yourself to public judgment and loss of privacy.
Black: It’s possible to promote yourself too much, and I think a lot of first-time authors do themselves a disservice by misusing the megaphone. Yes, a lot of book publicity falls on our shoulders these days, whether you’re with a big house, self-publishing, or somewhere in between. But the injunction “Buy my book” never works. It’s like being on a date and being told, “Like me.” If you have interesting things to say, if you make people laugh or make them curious to learn more about you, buying your book will be a natural consequence. If someoneelse’s book really wows me, I might make a public fuss about it. But I don’t think the most effective marketing always uses the front door.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE
Toth: My surprises weren’t all specific to my path, but there were several of them nonetheless:
1. I didn’t expect Annie to resonate as much with men as it has, and they’ve provided some of the most illuminating feedback.
2. An editor from a traditional publisher contacted me, having discovered Annie as part of the Amazon contest, and asked to see my next manuscript.
3. Despite my all-digital strategy, I started getting multiple purchase orders, which seemed to have been triggered by the Library Journal review. Suddenly, I became the shipping department I never thought I’d have: packaging and shipping paper books while calculating discounts and sending invoices.
4. I was bemused when some people I gave books to—in the unspoken hope they would provide positive word of mouth to others—made a habit of enthusiastically loaning the book out rather than encouraging people to purchase a copy!
5. If you write in the first person, and borrow anything from your real life, people will assume everything you’ve written is autobiographical.
Black: I need to say an amen to Michelle’s last point. There is so much in these stories that’s true, and so many people who were able to recognize it as true, that they sometimes imagined it’s all true. I had a friend who, after reading a story about a college student who performs a kind of striptease for a homeless man, tried to divine if this was something I’d actually done. When my own mother first read a story about the summer we lost one of my sisters up at Lake Winnipesaukee, she was puzzled by the ending. “That’s not the way it happened,” she said. I had to remind her that this was fiction, not memoir. I got a more troubling surprise when two friends stopped speaking to me because I’d forgotten to put them in the acknowledgments. And I had an ex-boyfriend request that I write a sequel to the story about a threesome—not because he wanted to read the sex scene, but because he disagreed with my ideas about nonpossessive love and wanted to see them challenged.
Keating: My narrator is twenty-two years old, so I thought I’d escape the question of autobiography. No such luck. People ask in hushed voices if I know any real fugitives like those in the book—or perhaps wonder if I am one! But most surprising for me has been how Layla has been perceived. Because editors in mainstream houses felt the novel wasn’t terribly commercial, I’d internalized the perception that it had limited appeal, especially given the political issues it raises. So I’ve been surprised by how strong the emotional response has been. I’d hoped the novel would resonate with people who lived through the 1960s, but it seems to strike more of a nerve with young people and parents in terms of their relationships with each other. A woman I had never spoken to rushed over to give me a hug and thank me for bringing her and her daughter together. I now see my own novel in a completely different light.
Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books in July 2011.
Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June 2011. She is an editorial associate at Hanging Loose Press.
Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in March 2011 as the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing company that she founded. Toth is a member of the board of directors of the literary nonprofit organization Grub Street.
After the Book Party: Three Different Paths From Publication
Last year, after we realized that all our fiction debuts would be released within a few months of one another (Alethea’s story collection was due to be published by a commercial publisher, Céline’s novel was scheduled for release by an independent press, and Michelle planned to publish her novel with an independent company she founded herself), we got together to compare notes about everything from working with an editor and choosing a cover to marketing and publicity. Our discussion was published as “Decisions, Decisions: Three Different Paths to Publication” in the July/August 2011 issue of this magazine.
Now, after a year filled with successes and failures as well as constant challenges and continuing rewards, our books have made their way into the hands of readers. A debut novelist once told Alethea that having a first book come out is like lighting a firecracker that doesn’t go off. While having our debuts published was undoubtedly an exciting event in each of our lives, it didn’t happen precisely the way we had planned. Of course we knew there were no ticker-tape parades for published authors, so the three of us arrived at our publication dates with relatively sober expectations; nevertheless, the postpublication journey was full of surprises. Here’s what we learned.
ON AND OFF THE SHELF
Black: I think the greatest advantage to being with a large publisher was the power it had to get my book into the hands of people who could really help. The best thing to happen to I Knew You’d Be Lovely was that it was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and the lion’s share of our sales has been from Barnes & Noble. My publisher also made sure to reach out to independent bookstores, and even had me write a personal letter of introduction, which was then enclosed with the ARCs sent to bookstore owners. The most surprising thing my editor did was ask me for a list of “tastemakers” whom I’d like to receive my book. I didn’t understand. “You mean, like Michelle Obama?” I don’t know who ended up receiving surprise copies of the book, but it was encouraging to feel the publisher was going to bat for me.
Toth: As a self-published author, I knew it made no sense to invest time or resources trying to break into bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Traditional publishers dominate that important sales channel because they have the necessary scale, distribution capabilities, promotional dollars, and stra-tegic partnerships, and if that weren’t enough to dissuade me (it was) the very thought of having to manage returns from bookstores would have. On the plus side, these constraints helped to make my strategy clear: Focus on online distribution via e-books and print-on-demand paperback books. With print-on-demand, there is no inventory. The online sale triggers production of the book, which is then shipped to the consumer. For my paperback I used Amazon’s CreateSpace (which will accept and ship orders not just from Amazon but also from other retailers such as BarnesandNoble.com) and for my e-book I used Kindle Direct Publishing in combination with Smashwords, an independent e-book publishing-and-distribution platform that produces e-books in multiple formats, including those for the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.
Keating: My favorite appearance of Layla on a shelf was in the Occupy Wall Street library at Zuccotti Park. As the novel centers on youth activism, this was perfect. One reason I had chosen to go with a small press was because mainstream publishers found the novel noncommercial. I wanted the thrill of seeing it on bookstore shelves, and the chance at serendipitous purchases. Plain View Press lacks a sales-and-marketing staff, and encouraged me to hire a publicist for outreach to independent bookstores. Although this was somewhat successful, most stores that carry Layla are not in New York City, where I live. Still, I get a charge when I do come upon it in libraries and bookstores.
PUBLICITY AND REVIEWS
Toth: My goal as an indie publisher is to replicate as closely as possible the way a traditional publisher produces and markets a book, so I hired a publicist who secured reviews and mentions from a number of online sites as well as Library Journal. Annie Begins was a semifinalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, and reaching that round of the contest resulted in a Publishers Weekly review. Having positive reviews lent credibility and support to my indie effort, and likely made bloggers and other reviewers more open to the book. I also had some excellent exposure in Bookmarks Magazine. My luckiest break was being picked up by Amazon for an e-mail promotion that introduced Annie to a much wider audience. I believe this resulted from the combination of being categorized as a genre book (contemporary romance), garnering a lot of early five-star reviews on Amazon, and my decision to price the e-book at $2.99. The only problem was that a few members of the contemporary romance audience would have appreciated a steamier book, and I did generate my first negative reader reviews after that!
Keating: Layla garnered good reviews and articles, was named a Huffington Post pick, and drew invitations to such blogs as the Quivering Pen and Words With Writers. Overall my marketing efforts felt a bit like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I tried giveaways, offering fifteen books each on LibraryThing and Goodreads, where two hundred and six hundred people signed up, respectively. More than a hundred people added my book to their To Read lists, and sales jumped. A mistake was paying for inclusion on book club sites. Given the huge number of books listed on such sites, I found it’s best to skip them if you can’t also afford an ad. There’s no shortage of work you can do for your book, and it’s hard to choose where to put limited resources. I wish I’d done more personal outreach to book clubs, bookstores, and libraries. But the path to publication is really a path to a writing career. Rather than put much energy into marketing, I focused on my next book.
Black: Reviews are pivotal when it comes to reaching a larger audience, but even a big publisher can’t force anyone to give your book coverage; in fact, I know a couple of reviewers who feel it’s a turn-off when a book is pushed on them too aggressively. I was up against some steep odds—paperback original, first book, short stories—and I did not get a lot of ink. In fact, one of my reviewers opened by saying she was surprised the book wasn’t being given more attention. Now that I’ve seen how things played out, I do think I might have benefited from an outside publicist. But at the time, I couldn’t justify the cost; I figured I should get health insurance before I got a publicist.
READINGS AND EVENTS
Toth: I did readings and events in only three cities: Boston, New York, and San Francisco. I had a launch event cohosted by Harvard Book Store (where Annie is available on the Espresso Book Machine) and Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. It drew an overflow crowd, and I sold all my preprinted copies (which felt good but is really a rookie-publisher mistake, as my writer friends pointed out). I did a round of literary festivals and book clubs—for Annie and also on the topic of self-publishing. I found that Skype book clubs can be a blast, and that when you figure out your core audience and connect directly with it, there’s nothing better. I could have done more and, as an extrovert, would have enjoyed it, but the demands of my day job had increased thanks to an unexpected promotion, and it was a struggle to do just the basics. This is an inherent challenge for any writer with a day job—and surely any self-published writer.
Black: I wanted to take the show on the road, and at one point told my in-house publicist that if she’d book the events, I’d pay the expenses myself. But no events were booked; book tours don’t seem to happen these days, even at a big publisher, unless you’re already well known. Of course, there’s a reason for that: Such efforts don’t typically have a large impact on sales. Nevertheless, I love to give readings—I love the smell and the feel of bookstores, and I love talking to book people—so I put together a small tour myself. You know the Onion headline “Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just Three People or a Crowd of Nine”? I drove from New York City to Chicago to give a reading to about twelve people. But the math of finding your audience isn’t linear, and even if you read to only two people, one of them might host a radio show, or be an influential blogger, or fall in love with your book and buy copies for friends.
Keating: At first I considered asking friends to be my public-speaking avatars, as I’m an introvert—but I knew readings would be one of the best ways for Layla to reach readers. Unlike Alethea, I live in dread of a small audience and put in enormous effort to make sure good crowds showed up at every venue. My first event was at Montauk Bookshop on Long Island, where I spend weekends. Although my husband embarrassed me by papering the town with flyers and telling everyone he ran into about the event, that personal touch really paid off. It was the bookstore’s biggest crowd ever, and the owner’s enthusiasm garnered some terrific press coverage after the fact. With personal postcards, e-mails, and Facebook invitations, my book-launch party in New York City was packed to overflowing. Then the timing was right for an official tour—vacation road trip! I traveled throughout the Northeast, where friends generously hosted events and lined up readings. By the fall, bookstore owners, book clubs, and librarians who had actually read Layla were sending me invitations to read, attend book club meetings, and even run a writing workshop. One of the most memorable events was reading with Alethea and Michelle at the Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. There’s nothing like combining forces with writer friends to fill a space, not to mention to share the anxiety—and the wine.
From left: Althea Black, Céline Keating, and Michelle Toth. (Credit: Black: Nadine Raphael; Keating: Mark Levy; Toth: Block Photography)
ADVERTISING AND SALES
Black: Crown Publishing Group, the division of Random House whose imprint Broadway published my book, placed AdReady network ads on sites such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Goodreads. Print ads are more expensive—the smallest ad in the New York Times Book Review, a two-fifths-page spot, costs $6,688 for black and white and $12,731 for color—so they didn’t go that route. I personally paid for an ad on Narrative.com and one in Poets & Writers Magazine; both places give you a healthy author discount, and it felt like money well spent. Lovely was in its fourth printing this past April, but that number doesn’t tell you much—we could be in our one-thousandth printing if each print run were ten books. My initial print run was eighty-five hundred, and each of the subsequent runs was under two thousand. When my first royalty check arrived earlier this year, at first I didn’t know what it was; I wasn’t expecting to have earned out my advance. I was surprised that only one e-book was sold for every ten p-books (and I was surprised to learn the term p-book).
Toth: Annie Begins was an Amazon Top 100 Kindle Best Seller and Top 10 in Kindle Contemporary Romancefor a time during the summer of 2011, and in the first year of publication e-book sales of more than five thousand dominated paperback sales of around five hundred. I recently elected to participate in an Amazon e-book giveaway that generated more than fifteen thousand downloads in less than a day and drove a significant jump in sales momentum. I also experimented with Facebook ads, which did not pay back the investment in terms of sales. The most effective thing I did was to focus on e-books and Amazon. Controversy aside, Amazon is by farthe most important site for e-book sales, and I suggest to all self-publishers that they should not only have an online strategy, but also an Amazon strategy.
Keating: I had modest expectations, as I knew going in that Plain View Press had limited marketing capability. Then the publisher died, throwing the press into turmoil from which it is valiantly recovering. So I’m thrilled that ten months out, Layla is still selling, which I assume means it’s being hand-sold. Sales are actually picking up, and Layla was Plain View’s top seller for 2011. My wildest dream was to sell a thousand books the first year, and it looks like that just might happen. My publisher put out an e-book version of the book recently, so I look forward to taking Michelle’s advice about e-book strategy.
NEW MEDIA
Toth: Part of the approach my publicist and I agreed on was for me to blog and speak on self-publishing, both because of the momentum of the self-publishing path and because I have a business background. It’s been gratifying to help empower authors by spreading the word about independent publishing, but such exposure does not necessarily translate to book sales. I also put up a Facebook page and did updates when I felt there was real news, believing that readers don’t need more than a couple of reminders to know if they want to buy your book. Mostly, though, I’ve reassessed the trade-off of taking time away from writing my second novel and developing the (sixoneseven) books platform, now structured as a micro press that has published three additional authors—two novelists, one memoirist—and counting. While I appreciate the value of social media, I think the best way to achieve my creative goals is to write and publish more books—of my own, and of other writers!
Keating: I dove into social media feet first (as in, less brain) and tried everything: Facebook, Twitter, Gather, Goodreads, LibraryThing, She Writes, and Red Room. This was SM—as in sadomasochistic, not social media—overkill. Like a bee amid flowers, I flitted from one site to the next, sipping nectar but producing only exhaustion. But gradually I began to make meaningful connections and tap into a wealth of useful information. And I got a real charge when I put an invitation on She Writes to anyone who lived in a town where I was giving a reading and didn’t know a soul, and a blogger and short story writer showed up! There’s no magic about social media. Just as with connections in the real world, you can’t expect tangible results without a significant investment of quality time.
Black: I’m no good at coming up with real-time 140-character-long observations that would be worth anyone’s attention. My publisher requested that I join Facebook, and I did; but I’m not on Twitter and I’m only minimally on Goodreads. Instead of putting my time into those venues, I tried to continue to write. I wrote a piece for Writer’s Digest about how I wished my dad could read my book, an essay for Narrative Magazine about why I write at night, and I published a new piece of fiction in One Story. I also told a couple of stories onstage for the Moth. The Twitterverse serves a lot of people well, but I think you should play to your strengths. If you’re a fish, don’t try to ride a bike.
LESSONS LEARNED
Keating: Readings not only helped me get past my shyness but also brought me back to my reason for writing in the first place. At a book group in Staten Island, New York, I had the overpowering experience of listening to women quote favorite lines from Layla and describe the metaphors that moved them. There’s nothing more rewarding than that, no matter which path takes you there. But while I’m thrilled I seized the reins by going with a small press, I learned that I don’t have Michelle’s energy and entrepreneurial savvy for DIY. I think it’s really tough to find your audience without adequate sales-and-marketing muscle. So formy new book, which aims for a more commercial audience than Layla, it looks like I’ll be shopping for an agent.
Toth: I’m not at all shy, but I still find self-promotion uncomfortable. One trick that helped me was to separate myself a bit from my book: I talked about what was happening for my character Annie, not myself. I rallied family and friends to join “Team Annie” to help in various promotional activities. And I surrounded myself with supportive writer friends who would understand the unique challenges of willingly subjecting yourself to public judgment and loss of privacy.
Black: It’s possible to promote yourself too much, and I think a lot of first-time authors do themselves a disservice by misusing the megaphone. Yes, a lot of book publicity falls on our shoulders these days, whether you’re with a big house, self-publishing, or somewhere in between. But the injunction “Buy my book” never works. It’s like being on a date and being told, “Like me.” If you have interesting things to say, if you make people laugh or make them curious to learn more about you, buying your book will be a natural consequence. If someoneelse’s book really wows me, I might make a public fuss about it. But I don’t think the most effective marketing always uses the front door.
SURPRISE, SURPRISE
Toth: My surprises weren’t all specific to my path, but there were several of them nonetheless:
1. I didn’t expect Annie to resonate as much with men as it has, and they’ve provided some of the most illuminating feedback.
2. An editor from a traditional publisher contacted me, having discovered Annie as part of the Amazon contest, and asked to see my next manuscript.
3. Despite my all-digital strategy, I started getting multiple purchase orders, which seemed to have been triggered by the Library Journal review. Suddenly, I became the shipping department I never thought I’d have: packaging and shipping paper books while calculating discounts and sending invoices.
4. I was bemused when some people I gave books to—in the unspoken hope they would provide positive word of mouth to others—made a habit of enthusiastically loaning the book out rather than encouraging people to purchase a copy!
5. If you write in the first person, and borrow anything from your real life, people will assume everything you’ve written is autobiographical.
Black: I need to say an amen to Michelle’s last point. There is so much in these stories that’s true, and so many people who were able to recognize it as true, that they sometimes imagined it’s all true. I had a friend who, after reading a story about a college student who performs a kind of striptease for a homeless man, tried to divine if this was something I’d actually done. When my own mother first read a story about the summer we lost one of my sisters up at Lake Winnipesaukee, she was puzzled by the ending. “That’s not the way it happened,” she said. I had to remind her that this was fiction, not memoir. I got a more troubling surprise when two friends stopped speaking to me because I’d forgotten to put them in the acknowledgments. And I had an ex-boyfriend request that I write a sequel to the story about a threesome—not because he wanted to read the sex scene, but because he disagreed with my ideas about nonpossessive love and wanted to see them challenged.
Keating: My narrator is twenty-two years old, so I thought I’d escape the question of autobiography. No such luck. People ask in hushed voices if I know any real fugitives like those in the book—or perhaps wonder if I am one! But most surprising for me has been how Layla has been perceived. Because editors in mainstream houses felt the novel wasn’t terribly commercial, I’d internalized the perception that it had limited appeal, especially given the political issues it raises. So I’ve been surprised by how strong the emotional response has been. I’d hoped the novel would resonate with people who lived through the 1960s, but it seems to strike more of a nerve with young people and parents in terms of their relationships with each other. A woman I had never spoken to rushed over to give me a hug and thank me for bringing her and her daughter together. I now see my own novel in a completely different light.
Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, published by Broadway Books in July 2011.
Céline Keating is the author of the novel Layla, published by Plain View Press in June 2011. She is an editorial associate at Hanging Loose Press.
Michelle Toth is the author of the novel Annie Begins, published in March 2011 as the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing company that she founded. Toth is a member of the board of directors of the literary nonprofit organization Grub Street.
A Day in the Life of a Book Editor: Caroline Bleeke of Flatiron Books
Before he got the call from Flatiron Books editor Caroline Bleeke, Neel Patel had spent thirteen years struggling to find success as a writer. Like many aspiring writers, Patel, an Indian American doctor’s son from Champaign, Illinois, had bounced around the job market, working first at Nordstrom, then in an accounting office, while filling his hard drive with unpublished novels and stories.
Finally, in early 2017, Patel finished a collection of stories, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, and landed a New York literary agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler at Union Literary. Not long after he signed with Ferrari-Adler, Patel’s collection, along with fifty pages of a novel-in-progress, landed on Bleeke’s desk. A second, more established editor at another house was also interested in Patel’s work, but when he spoke to Bleeke on the telephone, Patel felt an instant connection. “She’s young,” he says. “She just gets it. We had a great conversation. We have similar tastes. It felt like talking to a friend.”
All aspiring writers dream of one day picking up the phone and finding themselves talking to an editor at a New York publishing house who shares their vision and wants to publish their work. What many writers may not know, however, are the myriad decisions an editor has to make before placing that call and all the tasks, large and small, the editor has to accomplish to shepherd a writer’s work toward publication.
So that we might shed light on the work editors do—much of it invisible to writers and the reading public—Bleeke agreed to let me follow her around for a day this spring, sitting in on staff meetings, listening to her handle queries from colleagues, and looking over her shoulder as she scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet of submitted manuscripts.
At thirty, Bleeke (pronounced BLAKE-ee) was promoted last year from the associate ranks to become a full-fledged editor, publishing five to six books a year at Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan, one of the so-called Big Five publishing conglomerates. Named for the iconic wedge-shaped Flatiron Building in Manhattan, where it has its offices, Flatiron Books is itself quite new, having launched five years ago with eight employees, producing two books a month. Since then the imprint has tripled its staff and now produces about fifty books a year.
Our day begins socially, with a meeting in Bleeke’s sun-filled office overlooking Madison Square Park with Carole Saudejaud, a rights director at the French publishing house Éditions Fayard. For a half hour the two women engage in a delicate dance, mixing talk of sales figures and publishing-industry realities with more informal asides about favorite books and authors. The vibe is relaxed, but this is a business meeting: Saudejaud is here to gauge Flatiron’s interest in publishing English-language editions of Fayard’s books, and Bleeke wants to know if Fayard has any books that might fit her list.
Flatiron publicity manager Amelia Possanza (left) meets with editor Caroline Bleeke to discuss submissions.
After politely passing on a pair of nonfiction titles, Bleeke brightens when Saudejaud mentions two French novels, one of which, Au petit bonheur la chance! (“Leave It Up to Chance!”) by Aurélie Valognes, has sold 120,000 copies in France since it was published in March. “I would love to take a look at that,” Bleeke says enthusiastically.
This reaction, I will come to see, is vintage Bleeke. Eight years out of Harvard, where she made Phi Beta Kappa, Bleeke exudes the faintly wonkish literary zeal of an eternal English major who has landed her dream job of talking about books all day. A native of St. Louis, she retains a slight Midwestern reserve, but one senses that behind this outward modesty there burns an abiding ambition, a quiet relentlessness that she channels into her work on behalf of her authors.
The brief meeting with Saudejaud illustrates a crucial point about the life of a New York book editor, which is how intensely social the job is. Bleeke, like most editors, does little editing or reading of manuscripts in the office. Nearly all that work—and there is a staggering amount of it—gets done at night and on weekends. “A lot of the day is responding to e-mails,” she says. “It’s going to meetings. It’s talking to colleagues about various projects. It’s usually not reading unless I have a submission in that sounds exciting and that I want to read right away.”
This is borne out even on a day when Bleeke and her colleagues are bending their schedules to accommodate a reporter in her office asking questions. After the meeting with the French rights editor, we troop over to the conference area to sit in on a marketing meeting for one of Bleeke’s titles, British author Anne Youngson’s debut novel, Meet Me at the Museum, due out in August, before heading upstairs to a larger conference room for a get-to-know-you lunch with agents from the DeFiore and Company literary agency. Even late in the afternoon, with her office door shut, Bleeke has to pause frequently to answer knocking and check the caller ID on her ringing phone.
When I leave, she says, she’ll be heading to an industry cocktail party. The following evening, she has two events, a cocktail party and then a dinner for an editor visiting from Britain. The next week, when the annual Book Expo America takes over the Jacob Javits Center on the far west side of Manhattan, Bleeke will attend work-related events every night of the week.
“That’s pretty standard,” she says. “There are a lot of evening events related to publishing, whether it’s a reading by one of my authors or a friend’s author or various parties and fundraisers.”
This ceaseless stream of e-mails and telephone calls and cocktail parties is not idle socializing, though. It’s how business gets done in mainstream publishing, which despite its location amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan remains very much a small-town enterprise in which people know one another and relationships are everything.
Take one of the most central tasks of an editor’s working life: reading submissions. Each week, Bleeke estimates, she receives between five and ten manuscripts from agents. (Flatiron doesn’t accept submissions from writers without literary agents). That works out to between 260 and 520 manuscripts a year, from which Bleeke will publish just a half dozen books.
Each submission arrives with a pitch, a brief description of the book and its author, typically delivered first in a phone call from the author’s agent and later followed up with a longer pitch e-mail appended to the manuscript. But if Bleeke is doing her job right, the manuscript also arrives with an invaluable trove of social information, built up through years of lunches and phone calls, about the agent’s reputation for finding talented authors and the depth of the agent’s understanding of the books Bleeke is seeking.
With Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum, for instance, the initial pitch came from Sally Wofford-Girand, also an agent at Union Literary, whom Bleeke knows from her apprentice years in publishing. In addition, Youngson is represented in England by an agent at the prestigious London literary agency of Greene & Heaton, and the British edition of the novel was acquired by an editor Bleeke admires at Doubleday U.K.
None of this ensured that Bleeke would love Youngson’s novel, but the imprimatur of these publishing professionals she knows and admires no doubt shaped how she approached the book. “These are people who have a proven track record, who I know, whose taste I trust, so yeah, it helps,” she says. “I’m definitely more likely to read a submission quickly from an agent I know, who I’ve had a lot of conversations with, and who knows my taste, than from someone who I haven’t worked with in the past or is relatively unknown to me.”
Of course Bleeke, who has been at Flatiron since only 2014 and an editor focusing solely on her own list for less than a year, can’t possibly have deep professional relationships with every agent who sends her a manuscript, so nearly every element of her interactions with agents, including the rejection letter itself, is aimed at strengthening those relationships.
In roughly half the submissions she reads, Bleeke says she knows within the first five pages that a book isn’t for her. “But I don’t just read those five pages,” she says. “I would then read more because I want to be able to explain why this isn’t right for me. Every rejection is a way for the agent to get to know more about my taste. It’s an opportunity for me to explain what I’m looking for, and what I’m not looking for, so I want to have read enough to be able to articulate even if it’s in a very general way why this isn’t right for me.”
Caroline Bleeke (Credit: Michel Leroy)
Occasionally, when Bleeke thinks a writer is uncommonly talented or she wants to signal that she would be open to a revised draft, she’ll offer the writer constructive criticism, but most of the time rejection letters are principally communications between herself and the agent, written with an eye toward making their next interaction more productive.
Conversely, when Bleeke likes a book, she knows that very quickly too. “I know probably within the first few pages if I’m reading something amazing,” she says. “As I continue reading, I’m thinking about things like, ‘How original is this story?’ ‘How fresh are these characters?’ ‘Is this author leaning too hard on tropes, or does this feel authentic and real and different?’ I’m thinking about how it would fit on our list.”
For Bleeke a novel’s freshness encompasses more than just its plot and characters. Who the author is matters to her too. Starting with her first acquisition at Flatiron, Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), set in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, Bleeke has championed the work of writers of color. This is in part a matter of political conviction. Bleeke is acutely aware of the glaring lack of diversity in the publishing industry—a 2016 Publishers Weekly survey found 87 percent of employees were white—and is passionate in her belief that editors need to actively seek out underrepresented voices.
But, she says, she is also naturally drawn to characters and authors from backgrounds different from her own. “The books that I love, the books that move me, are books that expand my world in some way, that make me more empathetic, that introduce me to worlds and characters that I don’t know but that still have this deep emotional resonance for me,” she says. “In a lot of cases, some of the most exciting, fresh fiction is coming from these writers because they just hadn’t been published before.”
When she comes across a manuscript she thinks she might want to take on, Bleeke passes it around to her colleagues at Flatiron, both to check her own first impression and to gauge the institutional enthusiasm for the author’s work. At the most practical level, she has to get the approval of Amy Einhorn, Flatiron’s executive vice president and publisher, who must sign off on any contract Bleeke offers to an author. But Bleeke will also pass along manuscripts to colleagues like publicity manager Amelia Possanza to get Possanza’s answers, “from a publicity standpoint,” to questions like “Do you think this could get review attention?” and “Do you think this author would be interesting for profiles?”
If a submission survives this round of second reads, Bleeke will call up the author, in part to discuss the book and any major changes that might need to be made, but also just to get a feel for who the author is and how well they might work together.
“I think I have a tendency to fall in love with my authors on the phone,” Bleeke says. “Amy always teases me about it. I’ll run into her office after a phone call and I’ll be sort of grinning from ear to ear, and she’ll say, ‘You fell in love again, didn’t you?’”
If Bleeke and the author do indeed click, she’ll draw up a profit-and-loss statement, or P&L, to make a case for the book’s commercial viability. A P&L typically lists a number of recently published books similar to the one an editor wants to buy and uses the sales records of these “comp titles” to predict how well the unpublished book might do. A well-crafted P&L can be useful for books in predictable categories like cookbooks or for an author with a lengthy sales record, but because Bleeke is still a young editor and is therefore publishing mostly debut novels by unknown writers, the P&Ls she creates are, by her own admission, far less predictive.
“It’s guesswork,” she says. “Sometimes it’s very optimistic guesswork, but you really, really believe in the book, you really want it, so you’re going to take a flier, and who knows, maybe you’ll get the golden ticket and the book will work beyond anyone’s expectation.”
Then, too, by signing young, unheralded authors writing their debut novels, Bleeke is hoping to get in on the ground floor with a future best-selling writer who might bring profit and prestige to Flatiron two or three books down the line.
If Bleeke can convince Einhorn that the acquisition makes sense and best any offers the writer may have from other editors, she’ll sign up the author for Flatiron. But while the writer is busy trading party-popper emojis with her agent and posting photos of her book contract on Instagram, Bleeke’s real work as an editor is only getting started.
It’s rare, she says, for her to take on a book she sees as seriously flawed, but she has no compunction about suggesting changes when they’re needed. With If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, for instance, Bleeke urged Patel to cut one of the original stories and edited the drafts of two new stories he wrote to replace it. These two stories now close out the collection and are among its most assured and ambitious, a fact Patel credits to Bleeke’s editorial acumen. “The difference between writing on my own and writing with an editor now, it’s incredible,” he says. “I was like, where was she my whole life when I was trying to write stories and it would take me a year to write something?”
Even as she’s editing the manuscript and working with Flatiron’s art director, Keith Hayes, to design an eye-catching cover (see “The Aha! Moment,” on page 80) Bleeke is riding herd on Flatiron’s marketing and sales campaign, pitching the book to Macmillan’s internal sales force, and hunting down blurbs from authors, librarians, and other literary tastemakers. As an editor, she explains, “You’re the main supporter of this book. You’re the book’s person. There are a lot of people involved, but the first job of the editor is to make your own enthusiasm contagious. You want to get everybody just as excited as you are.”
The closer a book comes to publication, the more Bleeke relies on publicity staffers like Possanza. Meet Me at the Museum, the subject of the morning marketing meeting, would seem at first a daunting publicity task. For one thing, the novel’s author, Anne Youngson, who is seventy and started writing seriously after taking early retirement from a career in the British auto business, is an unknown quantity to American readers. Then there’s the book itself, a deft but slow-building epistolary novel chronicling a chaste love affair between a British farm wife and a Danish museum curator.
As Bleeke and Possanza speak, it’s clear they plan to put these very elements at the center of their publicity push. They seem genuinely charmed by Youngson’s unconventional path to publication and have set up a series of private events to give the author a chance to introduce herself and offer insights about her transition from business executive to published novelist to a select audience of journalists and booksellers.
Possanza, meanwhile, has been scouring the web for readers who might be drawn to the novel’s stylistic elements to help drum up prepublication buzz. “Some people are really obsessed with epistolary novels, and we can go on the Internet and see that, ‘Oh my God, this person has reviewed three epistolary novels,’ so maybe they want another one,” Possanza says. “Some people are really obsessed with Seamus Heaney, whose poem plays a role in the book.”
To augment this publicity and marketing push, Bleeke has sent, by her estimation, fifty handwritten notes to librarians and booksellers touting Meet Me at the Museum. (She did the same for Neel Patel’s story collection, which came out in July, a month before Meet Me at the Museum.) This is a tremendous amount of work, with uncertain returns, but Bleeke sees these notes as a way to talk up her titles while building yet another web of social connection, this time to the people who are ultimately responsible for putting the books she edits into the hands of readers.
“There is so much I do where I have no idea whether this is making any kind of difference, but this is a very concrete thing I can do,” she says. “I can reach out to this person. I can open a line of communication. I can introduce them to this book, and in the case of Meet Me at the Museum, people really responded to it and loved it.”
Bleeke declines to discuss the subject of her annual pay, but the website Glassdoor estimates that Macmillan pays editors at her level an average of about $56,000 a year. Given Bleeke’s Ivy League degree, the hours she puts in at the office and on nights and weekends, and the fact that she lives in one of the world’s most expensive cities, it’s fair to say she isn’t in it for the money.
“To survive in this industry you have to be an eternal optimist,” she says. “You have to still feel the same rush from discovering a great new voice that you felt when you were a twenty-three-year-old assistant. You need to somehow maintain that passion for what you’re doing and be willing to make it a huge part of your life and realize that you’re probably going to struggle with work-life balance your entire career, but you’re doing what you love.”
Michael Bourne is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Caroline Bleeke (Credit: Michel Leroy)
Agents & Editors: Dawn Davis
The business of books is full of puzzles, and this is one of them: How do you reduce an entire lifetime of interests into a single sound bite? Editors are often asked what kind of books we are looking for by writers we meet at conferences, agents we’re seeing for lunch, distant relatives over the holidays. It’s a simple question that deserves a straightforward response, but I always have trouble answering in a quick sentence or two. As far as I can tell, the books I love best might have only one thing in common: me.
Some editors readily commit to a single genre, such as business or crime fiction or food, but I am most curious about those who hopscotch across the world of books to find readers of all kinds.
Editor and publisher Dawn Davis has that kind of roving interest and range. After attending Stanford University, she worked at an investment bank and won a scholarship to study in Nigeria. A chance meeting at a party upon her return led to a job assisting André Schiffrin at the New Press, followed by stints at Vintage Books and HarperCollins, where she became the publisher of Amistad. While at HarperCollins, Davis edited Edward P. Jones’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Known World; Steve Harvey’s best-selling Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man; Chris Gardner’s The Pursuit of Happyness; and Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, as well as a wide variety of other books.
In 2013, when Davis started a new imprint at Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, she had to decide what to call it. In other words, she had to reduce her entire lifetime of interests into just one name. She settled on 37 INK, drawing inspiration from the line of latitude that connects California, Italy, and Africa.
Before our interview began in earnest, our small talk meandered to a shared interest in food and cooking, and Davis showed me a copy of a book she had written for Penguin fifteen years ago: If You Can Stand the Heat: Tales From Chefs and Restaurateurs.
I was going to ask you about this book!
There’s a story. While I was researching it, my friend Webb Stone said, “If you’re going to write about food, you have to meet this guy named Anthony Bourdain.” This was pre-Kitchen Confidential, so he was not yet famous. I interviewed him, and he said, “You can’t just write about it. You have to do it.” So I worked in his kitchen. Friday nights I would leave work around five o’clock. I’d work with him from five-thirty to ten, and hang out with his crew of crazy people afterward, and I had the time of my life.
I read somewhere that you once thought about becoming a chef. I once thought about it too. How serious were you?
At the time, I had left Wall Street, where I had worked for two years, and gone to work at the New Press, which was a nonprofit. I was making no money, and I couldn’t afford the things I used to be able to afford on an expense account. I had to figure out a lot on my own. I was always interested in food, and had friends who were too. After work we would talk about it, but it was a fleeting notion. The idea of turning a hobby into a career—I was already doing that with publishing.
I thought we might be romanticizing the notion of opening a restaurant—that it had to be a lot harder than we thought. So I talked to people to see what was really involved, and those conversations turned into a book.
Tell me about the name of your imprint, 37 INK.
I’m from Southern California, and I went to school in Northern California, so I claim the whole state from the desert to the wine country. My maternal grandmother is from Italy, and I’ve been many times and I love it—as of course most people do. And I’m African American, so I have Africa in my family heritage as well. The 37th parallel of latitude connects all three of these places that are near and dear to my heart, and mapped who I was without using my name.
Why not call your imprint Dawn Davis Books?
I’ll always want it to be about the authors, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that. But I understand why other people use their names; it’s easier. Once the lawyer tells you for the fifth time, “No, that name is taken,” you think, “Okay, I’ll use my own name.” I initially thought of Studio 37, but that was taken. It’s hard to come up with something original.
Where in southern California did you grow up, and what was it like?
I grew up in Los Angeles. Not Malibu, not the ’hood, not the Valley. Just real Los Angeles. It was a great place to grow up. I have friends now who say they’d never raise children there, because of the pressure to look or act a certain way. But I had a fantastic, almost idyllic childhood. I went to an all-girl high school and loved it.
What did your parents do?
My mom was a hospital administrator and my father managed a store. They were working class parents, but I didn’t know that. I just knew I had great friends and a great family, and went on lots of trips to the library every week with my mother. It was a normal American childhood. But I didn’t have a lot of exposure to people who were in publishing.
What were your aspirations growing up, and how did you make your way to Stanford?
When you’re from California, you’re told to apply to one Cal State school and one UC school, and depending on your GPA, to apply elsewhere. I didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles. I’m an only child, and my mom would’ve loved nothing better, but I was ready to spread my wings. Junior year of high school, I came to New York with three friends. We got rained on at a Diana Ross concert in Central Park, we were pickpocketed, and I left saying, “I can’t wait to move here!” I loved it.
I got into Stanford and UC Berkeley, but also Columbia. I wanted to come to New York, but my mom said, “Do me a favor. Stay in California. If you still love New York it’ll be waiting for you when you finish college.” And I did. I say I graduated on Saturday and had an apartment in New York by Tuesday.
My aspiration was about place, not profession. I didn’t know in college what I wanted to do. I studied international relations; Condoleezza Rice became a bigwig in the department. But to satisfy the requirements, I would take courses like The Russian Novel, because they dealt with something outside of America. I’d take economics, and then Literature of the Caribbean. Later, on Wall Street, I worked in the international division.
This was at Credit Suisse?
It was actually Credit Suisse First Boston—and just First Boston when I started, before they merged. During my two-year program there, I met someone who encouraged me to apply for a Rotary scholarship to study abroad. I wanted to study in Nigeria, where Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and so many of the greats had lived. Three years after college I was living in Nigeria. It was extraordinary, but it wasn’t easy.
What was hard about that time?
I had romanticized Africa. In many ways Nigeria is fantastic. They’ve created some of the most beautiful art, theater, literature. But to be twenty-two or twenty-three there, having arrived without knowing a soul? It was tough. My mom said the most freeing thing: “If you come back, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.” With that, I could take each day as it came and started enjoying myself.
Were you able to make excursions, or were you just studying all the time?
It was a lot of independent study. I would go to the library and assign myself books, and read them. There were often strikes, which is very much part of the African way of protest. There were strikes because the teachers weren’t making enough money, because there was no paper or books. Oftentimes there weren’t even classes. The real education was self-imposed, and being with the friends I made, seeing how they lived, how they often made something out of nothing. I met Soyinka’s brother, which was fascinating.
Not to be grandiose, but did you go to Nigeria and find yourself?
I think that’s right. And I met a publisher on the plane there, who published the African Writers Series with Heinemann. I said, “You get paid to read?” I could not believe it. That meeting triggered the notion that I could aspire to this profession.
When I got back from Africa, I was invited to a party where I met someone who knew André Schiffrin—who had just left Random House to start the New Press. I kept talking and talking to this person about publishing until I was introduced to André. I interviewed with him, and he hired me on the spot. Two editors had come with him from Pantheon: Diane Wachtell and David Sternbach. I was the first non-Pantheon hire, and I was to be his assistant.
What was it like?
It was fantastic, because he would create books on the fly. He would walk through Central Park dictating letters to people like Noam Chomsky, saying, “I know that you want to do X and Y, but I was thinking that we should also think about this other idea.” I would transcribe it all using that old machine, the Dictaphone with the foot pedal. I worked there for about five years. For two to three of those years I was his assistant. He let me acquire early on, so I received a 360-degree education.
What was one of those first books?
The first book I acquired was right after the Korean riots in Los Angeles, when there was tension in the Korean American community and the black community. I went to a discussion about it, and everybody was given exactly six minutes to talk before being cut off by the moderator. But there was one woman who was so spectacularly interesting that if the moderator had cut her off I think he would’ve been attacked. I told André about her, and he said, “You’ll find that there are very few people who can command a room like that, and who have something to say. You should reach out to her.”
That’s the best advice a young editor could have received.
The absolute best. Her name was Elaine Kim, and she was a professor and dean at Berkeley. I went out there, and she picked me up from the airport. She threw a Bob Marley box set into the backseat as I jumped in, and I thought, “I’m going to like her!” Her book was called East to America: Korean American Life Stories, and it was a book of oral histories about the immigration experiences of Korean Americans. They had been portrayed in a uniform way in the media but in fact their stories are very complex, nuanced, and different.
At the New Press I also worked with our freelance production person, so I got to know about that side of the business: paper weight and photos and the cost of adding various bells and whistles to a book. I was also the liaison with our freelance publicist, and learned a little bit about putting a press release together. It was an education that is hard to get in a big publishing house, working in just one department.
Why did you leave the New Press?
Ultimately, I was doing a lot of things. When I became an editor I also started selling our subsidiary rights. I had a lot on my plate, but I was young, and it was fun. I was working with a small, committed group of intellectuals. It felt a little bit like graduate school crossed with a start-up: Every day brought something different and interesting.
I got to know some of the other editors who were buying our paperback rights. One of them was Robin Desser, who suggested that I meet Marty Asher at Vintage when she was promoted to Knopf. One thing led to another, and I got an offer from Vintage. Marty took a chance on me and became a mentor.
What did you learn at Vintage?
I learned reprint publishing. There is less of that now because of e-books, but back in the day I watched Cold Mountain go from a well-reviewed, successful hardcover to a blowout paperback success, and learned how it was done. I learned to trust my instincts, because we read so broadly, and also because we would read things in submission and watch them go from submission to hardcover to paperback. Sometimes there were lots of oohs and aahs, with people saying a book was going to be the next best thing, and you could watch, as you planned the paperback publication, what did or didn’t happen. I learned how many books are published each year, versus how many of them have the tools for a successful paperback launch. I learned how to recognize good writing and good publication.
Tell me about that time in publishing, when books that sold decently in hardcover could explode in paperback. How did that work?
Back when I was a paperback editor, and we’re talking in 1996 or ’97, there was a certain number that the hardcover had to sell before we could do anything with it. We couldn’t make a huge success out of 10,000 hardcover sales. But if a book had sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, and it had great reviews and bookseller enthusiasm, we could work with it. You work from that base of readers in hardcover; they are like foot soldiers spreading the word. We could rejacket it, make great use of the quotes, maybe even solicit new quotes. You could just act as if the hardcover publication was one thing, and that you were going to go in a new direction.
Publishing a book in paperback reveals a lot about what every editor does—which is not just laboring over sentences, but figuring out how to make people pay attention to them.
Right. It all starts with the book. The book does have to deliver. Then, with Vintage, the track record was such that if we said, “This is our next Cold Mountain,” the machine was primed to listen. You have to do that selectively, but with a book where there is demonstrable interest already, with a nice base of readers and great review attention, you can get people to feel that they’re hearing about the book everywhere. Some prize attention always helps, but it wasn’t necessary. The big ones at the time were The Perfect Storm, A Civil Action, Cold Mountain.
You learned the mechanics of publishing at the New Press, and how to make a book a big commercial success at Vintage.
I also learned from André how to be entrepreneurial about creating books. I have to give him credit for that, because he did so much of that himself. From East to America and others, I learned how not to just sit and wait. With a small budget, we weren’t going to have all the agents calling, and I learned how to come up with book ideas of my own. That serves me well now—being entrepreneurial with my books, such as Steve Harvey or The Butler.
Another example is that when I had a sense that Obama was going to win the 2008 campaign, before it was obvious, I thought it was going to be historic for a community. Maybe for all Americans, but certainly for black Americans. I wanted to do a book called The Historic Campaign in Photographs. Initially the sales department said, “No, we don’t think so.” But the minute it became obvious that he was going to win, they suddenly wanted to. I learned that from André—to come up with your own books and not always wait for them to arrive in your inbox.
Ideas have to come from somewhere, so why not from you?
Right. The truth is, we spend so much of our time advocating internally for our books, making sure we have the right cover, the right subtitle, filling out forms and so forth, that we often don’t have time to be entrepreneurial. But when a moment of clarity comes, it’s fun to pursue it or to brainstorm with an agent about a client whose writing you really like.
Were you able to do that at Vintage?
I was primarily doing reprints and a few hardcovers at Pantheon, which were fun, but I didn’t come up with my own books there.
Was there a moment when you knew that you had found the right profession?
I’ve never really looked back since typing André’s letters. We get to do what we love, we get paid to do it, we get to champion works that we believe in, and even our worst days are, I’m sure, better than 95 percent of the working world’s.
Someone asked me the other day, “Do you still love it?” We were away for a weekend and I was working. I do. There are days when you want to pull your hair out. But I’ve always known how lucky I am to have this as a profession, and it’s something I don’t take for granted.
Would you tell me more about the challenging parts of your job? I ask on behalf of young people getting into the business. It’s not always easy.
Well, I hate to say it, but I’ve been riding a magic carpet. But sure, there are hard parts. Relative to peers who take jobs in tech or finance or law, you don’t make that much money. That’s romantic in the beginning, but it’s harder as you get older. It’s also hard if you want an outside life, because this work does encroach on your weekends, and on your vacations. And then working on books you’ve inherited and aren’t passionate about is really tough. Passion is what makes fighting for a book worthwhile, and frankly what makes it seem less like a fight.
You can feel caught in the weeds when you have to let people know you can read and advocate outside of your own background. To have people only think of you for African American projects—or, if you’re Latino, to only be thought of for Latino culture–based projects—that can be disappointing and exhausting. I feel that’s something I’ll always have to navigate. Some agents get it right away and have always gotten it, and others—well, maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
Then there are the books that you’re convinced are worthy of more attention than they received—and other books that have not been written with a golden pen, but do go on to be huge successes. You think, “Why didn’t my book get a fraction of that? It’s just as beautiful and just as moving, and the author is just as worthy!” We all go through that.
Having been the editorial director and publisher of Amistad for twelve years, I can say it’s tough watching where some books get shelved, or how a universal story can be bought only for African American accounts. When I published The Pursuit of Happyness, I begged for the Harper sales team—which was very receptive—to see it as a rags-to-riches story that is at the cornerstone of what Americans want to believe about ourselves, that you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. I wanted to publish it like that, and not like some book that you have to go to the basement to find in a dusty corner in the African American section. That’s been a constant challenge.
How did you land at Amistad?
I got the call when I was an executive editor at Vintage, and at first I said no. I was working on all kinds of books and didn’t want to be pigeonholed into doing exclusively African American content. I always advocated for it, I always published it, but I didn’t want to be limited to it. And they said, “Well, you can also be executive editor at HarperCollins, and you can do whatever you want to do there.” And I said, “But I really like paperback publishing, too.” They said, “You can also be our reprint manager.” I was so happy and so comfortable at Vintage, and I liked my colleagues and loved my authors. But I had run out of excuses. I thought, “They’re giving you everything you say you want, so you should say yes.”
It sounds like you accepted three jobs at once. How did that sort out?
At Amistad I inherited a bit of a mess and I had a lot of work to do. By the end of the first two years, I’d let the reprint piece go. I hung on to the executive editor piece, which was great, because I got to see all kinds of proposals and to work with my colleagues at Harper, but I spent most of my energy making Amistad a destination for authors and their books.
How did you set about achieving that goal?
I tried to take everything I learned from watching the people at Knopf and Vintage publish, and apply it to books about the black diaspora. I had authors from the Caribbean, black Americans, white authors writing about the black experience. I wanted to publish quality literature in a fine and, if applicable, commercial way. I wanted to bring prestige to the list.
People kept telling me, “You’re going to do street fiction, because it’s so commercial,” and I thought, “Nope.” Harper gave me freedom to publish books that I loved and that interested me. It helped that the first couple books that I signed up had some success. One of them, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe, won the Giller Prize in Canada and became a Pennie’s Pick, which was strange but lovely.
You’re referring to Pennie Clark Ianniciello, the book buyer at Costco?
Yes. And then I published this young writer named William Henry Lewis, whose book I Got Somebody in Staunton was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. Early on we had books that people were paying attention to. I wanted review attention. I wanted agents to see us as a destination. And we were able to do that. Then, of course, there was The Known World. I got there in late 2001 and then we published that book in 2003.
What was it like working with Edward P. Jones?
It was a dream. The manuscript came in and it was nearly fully formed. He’s a beautiful writer and he knows his craft. He’s receptive to discussion around small points, but he’s very much in command of what he does. It was a privilege.
I remember when I first read The Known World. I was at a friend’s weekend house sitting outside, and I knew within the first five sentences that I was in the hands of a master. I thought it was my responsibility to take care of it, and that it would be an honor to be able to take care of it. And that’s basically what I did.
It’s inspiring when the quality of a book begins to pave its own way.
Yes, it is. It’s the vision of publishing that we all stay in the business for—that the work will speak for itself, and all you have to do is put it in as many hands as possible, so that it can go as far as it’s meant to go. Even the copyeditor said to me, “Thank you for letting us work with this material. I know this will be here long after I’m gone.” How often do you get a note of thanks from the copyeditors, who are overworked and underappreciated? I had support early on, and I had support all the way through.
I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do this, so I went to booksellers I had been friends with for a long time and asked them to give me an early quote about the book. Then I went into a sales conference with those quotes, and told the reps, “This is what your own community has said about this book. I don’t want to hear that it’s a black book. This is a book of the world, for the world. Let’s publish it that way.” That was a real aha moment.
Did you often find it necessary to have that kind of conversation?
My associate publisher and I felt it was important to help the sales reps frame the discussion for their customers—to talk to them about what was more universal and what was more specific to the community. Some books were for a black audience, like one called The Mocha Manual to a Fabulous Pregnancy, for black women who have different health risks in pregnancy. But my sweet spot was publishing black stories that were also universal stories.
I saw a Pew study about reading habits, from 2013, that touched on race. Sixty-seven percent of the Hispanic people surveyed had read a book in the past year, as compared to 76 percent of the white people and 81 percent of the African Americans surveyed. Do you have an opinion about why that diversity of readers isn’t reflected inside publishing houses?
Why are there not more people like me on the other side?
Right: Why might there be a dozen bearded white editors named Michael, and only one black editor named Dawn?
I cannot for the life of me figure that out. I don’t really know what else to say.
There is limited economic and geographic diversity in the industry as well, of course, and there are people who feel alienated just because they didn’t grow up in New York or come from wealth. But racial diversity? There’s even less.
I agree, and of course I might’ve felt some of that isolation you’re describing—even solely in terms of cultural references. If everyone else comes to the table reading the New Yorker, and you’re from L.A. skateboard culture, went to school in Hollywood, and didn’t grow up reading the New Yorker—there can be moments of “Do I belong at the table?” that may keep some people away.
Why aren’t there more people who look like me? Many black women have left and are no longer at a mainstream house. I can think of half a dozen in the past six years. Yes, I felt isolation, but just kind of powered through it. I’ve also had amazing mentors like André, who went out of his way because he thought my perspective would add value, and Marty, and I pay homage to them.
At Amistad I took great pride in knowing that the publisher, the associate publisher, and the publicist were three black women empowering our authors. We loved that.
I’m embarrassed to say it, but I don’t think I know any African American literary agents.
There are not many. Marie Brown has been doing it for a long time. She used to be an editor and she knows both sides. Faith Childs is a former attorney who’s been doing it for decades; she’s outstanding. There’s a young woman named Regina Brooks, who has her own agency called Serendipity. And the late Manie Barron went from sales to editorial to working as an agent. So there have been some, but it’s pathetic.
Sometimes I’ll go out to lunch with an agent and talk about, I don’t know, skiing in Italy. And then the agent will go out with some World War II story where a guy saves the day by skiing across Italy, and say, “Oh, I didn’t think of you.” But that agent will send me a black thing that has nothing to do with anything, except that it’s black. I find that frustrating.
We all get stereotyped, of course. I’m probably more generous about it than not, because otherwise you can let it define you.
What else happened at Amistad?
I was having my two children. I had the affiliation with HarperCollins, but didn’t buy that much for them; the Amistad list and my kids were my full-time thing. Later I moved to Ecco when there was some restructuring at Harper, and I wanted to be aligned with a smaller imprint. I think that with smaller imprints, you have more flexibility to support your authors. If one of the books is a mega-success, you can use that to get other authors in the door, whether it’s co-op spending with bookstores, or publicity or marketing dollars. I felt that it was easier to have those conversations within the context of a smaller imprint. That was in effect for almost two years.
How did you come to start 37 INK?
I’ve always had these great mentors. I started with André, then it was Marty, and then the early team at HarperCollins, where Jane Friedman and Cathy Hemming were very empowering. At Amistad they told me, “This is your ship now. What are you going to do with it?”
Then an opportunity came to work with Judith Curr at Atria. I felt that there were so many changes in the marketplace that I could stay and continue doing what I was doing, or I could go work with someone like Judith, who’s fearless and willing to innovate. I could ride her coattails into this brave new world where people are discovering books through Twitter and other things we don’t know about yet. I could stay put and become rooted in doing things the old way, or I could get excited about new ways to reach readers.
Take Twelve Years a Slave, for instance. I had read that Brad Pitt had wrapped that movie. I’d read about it two years before it finally came out, and I tried to get the official cover for our edition, but they had gone with Penguin. I said to Judith, “We’re not going to get the official one, but I can’t help but feel that this film is going to establish this book as the classic that it should be. I’ve read the book, it’s beautiful, it’s fantastic, it’s eye-opening.” Without blinking an eye, Judith said, “Do an e-book. Don’t charge anything for it, and have a note that says, ‘Learn more about 37 Ink’ in the back.”
We ended up charging 99 cents; if people really want it, they’ll pay, and maybe there’s even a psychological effect that you value things more if you pay for them. We put a beautiful cover on it and got an introduction from one of my Amistad authors, Dolen Perkins-Valdez—and we sold over 200,000 copies. We spread the word about the book—it sheds light on slavery in America, which I find to be important—but it was Judith who said, “Let’s do this.” Even if it were a failure, in Judith’s eye it would still have some value. That’s why I moved.
What else are you excited about?
I published Dear Leader, which points to the breadth I hope to establish for the list. It’s about a North Korean spy who, once he found out the truth about what was happening there, fled to South Korea via China. It’s a story about the North Korean regime, but also a daring escape story and a great way into this puzzling country.
In the pipeline I am particularly excited about Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, the edited journals of Alice Walker. I was thrilled to be able to work with Jan-Philipp Sendker, who wrote a book called The Art of Racing Heartbeats. I’m publishing his new books, which are set in the new China and explore the hidden costs, psychological and otherwise, of all the progress there.
And I love the author updates I get from the journalist Josh Levin, who is working on a book called The Queen. It’s about a divisive, mythic political figure: the “welfare queen” who dominated so much of the discussion around race and class in the politics of the ’80s.
She was mythic, but not in the way one might predict. She’s proof that truth is stranger than fiction and is one of the most singular and strangely compelling female figures I’ve read about in ages. It’s very dramatic. The author sends me updates from whatever archive he’s buried in and I love it. Did you see it when it was on submission?
I did.
It’s fantastic. I’m so interested by that particular story, because it reads like Devil in the White City meets Destiny of the Republic. It’s true crime with a pulsating narrative—there’s a serial killer in it—as well as a meditation on race and how it’s all a construct.
Another book I am excited about is Never Caught. It’s the story of Ona Judge, a slave in the household of George Washington. When she ran away from the Washingtons, she chose freedom over an elevated kind of servitude, and though the president knew where she was, and even petitioned the governor of New Hampshire to return her, he was never able to recapture her. People are fascinated by the founding fathers. This doesn’t disappoint.
What are you doing at 37 INK that’s different from what you did at Amistad?
What I’m doing as an editor and publisher is the same. I am trying to buy stories that I am drawn to and passionate about, because I have to advocate for them from the moment they’re acquired until a year after they’re on the bookshelf. The only thing that has changed is how I interface with the people who are more on the marketing side, being open to their ideas about social media and how we find our readers. But most of my work is the same: editing and making a book the best it can be, and then advocating for it.
What have you learned over the last couple years of running this imprint that you wish you knew earlier? About yourself, your authors, the role of being an editor or publisher?
I’ve learned that despite all the new bells and whistles, there’s no substitute for giving the bookselling community time enough to read a book and get behind it. I was lucky the first book out, with The Butler. I arrived here in April. By July, Wil Haygood and I had a bestseller. It helped that the book was short—under 100 pages of text. People could read it. But for a novel or a grand work of narrative nonfiction, people still need time.
Is there a set of traits common to the most successful people you’ve worked with?
Edward P. Jones is just a beautiful writer, and his success is all about the quality of the writing. Steve Harvey’s one of the hardest-working authors I have ever met, very shrewd, and surrounds himself with shrewd people. He was willing to travel far and work hard to make his books a success. Dolen Perkins-Valdez is very hardworking. She communicated with her audience; no book club was too small. She went to writing programs, conferences, met aspiring writers. She put herself out there and did what we ask authors to do, which is find an audience, communicate with them directly, make them feel like they’re part of your team, and then they help spread the word for you.
Despite all the things that we tell authors to do, there has to be a book that you want to recommend to five other people after you put it down. It starts with the book no matter what. Without that it doesn’t matter how much you tweet. You’ll get one wave of publicity and then it’s over.
The first successes at 37 Ink had a film component to them. Is that something you think about explicitly?
I just got lucky. I had read 12 Years a Slave years before the film came out, so I knew the story. A friend in the film industry saw an early cut and said, “I’s going to win everything.” It was in the public domain and the timing was right. I acted on my instincts.
The Butler was a little bit more of a risk because I signed it up before I’d seen the movie, though I had read the script. I thought the cast was great, and also I saw it as a small metaphorical story about a bigger kind of American journey. One thing that Judith has taught me is that it’s okay to take risks. I’ve really been kind of cautious, and that’s a piece of my education that was missing. Particularly in this environment, you have to try new things.
I used to take everything so personally. If something didn’t work I would be so upset on behalf of my author and on behalf of the imprint. But the old ways will not work anymore.
When you started out, did you ever envision doing diet or self-help books?
Never. But I’ve done the Steve Harvey self-help book, and J. J. Smith’s diet books came to me through him.
I met J. J. last year and thought she was impressive. I wonder what authors of any kind can learn from her success, first as a self-published author and then working with you.
Her story’s interesting. Steve brought her to my attention years ago. She was sick, and traditional medicine wasn’t healing her, so she got credentialed in nutrition. She also trained herself in media—she spent money on herself—which is a good example of an author investing in and believing in herself. I liked her hustle.
I’d had a conversation three or four years ago about her coming in, when she was self-publishing, and she said, “I’m having so much fun on my own. It’s working for me. Why would I give a publisher a share?” And then she got so big that she realized there’s so much that a publisher can do for her, and that she didn’t want to do it all on her own. We could get her into new outlets, and give her the kind of publicity she couldn’t get on her own.
That story reminds me of something else. Every once in awhile I’ll get a letter from someone who will have photocopied a letter that I sent to them, saying, “You reached out to me after I wrote this short story and said, ‘If you ever have something, please be in touch.’ Well, here I am!” Seeing your own letter is like being introduced to your former self. It does pay to be entrepreneurial. Sometimes as editors we are so overwhelmed that we want to reach out to the person who’s written a short story, or want to send a note to someone at a reading we were moved by, but we just never have the time, or we think, “Oh, I could do that, but I’ll never hear from them again.” It’s nice when it comes full circle.
Let’s talk about editing the books you publish, because you’ve done such a range. How do you conceive of your role?
My job as an editor is to help you fully express yourself as you intend to express yourself—to have your work be its full expression. Sometimes you, a writer, can get in your own way, and I can gently nudge you one way or the other, and say, “I think you intended to say this,” or “I don’t know if you know your character is coming across in this way.”
I remember a novel I worked on in which the lead character became less sympathetic with each chapter. It’s okay not to like the character always, but ultimately the main character has to be sympathetic for readers to stay with the book. Sometimes it’s pointing out those things to a writer. Sometimes it’s helping writers clear a path, or helping them find their way back to the voice they have 80 percent of the time when they have gone astray. Making suggestions, and being truthful—particularly so with memoir. To say, “This will be of interest only to you,” or “There’s something universal here—expand.” Or “I like this riff. It takes us out of the central story, so let’s stay with it for a couple more pages, and when we come back, we’ll feel gratitude toward the central story,” or “We want to be reimmersed in the central story.”
I have to channel the author. That is always the same, whether it’s narrative nonfiction, even a piece of journalism—though the work there is often more organizational—or fiction. What would you say we do?
One thing is that we help writers see what individual decisions mean in terms of their overall ambitions for the work. That process has value not because I’m a better writer, but because I’m a different human being. Receiving a book and then repeating its message back to the author usually clarifies what they send out into the world.
Absolutely.
I love a true collaboration, when the writer invites you to help make the book with him or her. That’s when the job stops feeling like a job to me. To go in that deep can be dangerous, though, because you need some distance to be effective. You’re a therapist, you’re a parent, you’re an employee, you’re an employer—and you’re all of these things at once.
You’re sounding like Anthony Bourdain talking about being a chef! Yes. There is that dance where a writer has to let you in and trust you. They all say they do, but they really have to mean it. But I do find that most writers are waiting for that feedback. They know when something’s not working, but it’s almost like they want to be told. They need someone to gently nudge them out of their own way. Ultimately, a writer might say, “I took 97 percent of your suggestions. There was this one part where I disagreed.” Great. It’s your book, and that’s absolutely your choice. I did get an affirmation the other day that was so nice. We all need it, whatever your industry is.
Where a writer said, “Thank you for spending three weekends in a row working on my book?”
Right. I had one memoir where the author took about 80 percent of my comments, and then there was the remaining 20 percent she wasn’t going to budge on. I said, “This is your story. I can’t make you. I feel very strongly about this, but I can’t make you.” And she was great. She said, “Wait a minute.I didn’t decide to work with you to not listen to you, and you didn’t get where you are by not listening to your own instincts. So let me sit with this.” That was a great moment, because we were both following our instincts, and it worked out. Still, there’s no right answer. It’s not like you get to flip to the end of the magazine and check if you’re right. But we do get to see if readers respond, and that is the key.
How connected are you to the marketing and promotion of a book?
I do find myself crafting pitches. I find myself organizing events for my authors. I find myself reaching out to people at magazines, in conjunction with the publicists I work with. We are increasingly called upon as editors to help with the pitch, to follow the author’s social media so we can come up with ideas of how we can use their platform to sell their book. Sometimes the only thing we’re not doing is taking the author photograph.
I was on the road with Dolen Perkins-Valdez after her novel Wench. I was going to all-white book clubs—you know, eighty people strong in suburban Connecticut. And then I watched her on academic panels related to African-American studies, and saw her Skype into African-American book clubs. I thought, “This book is really crossing cultures, and playing to different kinds of households. There’s a story to that.” And we pitched it. We got far with the New York Times, who kept saying they were interested, then nothing—and then tried the Post, which did a similar story.
Let’s put it this way: Nobody’s ever going to stop an editor from wearing an additional hat. No one’s going to tell you not to come up with an event where you can sell two hundred copies. So I do an event on Martha’s Vineyard called the 37 INK Literary Brunch.
Tell me about it.
I found a sponsor, and we bring three authors to the Vineyard, and we work with the independent Bunch of Grapes bookstore—it’s an opportunity to put books in front of readers. With bookstores closing, it’s harder and harder to get on their calendar unless you have a big blockbuster. That’s something I’m really proud of, because it was kind of scrappy—it was almost a challenge from an author, like, “Why don’t you do an event here?”
I always have one of my authors, but we now reach out to other authors as I’m building my list. We’ve had Junot Díaz, Nikki Giovanni, and Bill Cheng, who I worked with when I at Amistad.
What was it like to work with Bill Cheng on Southern Cross the Dog? I loved that book.
Bill is a very talented and confident writer, and the book was sprawling. He came in, and I remember saying, “You’ve got a little magical realism, you’re writing across gender, you’re writing across race, you’re writing across geography. You have a non-linear layout to the book. But just because you can do everything doesn’t mean you have to. Our job is to figure where to pull back. Ultimately, it’s your book, and I believe in your voice, I love these characters, I love this story—the bigness, the richness of it—but it needs some pruning.” I think that when Bill went around to see editors, everyone told him how much they loved the book. I felt a compulsion to be a little bit honest, and to find out how open he was to editing. He said, “I don’t want my ego stroked, I want real feedback.” I loved working with him. He is great; so young, so naturally gifted. I loved seeing what he could do with his craft.
He aimed high, and wrote outside of his experiences. He would say that the book is an homage to a type of music, the blues, that at some point in his life was significant to him. I don’t know that he would say that the blues “saved him,” but he wanted to pay homage to it with this story that came out of his imagination. I love it like I love The Known World. I love these books with these big acts of imagination. I wish there were more books like them. If that were the case I’d publish more fiction.
Who in the book business do you most admire?
I think the world of Robin Desser at Knopf. Fantastic instincts, great on the page, beautiful person. Anne Messitte at Vintage, supersmart. Reagan Arthur, working mom extraordinaire, great list, great instincts. I could go on with others.
Reagan is amazing. I’m sure you know that already, since you’re at Little, Brown, but I’ve known her for a long time and I will add this to what we said about diversity: There are very few working moms at her level. It is a job that demands that you are always available, always working, and, if you’re on a baseball field from eight to eleven every Saturday and Sunday, that’s a big chunk of your time. I admire her for that.
I love hearing about who knew whom before I got into the business.
Jonathan Karp, Edward Kastenmeier, Amy Einhorn, Molly Stern, Judy Clain, and I used to be part of something called the Young Editors Group. We would meet once a quarter at a restaurant on the East Side in a back room. I’m sure there were others there; these are the ones I remember. It’s interesting to see where we’ve landed, those of us who are still standing.
How did you remain standing?
One of the things I tried to do at Amistad was to always have something working commercially so I could publish my “smaller” books. I published a lot of story collections when I was at Amistad, but I would always buy them when something was working in a big way. I think that would be what my publishing model is—to have something big enough that allows you to take more risks on books you publish because of the review potential, or because you believe the author’s going to have a big or important book one day, or is saying something from a perspective that no one else is coming from. But you have to bring the publishing house something. Great reviews, great numbers, new audiences.
Michael Szczerban is an executive editor at Little, Brown.
Agents & Editors: Jeff Shotts
These days, it’s tough for an editor to take a chance on writing that is risky, experimental, or hard to define. That’s why writers everywhere should be heartened by the success of Graywolf Press, an independent publisher in Minneapolis that has been taking chances on new work often overlooked by editors in New York—and reaping big rewards.
Graywolf was founded in 1974 by Scott Walker in Port Townsend, Washington (home to another outstanding indie, Copper Canyon Press). Its headquarters moved to the Twin Cities a decade later. This year the nonprofit publisher celebrates its fortieth anniversary, as well as recent critical and commercial triumphs.
At the heart of Graywolf’s outsize success is executive editor Jeff Shotts, whose poets and essayists rank among the finest writers in the United States. They have also been racking up the accolades: In the past three years, books of poetry by some of his authors—Vijay Seshadri, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and D. A. Powell—have collected two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. This past spring, his author Leslie Jamison debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, where her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, remained for four weeks.
That kind of national commercial response is rare for Graywolf, but is the product of years of patience and the relentless pursuit of interesting writing. Shotts’s roster of essayists and poets also includes Elizabeth Alexander, Mary Jo Bang, Eula Biss, Matthea Harvey, Tony Hoagland, Claudia Rankine, Tomas Tranströmer, and Kevin Young, among others.
We spoke this past spring at the Graywolf offices in Minneapolis, a day after I saw Shotts introduce Tracy K. Smith at an event benefiting a local library system.
Let’s start with a little about Graywolf. Do you think this press could exist outside of Minnesota?
It could, in the way that other nonprofit independent presses exist elsewhere, but the Twin Cities is a coveted place because of its support for the arts. The philanthropic support in Minnesota is unparalleled—not just for literature but also visual arts, theater, and music.
Our nonprofit, independent structure creates a culture. We’re absolutely a mission-driven organization. That allows us to make editorial decisions that are often deemed risky, because we have a safety net of support underneath those decisions in a way that other presses don’t.
How does Graywolf’s mission affect what you do?
We bring our mission to every editorial meeting. It’s how we talk about all the decisions we make. We take risks on books that aren’t obvious—in the proposal, the content, the profile of the author. We publish poetry and essays. Our nonfiction prize is defining a new kind of writing that is positioned to the side of most popular notions of what nonfiction is. We publish challenging novels and short stories. Some of those books really do succeed commercially. But we absolutely support the challenging but nonetheless great books that don’t, on their surface, seem likely to hit the best-seller list or win a big award.
We’re a nonprofit so we can take on these books, but we’re also a nonprofit because of the kinds of books we take on. We build our list in ways that would strike neither the publishing industry nor the culture at large as the methods of a commercial enterprise. It’s been extraordinary to see the success we’ve had with books that get passed up, frankly, by larger houses.
If I were to say one word about my role in how our mission operates, it’s patience.
That’s a rare virtue.
Exactly. And it’s the thing that distinguishes us from any other publisher. Leslie Jamison is a case in point. The success of The Empathy Exams began when we started the Graywolf nonfiction prize ten years ago. That prize attracted a number of great writers. Ander Monson’s book Neck Deep and Other Predicaments is a marvelous work that challenges our notion of what nonfiction and personal essay writing is. Not too long after his book, we published Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land, which has been one of our most successful nonfiction titles. That book won the National Books Critics Circle Award, was adopted in classrooms, and established Eula as one of the foremost essay writers in the country. And Eula’s book, Leslie has been saying, is the reason she sent The Empathy Exams to Graywolf.
We couldn’t have known when we started this prize that we’d have a New York Times best-seller or a National Books Critics Circle Award winner. But the success of the series has been in supporting each of those books so that other writers read them, see them, and want to create books like them. Only a press like Graywolf can be that patient.
How did Graywolf come to select The Empathy Exams for the nonfiction prize?
It was a fast and furious and unanimous choice. Leslie had sent us about a hundred pages—a lot of which is no longer in the book—and a cover letter and proposal for what the book would become. Those pages did contain an earlier version of that title essay, and it’s a remarkable, life-changing kind of essay. It blew us away from the beginning.
Watching that project build was extraordinary. Being the editor as Leslie turned in these new pieces, seeing Harper’s or the Believer pick them up, and building the conversation in the book around that central concept of empathy—it’s been one of the most extraordinary editorial relationships I’ve had.
Something similar to the nonfiction program is happening with the poetry list. Some writers have stayed with us over the course of three books now, and in the case of someone like Vijay Seshadri, he puts a decade between each book. We have not only the ability to patiently develop each individual book that we take on, but also the patience to develop an author’s career over a course of several books or, in some cases, several decades. Publishing as a whole has lost its patience with that kind of development. The commercial presses have ceded that ground to us, and we’re glad to take it.
They’ve ceded other ground too. Poetry is a great, fertile genre for us; it’s at the heart of what we do, and it’s territory that we get to inhabit. This new nonfiction writing is really fertile ground. Translations have also been ceded to independent publishing, by and large. With support from the Lannan Foundation, we’ve had extraordinary success with our translation list—fiction and poetry—and that’s yielded us Nobel Prize winners and Per Peterson, who is one of our absolute star international writers. His book Out Stealing Horses—that was work that had been passed over time and again.
We’re trying to move into these territories where we can be exciting. It’s author-driven territory, not commercial-driven territory. Authors are defining this new nonfiction. Poets are defining what poetry is for us. The way we attune our ears to them, the more that we can listen to them and what they’re writing, even if at first it unsettles us—that is what Graywolf is to me.
But don’t many of the pressures on a commercial publisher act on you, too?
I've been in independent publishing a long time now, and there is a Kool-Aid that you can drink. Even though I’m talking about this ground that’s ceded to independent publishing, I don’t want to make it sound like a shortfall of commercial publishing. They’re dealing with a reality that we’re in too. Of course we want to hit the Times bestseller list. Our mission is also to reach readers. These scrappy, odd Graywolf books sit at Barnes & Noble and everywhere else right alongside books from Simon & Schuster and Knopf and Random House and Farrar, Straus and Norton and so on. We have to exist in that world, and that’s a real challenge.
I want to go back to that sense of patience. It’s a huge part of what we’re able to give a writer. We take on individual books, absolutely, but we really are taking on a writer. We look for writers who give us the sense that their work is the beginning of something that we want to support over a long term. It can't always happen, of course. But that’s the ideal: to get in with an author on the ground floor and build them up to where the third, fourth, fifth, tenth book gets the front-page review or the big interview, and breaks out.
I think you’re underselling yourself with the word “patience.” You’re not just waiting around, are you? You’re identifying writers with talent, and then nurturing it—knowing that it will take time to reach their full power.
No, you’re right. It’s active patience.
Is it more challenging for you to identify young talent and nurture it today than it was ten years ago? You’re more established as an editor, for one, and you now have a list of continuing authors—take Matthea Harvey, for example.
Sure.
I remember first encountering her at the Dodge Poetry Festival when I was in college, and thinking that her voice was so fresh, so smart, so funny. She was totally new. But nearly a decade later, she's part of the establishment.
[Laughs.] She would never accept that designation—but yes.
On the one hand that’s fantastic. And on the other hand, every book she publishes with you takes up a slot that you might use to break out a new poet. How do you find the equivalent of Matthea today, when your list is already populated?
There’s truly no equivalent to Matthea. Let’s talk for a moment about her because I delight in her in so many ways. She is both a marvelous person and truly one of the geniuses of her generation. There’s no one who has the vision and imagination that she brings to the page. Her new book, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You?, is a hybrid book that is half her visual artwork and half her text, and there's nothing like it. Some of what we’re talking about is supporting authors who can challenge themselves like that. You know what I mean: There are many authors who stop challenging themselves.
I could not have anticipated this new book when we took on Matthea’s second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine. Now I see the connection: Of course there is this giant leap to the visual, a bigger scope that is even more political and more emotional. I had read her first book, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, published by Alice James, and I was blown away. I remember being introduced to that book by Mary Jo Bang, who was then my teacher and is now one of Graywolf’s award-winning poets.
I saw Matthea’s new poems come out in magazines, and I e-mailed her and just said, “I’m coming to New York. Do you want to meet up?” We did, and had a couple of gimlets. I was fascinated by what she was doing and what she was writing, and so thrilled she was willing to meet with me. It wasn’t a big pitch. Of course she knew Graywolf, and there was an understanding of what this meeting meant. Relatively soon after that, she sent what became the second book, Sad Little Breathing Machine, which we’ve done incredibly well with, and then we did Modern Life, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the NBCC. And now we have this big, bold, ambitious work.
We don’t publish a lot of work with high-end artwork included in it—it’s an expensive book for us. But being able to support a major force in contemporary poetry—that feels essential to me. It does mean we have to be nimble, but I love that we can take a leap alongside her.
How did you come to work with Eula Biss?
I’ve lived my life alongside her, and I adore her as a writer and as a person. In the summer of 2002, I had finished my MFA at Washington University, and was reading an issue of Harper’s. There was this amazing piece called “The Pain Scale” by a writer I didn’t know. I hadn’t seen anything like Eula’s writing before, and I checked out her first book, The Balloonists, a wonderful book about the dissolution of her parents’ marriage. I wrote her to say that I had noticed these amazing things she had been writing and asked what she was working on. At that point she was just going into the University of Iowa nonfiction program. I was twenty-eight and she must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. We started a conversation, and every few months she’d send me some new pieces, and I tried to get her to start cohering some of these pieces around... something. I wasn’t quite sure what. But you can’t read a piece like “The Pain Scale” and not see the greatness and the potential in someone writing like that. I held onto that, even when she sent me pieces that were not up to that standard.
I kept trying to push her: “These are great individual pieces, but what are you writing about?” You know, I’m the guy who has to write the catalog copy for these books. [Laughs.] I have to stand in a room with our sales reps and say what a book is about. Sometimes that’s hard for poetry and essays.
Several times we got to a point where Eula could have ended the conversation, which would have been the saddest thing. Then, at some point, probably in 2006, she sent me a piece called “Time and Distance Overcome.” It is one of the single most essential pieces of writing I’ve seen.
She started writing about Alexander Graham Bell,when communication from sea to sea by telephone was a new concept in this country. The piece continues through the history of how the government started putting telephone poles up across the towns and highways of America. Then, in the middle of the piece, she goes to the New York Times database and types in “telephone poles.” And almost every entry that comes up is about lynching. This is not where the essay was going. It takes a turn, and becomes a remarkable piece about racial violence just at the moment when we think we're in this great moment of connection. It is an amazing, chilling piece.
That was the moment we put our finger on what she was writing about. What then cascaded was this frank book about race, about whiteness and American culture. At some point, as the editor, it’s fascinating to get out of the way. These pieces started cascading together and making coherence out of what had previously been a kaleidoscope. No longer in that book is there the original spark, “The Pain Scale,” and it still hasn’t been put into a book.
That’s the nurturing patience. I hope some of what comes through to writers from our conversation is that it’s one thing for the publishing industry and editors to be impatient. There’s an economic drive around that. But writers can be the most impatient ones of all. That’s understandable, especially if you’re trying to get a teaching job, or we’re talking about poets or essayists who aren’t making life-changing advances, but are finding means to write through teaching. But if Eula had done that kind of kaleidoscopic book earlier on, I don’t think she’d be anywhere close to what she ended up accomplishing with Notes From No-Man's Land. Similarly, in Leslie Jamison’s case, there was a throughline all along, but a lot of her hundred-page sample didn’t make it into the final book. And as these individual pieces started to cohere, there was also a fascinating cascade. I keep coming back to that word.
You’re talking about that moment in the creative process when the work takes on its own momentum.
It’s the greatest moment. A good editor needs to recognize that moment as they’re editing on the page, but also when they’re in that nurturing conversation with their author. When do you shut up and get out of the way?
The line editing has to come at some point, but it’s that larger conversation where you as an editor gain the trust—and hopefully friendship—of your author.
I’ve yet to meet an author who sees a document filled with an editor’s comments and doesn’t think, at least for just a second, “Who the hell do you think you are?” [Laughs.]
Especially poets! [Laughs.]But if you’ve developed that trust and friendship, by the time you’re really doing the line-edit type stuff, you can spill ink as necessary. Editors can over-edit, of course, but developing that trust and friendship is so important.
How do you know when to shut up?
By listening to the author. When I send an editorial letter, it unnerves me when an author replies with, “You’re right. We should change that.” This happens very rarely, but when an author comes back and just says, “Yes, yes, yes,” it makes me concerned about their confidence in their voice.
My job is to get that author into a conversation about the work. I want that poet or essayist to draw a line for me, to say, “Yes, I’ll take this suggestion, but not this one—I don’t sound like myself anymore.” I’m willing to look a little stupid, or maybe a little pushy in some cases, but I love it when an author pushes back. That’s when I feel that the author is ready, confident in the work and in her own style and voice. That can be true for an author’s tenth book, but more often for the earlier books in a career.
An author needs to learn how to be an author.
Yes. And as an editor, you want your author to be able to present what their voice is. So I listen for that moment when an author pushes back. Sometimes that confidence is there from the beginning, and other times you do have to search for it. Finding that moment is the spark that keeps me coming back and makes me feel like a contributor to the conversation.
That moment of pushback is an inflection point. It’s when you can begin to work together and say, “Okay, your aim is this. This is how I’m not following you there. How are we going to make this better together?”
Exactly.That’s one reason I often phrase my suggestions as questions—because I see myself as on the same team, not an adversary saying, “This is how it should be.” I don’t think writers are interested in that.
It seems to me that there are basically two ways to get someone to buy your book. The easier way is to write about something that people have an active interest in. The other way, which is perhaps one challenge in selling poetry, is to conjure a new interest in a reader.
That’s interesting, and it brings up what poetry can do. I’m hearing myself automatically talking about subject matter and essays—the nonfiction part of myself. In terms of poetry, I hope that there’s something about poetry where the reader not only has to be nudged toward the interest of the poet, but the reader is also asked to perform a great feat of empathy: inhabiting that poet’s voice.
In a poem, “I” might be the poet who wrote that statement, or maybe not—regardless, it’s the reader. I don’t think that intimacy is achieved in any other art form. Part of the interest in reading poetry, and part of what is gained by reading it, is this leap into another identity. The poet creates the space for this to happen.
I’m interested in poetry that does collide with our culture. Vijay Seshadri is writing about an immigrant culture, and I think that’s something the Pulitzer committee probably responded to in some way. What does that amalgamation of voices and languages sound like on the streets of Brooklyn? You can open any of Vijay’s three books, but particularly 3 Sections, and overhear that street-level conversation he’s attuned to. I love books that get under the language in that way. There is a moment of familiarity, but the way the poet has transformed that is unfamiliar to us. That’s the unsettling area where poetry lives. But the poet does have to beckon us over there through some kind of subject matter, or through some kind of voice.
Tony Hoagland comes to mind. He’s a controversial writer for this very reason: He takes on voices that are sometimes very affable and sometimes very funny, but he is also willing to give voice to voices that are disturbingly ugly. In the process, he raises questions about American culture, about what poetry should or shouldn’t be talking about. We don’t always have to agree with Tony. And yet I’m excited by that risk, to inhabit these characters, these voices that we have to admit are part of American culture.
I love that he tramples on the idea that there’s a limited domain of interest that poets should engage with. He, along with a poet like Matthea Harvey, engages with questions I actually have, rather than ascending into a rarefied aesthetic landscape.
Poetry as a democratic act. That Whitmanesque impulse is something I aspire to. The Dickinsonian impulse very much alive in Matthea Harvey’s or Mary Jo Bang’s work. But it’s the collision of those impulses that I think makes poetry great.
That reminds me of the poems Tracy K. Smith was reading last night—those postcards by the victims of horrible acts of murder writing back to their vanquishers. But they do it with this voice of beauty, this acceptance of their fate. I remember first reading them, and it was shocking—most people would assume you should take those stories and witness them in a very particular way. But for Tracy, it’s really only an act of empathy if you include everyone in the story—that includes the person that we don’t like to look at. Tony would say that sometimes the person you don’t want to look at is yourself.
That’s poetry. What a powerful little thing a poem is.
I want to talk about audience. Is poetry read only by other poets?
A lot of people say that.
What’s your take?
No. Everybody is reading poetry. Robert Pinsky talks about poetry being the thing that exists from the breath. He says we walk around all day saying poetry to each other, and there is some truth to that. We’re helpless in the way that our language is cadenced. If you think widely, in the way Pinsky encourages us to, we’re speaking poetry all the time.
Of course there is something about the act of codifying and distilling the language into a piece of art that’s different from the way we’re talking now. Our culture gives that heightened moment to the poem. Even when a writer like Tony is doing something very conversational, there is still something ceremonial and ritualistic about the poem that can be the place where readers and audiences get lost. That heightened place gives poetry its great power in our culture, and maybe that’s why we turn to it for inaugurations and weddings and funerals. Poetry moves us in a different, powerful way. Those are other ways everybody is engaged in poetry.
But is everyone engaged in the purchase of poetry?
Right, right, right. Well, in that way, no, poetry still tends to be niche. [Laughs.]
How have you seen the audience for books of poetry change?
I’ve been engaged in the publishing side of that question since the mid-1990s, and also as an MFA student. MFA programs have continued to increase in numbers. There’s a lot to be made of the effects of that rise—what the workshop model means for poetry, aesthetically, and I’m engaged in that question too. But in terms of audience, those MFA programs are talking about poetry in their classrooms and in their auditoriums, and that has only increased the audience. When authors do appearances, even if the book isn’t part of that transaction, the poem is—and that is incredibly valuable, even if it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line of a publishing house.
I tend to be pretty optimistic about the audience for poetry. Writing programs and reading series, book groups, National Poetry Month, Billy Collins on the radio—there are more ways to access poetry than there ever have been before. It is an exciting time to be a poet, and to be a poetry editor trying to keep your ear to the ground in terms of where poetry is being experienced. It’s a much wider response than one might initially assume. Many of our poetry books have been our best-selling titles in these last few years. Some of those sales are propelled by the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize and the National Book Award, and so on. Some are propelled by the excitement about what a particular voice has to offer.
Tony Hoagland is an incredibly populist and popular poet. Tony is not hitting the New York Times best-seller list, but he has hit a cultural nerve. Claudia Rankine, a poet who’s also doing very slippery nonfiction poetry stuff, is also hitting a nerve with her fearless way of talking about America. We’re in multiple printings. Any publisher would kill to have numbers like we have on those books.
Is every first book of poems going to perform that way? Of course not. But it’s wonderful when poets do tip their work toward a wider audience, because that allows us to publish more so-called new and emerging voices.
I have only seen poetry become more popular, more read, more taught and discussed. It’s part of our mission to find that audience. Absolutely we market our books toward those writing programs. We go to AWP and make sure those books are front and center, trying to get those books on syllabi that get taught time and again. We’re out trying to make all kinds of things happen for these books. But also finding those—it goes back to the subject matter, and the way those authors sort of talk about their subject matter—how can you reach those audiences for that book?
This fall we’re publishing a book by Katie Ford, a marvelous younger poet. It’ll be her third book, Blood Lyrics. There’s a section in it about experiencing an extremely premature birth, at twenty-four weeks. And it’s a story of survival, it’s a story of a hospital, it’s a story of a marriage, it’s a story of a childhood, it’s all these things. I haven’t seen poetry hit that subject so head on, and with such an urgent voice. We want to reach people outside of the usual poetry audience for whom that’s personally urgent. We think that way about each of our books: How do we reach an audience that might not be sitting around and waiting for a poem? But when the right poem does reach them, it changes their worldview.
Do believe that there is no segment of America that cannot be reached by a poem?
Absolutely. It’s naïve, perhaps. [Laughs.]
No! If you don't believe that, it’s probably time to fold up.
You do see Random House taking on Billy Collins in a particular way. There is a commercial opportunity with poetry too.
Oh, that reminds me: I brought you a copy of one of my books. It’s an anthology titled Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, edited by Anthony and Ben Holden.
Oh, good! I've been so curious about this, because it’s for the masculine audience that Tony Hoagland, for one, is reaching. Men do read books. I’m not only talking about poetry. The publishing industry seems to ask itself whether that’s true, but very clearly, men do.
You and I have done it!
Here we are! [Laughs.] You and me, we might be it. But do men read poetry? Maybe that is an interesting question. At Tracy K. Smith’s reading last night, there were significantly more women than men, so that audience provides some anecdotal evidence about who’s reading literature. But every editor, and every publishing house, must maintain the hope that what they’re doing has the power and the potential to reach anyone. Even the most experimental, innovative, destabilized voice—if that author is able to clutch the culture by the collar, I think any reader can go there.
The academic audience is an important one, because it’s often the place you have to start with challenging books. At a writing program or in an English department, there’s an engagement with the question of what it means to challenge a reader. Can you get that conversation to start there and gain enough traction to move further out in the culture? Sometimes yes, and often no. But it does happen. There’s still what used to be called the avant-garde. I love that there is still a mechanism through publishing houses and magazines and online and self-publishing for the new James Joyces and Samuel Becketts and Gertrude Steins. The writers who are pushing the language in such a powerful way that our first encounters with it scare us.
New Directions is a national treasure. That they're still committed to that kind of innovation is a testament. New Directions was the model that Scott Walker founded Graywolf on. Every small independent press that’s still active in this country is founded on what that press stands for. That’s very moving to me as a reader and as an editor.
Well, now that we’ve covered everything, let’s start at the beginning. [Laughs.] How did you become an editor of poetry books? I’ve read that you grew up in the Midwest in a very Scandinavian household.
I’m from the middle of Kansas, from a very small, rural town named McPherson. Deep Scandinavian roots.: 1880s immigrants from Sweden, many of whom came to central Kansas, some of whom didn’t like it and got scared and went back. Church steeples, oil wells. It was a beautiful place to grow up, and I was fortunate to have a lot of people lifting me up. It’s one of the most conservative places in the country. But my family had a tried-and-true-blue quality that I was completely oblivious to at the time, but which certainly seeped in. Even my grandfather, who’s gone now, was canvassing up to his last year or two for John Kerry against George W. Bush. My mom is a deep thinker and a reader.
We had these red faux-leather books in a series called the Book of Knowledge. And I remember us buying the encyclopedia letter by letter as the volumes came to our grocery store. I read a lot in the encyclopedia, and I remember my mom reading from the Book of Knowledge. [Laughs.] They’re absurd in terms of their impossible breadth. But it provided me with an imaginative world as a young person. I was lucky that those books were among the many ways that I was lifted up intellectually. I grew up believing I had to think my way out of there.
What do you mean?
Every teenager grapples with central questions of identity. Who am I, and what do I love, and is it supported here? All of those things.
I’ll back up a notch. My mom was a really big figure, but my grandfather gave me a worncopy of Tennyson that I still have. It was an odd gift, because he was not a readerly person. He went to the agricultural school at Kansas State University on the GI Bill, very proudly, and was a county extension agent. I used to walk wheat fields with him. He had these ritualistic practices and would walk a field in a certain way, seeing things that of course to my eye were invisible, and then he would chew the grain and deduce something.My dad had a master’s degree in theater, though he was a real estate agent and broker for most of my youth.
I’m sure this joke isn’t new to you, but: Did you hear about the Scandinavian man who loved his wife so much he almost told her?
[Laughs.] That’s the world I’m from. You keep it secret, that part of you.
But you noticed that part of you, and saw it in other people in your family.
My parents are very aware people. They were invested in making sure that my two sisters and I did things like go to art museums in Kansas City, which was this big three-hour drive from home. We took trips outside of Kansas, and that felt important. I mean, now that sounds pretty average, but Kansas is a land of settlers. That austere thing you’re talking about is deeply ingrained.
How did you come to realize the role creative expression could play in your life?
Mostly by reading. Then I tried writing poetry. Middle school is where it sparked. And then I had a remarkable high school English teacher named Carole Ferguson. We read Shakespeare and William Blake and the Romantics and Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. She was a remarkable teacher in how she introduced that writing without killing it—in a way that allowed you to think deeply about it but also enjoy it.
We had another high school English teacher named John Hudson, but everyone called him Hud. He was also the track coach, and he was all about Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville. Those writers in the deep masculine American vein. He taught literature the way he coached the track team, which was to inspire. He would stand in front of the class—he had this comical hairpiece—and take off his glasses and read us passages he loved. It was alive for him. I didn’t learn a thing about the critical appreciation of literature, but I loved it. Having those two very different English translators opened up a path.
Mrs. Ferguson recognized something in some of us. She gave me a poem called “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford and said I should read it. Stafford was still alive at the time, and he was from Hutchinson, Kansas—what we called Hutch—about thirty miles away. That was very powerful: to have a teacher take that interest in me, and to be shown that poetry didn’t end with Frost. She showed me that poetry was still alive, and in fact that there was a guy from right nearby who won the National Book Award. That was eye-opening.
Graywolf publishes William Stafford now; that’s not an accident. His new and selected collection was one of the first books I published. I remember it came in a big black box—this was after Stafford was gone—and I thought, everything has led me to this moment.
Were you the lone reader of poetry among your peers?
I have to mention the Hollow Men. Growing up in central Kansas, as I mentioned, there could be a sense of silence, and a sense of a narrow path forward surrounded by immense horizons that seemed to lead everywhere and nowhere.
The Hollow Men was a group of us in high school who stole away in secret up to Coronado Heights, the highest point in McPherson County, the legendary northern point Coronado reached on his search for the Seven Cities of Gold. He reached that point, saw what he assumed was nothingness, and turned back. But that’s where we turned, a bunch of guys who went there at night to read poems out loud and try to eke some meaning out of that nothingness. T. S. Eliot’s poem provided us with our name.
We were pretentious and hopeless, embarrassed and beautiful, and around those fires in the humid Kansas nights, we introduced ourselves to Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, and we uttered poems by living poets whose names we might not have been hearing in our classroom. Seamus Heaney, Tomas Tranströmer, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, E. E. Cummings, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, many more.
It’s amazing to me now that we Hollow Men found one another. We’re still all marvelous friends, now trying to be fathers and artists and teachers and editors. I suppose we never stopped being Hollow Men. I think we’d all say poetry saved us from ourselves and provided us a space where we felt in control of our lives. That’s one way to answer how I came to poetry. Another way to answer: listening deeply to what others brought to light for me.
Why did you move from Kansas to the Twin Cities?
I made the great decision to go to Macalaster College in St. Paul. I was an English and classics double major, studying a lot of Greek and Latin language and history, seventeenth-century literature, Chaucer, Beowulf. Charles Baxter had been the editor of Macalaster’s art and literary magazine, so there was a kind of literary history at Macalaster. Tim O’Brien went there, Mary Karr.
What decade would this have been?
I graduated high school in 1992, and then graduated Macalaster in 1996. During my senior year at Macalaster I did an internship at Hungry Mind Review, which used to be a magazine for independent and university publishing that was distributed for free in independent bookstores. I did everything from pitch books for review to sell ads. It was there, while I pored over independent publishers’ catalogues, that I realized the Twin Cities has an amazing literary scene. Graywolf Press, Coffee House Press, Milkweed Editions, the Loft Literary Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and so on.
I wanted to get some more experience in publishing after I graduated, so I started an internship at Graywolf. The second day I was there, the guy who hired me said he was leaving and asked if I would consider applying for his job. It was shortly after Fiona McCrae had taken over the press, and I was in the right place at the right time. I owe Fiona everything. She was very patient not only in developing books and authors and a list, but also in developing her staff. I learned like you, like everyone, by really doing it.
Fiona deserves all credit for moving the press from, at the time, a potentially disastrous financial moment. Scott Walker left in 1994 and there was a board of directors in place that then hired Fiona. Slowly but surely Fiona saved the press from that precipice, and we’ve been thriving since then.
What did you accomplish those first few years?
In the first year, I was able to put my finger on some poetry books that excelled for us. One of them was William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. I knew the power and potential in that manuscript, and it continues to be one of our best-selling titles, period. I’m very proud of that, both for mythic personal reasons and because it was a good publishing decision. Another one around that time was Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel. His books are among our best-selling titles as well.
You were all of twenty-two or twenty-three at the time?
Yes. Not all of them went on to the same success, of course, but I was given freedom to march into the publisher’s office or to be at an editorial meeting and say, “This is big. This is important,” and put some enthusiasm—if not acumen—behind those books. The community here was willing to lift me up. It means everything to me now, that there were people who listened to that young jabber-mouth wannabe.
I got promoted and took over more of the poetry. I worked at Graywolf as an editorial assistant, and then assistant editor, and I think I was just editor by the end of those first four years. By then I knew I wanted to go to graduate school for an MFA in poetry.
I imagine you had some pretty nice recommendation letters by then.
[Laughs.] I did, and that probably helped my application. I hope I had a decent writing sample, too, but please don’t try to find it!
What was your motivation to go back to school?
I needed to figure out if I was an editor or if I was a writer. I studied with Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang, who are both absolutely terrific teachers, at Washington University in Saint Louis. I learned a great deal about the history of prosody and craft from Carl, and from Mary Jo I learned how to read new and innovative kinds of writing. I realized later that I became an editor through my MFA program. In those workshops I learned how to read and line edit and respond to a writer. I really took that very seriously and earnestly—as I tended to take everything. [Laughs.]
Were you publishing any of your own work?
I did a little, and I did some reviewing. But I recognized by the end of that experience that my path was back to Graywolf. I had been freelance editing during those two years, and Fiona asked me to come back. In 2002 I took over the poetry list. Then we started to make more commitments to our series of books on the craft of writing—that’s when we launched the “Art of” series with Charles Baxter—and started the nonfiction prize soon after that. It was a marvelous moment of upward movement and growth.
Fiona put extraordinary faith in me. We took on D. A. Powell, Matthea Harvey, Katie Ford, Claudia Rankine, and many others, and continued longtime support for Dana Gioia, Linda Gregg, Jane Kenyon, William Stafford, Eamon Grennan. I was given amazing autonomy to bring in the kinds of work that expanded our list.
Tell me about a couple books you got behind.
I really got behind Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, which we published in 2004 and have reprinted many times. It was not the kind of book that Graywolf was known for, but we succeeded with it.
I was building a diverse list, because that’s what I saw in contemporary poetry: fragmentation. The historical idea of schools of poetry had been upended, and we wanted Graywolf’s list to reflect what writers were writing. We published Thomas Sayers Ellis’s first two books, and started relationships with Cave Canem, the African American poets group. We published Natasha Trethewey’s first couple of collections.
Mary Jo Bang’s first book that we took on, Elegy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It’s a marvelous and moving book, and it meant a lot that it was by my teacher. We’d been a finalist so many times and we finally had broken through in one of the big three awards. We got up to around thirty books a year maybe four years ago. We’re roughly equal thirds: fiction, nonfiction, poetry. I love that in the same season we might have a book like 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri, which uses a lot of traditional craftmaking and rhyme, and it might be next to something like Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine, this remarkable lyric voice, next to Tony Hoagland’s cultural conversation about identity. We are deliberate about trying to have some new and emerging voices, some midcareer voices, and then some established voices on each list. That’s a way to avoid competition within the list itself.
How do you schedule a book of poetry for publication?
Everyone asks if we only publish poetry in April. When I first started at Graywolf, the Academy of American Poets was just starting National Poetry Month, and the larger houses didn’t catch on for the first few years. Early on it was really driven by independent publishers, and they really promoted our books well. Later, Knopf and others started publishing their big poets in April. What do you do with that promotional machine? It’s positive for poetry, but now it means that April might not be the best month to publish a poet’s first book—something that might get lost alongside Philip Levine or Billy Collins.
We operate in three seasons because of our distribution through Macmillan/FSG, with three to four books of poetry each season. We have lead poetry titles, which is to say established poets like Tracy K. Smith, Tony Hoagland, Fanny Howe, Matthea Harvey, Claudia Rankine, and so on. And then we might have a translation, and a first book we selected for a prize or from an organization we have a collaboration with. Those books aren’t really competing in the same conversation.
The main thing is to support the roster of poets that we’ve built, to space their books out in a meaningful way. It does mean making some of those poets wait, and that is a difficulty. Most poets are willing to work with us, and we try to make use of that time as an incubator to make the book as ready as it can be by the time it comes out.
How do you use that time?
We’re able to do more editorial work, place more poems in magazines. Frequently that extra time ends up yielding some of the best work around that manuscript.
Take Nick Flynn. We’re working on his new poetry book, and the conversation about its title, My Feelings, has led to him working on a title poem to insert into the book. For a book of poems, that’s a major edit. He’s also on the cover of American Poetry Review, and that helps create some anticipation. And it’s never too early to gather blurbs. People think it’s funny to talk about promoting poetry in the same way you might promote a book of stories. But it’s the same.
How else do you conceive of promoting poetry?
Some poets want to do, and are very good at doing, a lot themselves. Doing readings, placing poems, all of that. There are marvelous places that want to know about our books and talk about them and support them. We are always sending them our galleys, getting them early copies. The AWP conference is a really powerful tool: You get thirteen thousand people. But a lot of this goes back to what we were talking about before: What is it about this poet or this book that might reach other special audiences?
You’re trying to increase the poet’s profile in the world of poetry while you try to find readers outside of it.
Absolutely, and that’s not unlike how one would promote a nonfiction book. We treat poetry as a genre that is up to the sales potential of our fiction and nonfiction. Are there specialty catalogs that this book might fit into? Are there particular magazines that this particular poetry book might enter into?
In March we published a book, How to Dance as the Roof Caves In, the third book by a poet named Nick Lantz. It’s a great book, imaginative, smart, and it’s very much about the collapse of the housing market and the downturn of the economy. NPR has picked up on this book and has done a couple pieces on it that I’m not sure the book would have gotten without talking about this subject in such a candid and imaginative way.
It’s that assumption that poetry is its own circular beautiful self. It can be, but what else is it? We’ve been able to get that book in the hands of good reviewers who might not otherwise review a poetry book, so that’s one example where subject matter can drive the way we promote a book. Nearly every book has an angle that gives it appeal to varying audiences.
Would you walk me through acquiring a book of poetry? You publish ten or so poetry books a year, but must receive some vast multiple of that.
Technically, if you go to our website right now, you’ll see we are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts. That said, I still am inundated.
More than a thousand a year?
Oh, easily more than twice that. I’ve checked e-mail once this morning, and there were at least three by 11 AM.
Some of it is stuff that I’ve solicited: people I’ve met at Bread Loaf, AWP, authors who live in the Twin Cities, people who one of our authors have recommended. I’m seeing more and more agents sending poetry, often because their client does something else. I wouldn’t say that’s a huge percentage, but they are there, and I take those submissions seriously.
How do you triage that volume of reading?
Those poets whose work I’ve solicited or who have been recommended by one of our poets, or who I’ve met at a conference or read in a magazine—I take those pretty seriously right out of the gate, more than something that just comes in cold. It’s human nature, I suppose. But we do look at what comes in.
Do you have readers who do a first pass?
We do have some readers in-house who we kick some stuff to. Because our list is technically closed, most of the submissions we get are from people who are trying to go around the door. I look at them as I can—I’m far slower than I want to be, but that’s just a reality of time and commitment to the books that we have taken on.
We have such a roster that of those ten to twelve books we publish a year, eight might be filled by returning poets. Balance becomes a huge question. It is part of our mission to keep the list fresh. So far we’ve done a pretty good job, but there are harder decisions ahead. That’s the worst day: turning down somebody you’ve worked with before.
What happens when you read a submission and love it?
I take that manuscript to our editorial meeting, where I present the book and say why I’m excited about it. Often, I will send out a sample ahead of the meeting. We talk about where this poet has published work, if it is his or her first book, whether the poet is a good reader of his or her own work. There’s absolutely nothing like a great poetry reading, and there’s nothing like a really bad poetry reading.
What makes a great poetry reading?
It surprises people when the poet is able to move out of the expected territory, that slow, elegiac, incantatory tone that doesn’t add much value.
I love hearing those poets who really allow for their own voice. I love when poets are risking something during the reading, whether that is what they are reading or how they are reading. What they are risking at that microphone is something people are moved by and interested in. Not all poets can be great presenters of their work, but it’s a huge help for any author to present work in a unique and exciting way. It adds to the experience of the book.
Is the poetry reading one of your most important promotional tools?
It’s huge. It is poetry. The page is one significant method of transferring the art of poetry, but part of its deep tradition is oral. That is part of the alchemy for a successful poetry book. People take note of the really great readers. Having a big reading at AWP, or a breakout reading at Bread Loaf at that famous theater where Robert Frost read years ago can make a difference. I’ve started dialogues with poets because I sat up at their poetry reading. I think those things even can influence the academic job market for a writer.
I’m curious about the unexpected places you find terrific writing.
One way to answer that question is social media. I’m a clicker, and I love it when someone tweets out a poem or posts it on Facebook. It might be a poem from Rattle magazine or a publisher’s website or the Paris Review, but getting it funneled through someone else’s enthusiasmis one of the ways the tool of social media can be interesting for an editor. It can also be incredibly deceptive and a waste. But I love books and poetry that ignite conversation.
Word of mouth is for poetry is huge. Tony Hoagland’s early success was due to word of mouth: “Can you believe how beautiful this poem is, how audacious this guy is, how this person is pissing me off by saying this in a poem?” That conversation is exciting. That’s what we’re in it for: people who are not only appreciating literature but are passing it on and saying it is important. I want all of our books, whatever genre, to do that.
I try to look outside my own aesthetic value. The conversation is as important to me, and maybe more so, than what I think is “good.” As an editor, reading outside yourself is everything. You can’t possibly put yourself in the shoes of every audience member. That is another reason why I take notice of word of mouth, even when the material isn’t my cup of tea.
You want to understand why people are responding to it and you are not?
Right. My assumption from that Scandinavian background is, “What’s wrong with me?” [Laughs.]“Why don’t I see this?” The deficiency is mine. That interests me, because it’s a place from which I can expand and learn. I learn a lot from the books that on first read I was startled by or assumed that I didn’t like.
At the editorial meeting, you come to the conclusion that you’d like to publish a particular piece of work. Then what happens?
We do a P&L for all of our books. We’ll talk about format, season, advance, and then I’ll contact the poet and make the offer. That is the great day, the best day in publishing, when you get to make that phone call, especially with someone who is new to the list. For a first or second book of poems, the advance might be a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars, so it’s not a life-changing amount of money.
But it is a life-changing event.
I hope so. That’s a lovely phone call to make.
Okay, now on to a big question. How do you edit poetry?
Very carefully. [Laughs.] And with a green pen.
Never red?
God, no! I haven’t really had writers flip out, but green is a psychologically friendly color. That’s tip number one: Green is helpful.
You edit poetry by listening deeply and taking on the voice of the poet. For me, it is an act of empathy. It is an act of taking on that poet’s voice and plight and subject matter such that I can make intelligible suggestions that are within the conventions and voice of that writer. I go through everything that I think needs to be gone through. That can start with the title of the book. A title often suggests what the central set of concerns is in this book, so it is a way in. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward.
What are some of your favorite titles?
Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me has probably received as much or more attention than any title—purely as a title—on the poetry list. In a much more subtle way, Mary Joe Bang’s next title is The Last Two Seconds, which is so unusual and fascinating to me, and it's not a usual poetry title. And I do think Nick Flynn’s new book, My Feelings, has a great title because it flies in the face of every poetry workshop and thesis advising committee in this country. He’s managed to challenge himself and risk something with that title. It’s risky for being the most clichéd title imaginable, and yet readers will see the title change in a really meaningful way when they come to the moments where that phrasing occurs. I had to come around to that title, I admit.
One of the things I work on the most with poets is this: How does the poet earn our trust and get us into that voice? The first movement of the book is so important, and that starts with the title. Is there an epigraph? What is that epigraph saying, what is it doing, how does it relate to the title? I’m intrigued by the way that a reader starts to accrue meaning. Maybe there’s not an epigraph, maybe there’s a dedication. Sometimes a dedication can totally change the way you read a book.
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Why is that first poem first? It’s the first impression and is going to define what we expect from the second poem. Does that second poem subvert those expectations or does it delight in continuing what we've seen, either by subject matter or voice or form on the page? In that first movement, the poet can bring you into the collection, or keep you out. I want to interrogate those things.
You’re talking a lot about organization and flow.
I don’t want to make it sound like we read a poetry book the same way we read a novel. But I do think that it’s valuable for the poet and editor to get on the same page about the vessel of the poetry collection. Is there a sequence that is meant to take us through a particular kind of experience? I want the work of art, that vessel of the book, to be respected by the reader, so that the reader doesn’t just want to flip around. In a new and selected collection, sure, go ahead and flip. But for a single volume in which the poet has thought very carefully about that sequencing, I want to make sure that experience is there for the reader. How do the poems accrue? Does this collection take us somewhere?
What about the individual poems? Are you working on them, too?
It’s the same thing.
What if a poem has been previously published in a magazine?
It really depends on the poem, and also where that poem fits in that manuscript. It’s a really different thing when the poem is by itself in the New Yorker as opposed to when it is in the middle of a poetry book, or if it’s the first or final poem. That might mean changing some lines or a title to fit the sequencing.
Some poets say, “Oh no, that poem appeared in Poetry magazine, that’s got to be just how it is!” Sometimes it does work that way. But something really different happens when a poem moves into the pages of a single poetry volume. The overall book needs to operate the way a single poem does. That first poem operates as the first line of a great poem across the book. That fifth poem is the fifth line.
One thing I think about is the sequence for each poem, where it fits and why it fits there. Is that the right title? Is this the right way into the poem? We call it throat-clearing when there’s a first stanza or a first paragraph that can be removed or trimmed down. Of course, you have to make changes by understanding that if it is a sonnet, it needs to remain fourteen lines!
If there’s a very particular style, lineation, use of capitalization, punctuation, all those—I help find the right conventions for that individual poem as well as the conventions that fit the entire book. If something seems off from the poet’s own conventions, I’ll point it out. Very small things like a change in capitalization can potentially get in the way for a reader.
And then I edit for meaning. Does the poem really start here, does the poem really end here, should this penultimate line really be the last line? It is making those kinds of suggestions without, I hope, being interruptive. If nothing else, I hope making suggestions like these allows the poet to get back into the poem. Writers can get stuck. Sometimes it’s just helping them to get back in.
Some poets like early involvement, some do not. Every poet is different, and every poet’s process is different. It keeps my job interesting, and it’s one of the things I love.
Does your editorial process with poets differ from the prose writers?
I’m surprised how similar it is. The reason I say that is I think you’re dealing with pieces, and any time you have two poems or essays or chapters rubbing up against each other, do you want the heat and energy of friction, or a subtler bridge between those two things?
The nonfiction I tend to work on is often by writers who also identify on some level as poets. On Immunity by Eula Bisshas a deeply poetic way of sentence-making and argumentation that feels very natural to me, as someone who works with a lot of poetry. There is a lyric insistence in the writing and metaphor-making in that book. I’d say something similar about The Empathy Exams. At the end of that book there’s a cadence towards a revelatory end of the final essay that feels to me poetic.
You do move from the line to the sentence, and yet there is something about unit-making that feels akin. I hope editing one makes me good at editing the other. It may not be for me to say. I hope it gives me an attention to language. That’s at the heart of Graywolf: that the information being offered with a book of nonfiction is being offered in a very artful way, and the same might be true for a line of poetry.
Have you ever edited a novel?
I never have.
Do you have any inclination to?
I’d love to. We have so many other good editors that it’s probably for the best in terms of workload, but I love reading short stories and novels and fiction in translation.
Who are your favorite novelists?
Per Peterson is a remarkable, amazing novelist to me. It goes back to that Scandinavian silence: No one creates that quiet landscape better than Per Peterson. Another Graywolf writer, Kevin Barry, is an Irish phenom. I love Marilynne Robinson;Housekeeping and Gilead are remarkable. I’m a huge reader of Paul Auster. Louise Erdrich. Charles Baxter. Toni Morrison. Denis Johnson.
Is there something that unites those writers? Is it their use of language?
Now that you say it, I think it is the use of language, but for very particular ends. The silence of Per Peterson is in direct opposition to Denis Johnson’s high-energy voice and dark humor in Jesus’ Son. An attention to and a delicacy of language is probably it, but with a real conceptual edge. Auster is such a conceptual writer. The pure language and sentence-making of Marilynne Robinson is remarkable stuff. And with Marylinne Robinson or Per Peterson, there are these quintessential images of those books that appear when I think about those books. I think about Housekeeping and that moment when the character falls down into the river where that train had fallen and the foot touches something metallic in the water, and it’s so visceral—a haunting image of the train that went down in that water.
It’s funny that when I start talking about fiction, I turn to the language of poetry, not just the language of sentence and unit-making, but the making of images. I suppose when I’m reading fiction I’m still looking for poetry.
Why do you think that is?
I'm helpless—and a really slow reader of fiction. I’m used to the density and intensity of a poem, and you do train yourself in certain ways.
You’ve never turned to a Lee Child novel?
[Laughs.] No, I haven’t. Not yet. I’ll get there.
Do you feel competitive with other poetry editors?
Yes, there is a competitive level, even for poetry. I look at other lists and say, “I wish we could have gotten that one!” And sometimes we lose a poet, or something you passed on ends up winning a prize or getting the review. And yet I choose to look at it more like: Thank goodness for all of this. I make a lot of mistakes, so it’s great to know that others are there to make sure that great work will find a home. It might take a year or three years or ten years, but more poetry is being published than ever before, and there are outlets for many kinds of poets.
Who is the editor who most inspires you to do your best work?
Fiona is first and foremost. Watching her work on particular books—she edits Percival Everett, who is a genius, and seeing her editorial work with Salvatore Scibona’s The End, which was a National Book Award finalist in fiction: Wow.
Has self-publishing had an impact on the world of poetry publishing?
Sure, it’s had an impact. Walt Whitman self-published, William Blake self-published. [Laughs.]
True! But what about digital self-publishing today? Do you see that as kin to the chapbook, something the poet could create himself and disseminate?
Perhaps now a poet’s website operates not unlike that, but maybe not quite. I almost wish self-publishing had more of an effect. Not surprisingly, I tend to think that going through a traditional publisher will always be a writer’s—including a poet’s—best option. It’s very hard for a poet to produce and design—let alone write—the work, and then market, distribute, and promote it. I’m glad the mechanism is there, but it could probably be a more vibrant area. Not everything needs to go through a traditional publishing house. Not everything needs to sell x number of copies. Not everything needs to be reviewed in the New York Times—nor is it!
I don’t see self-publishing as competing with what Graywolf is doing, or what FSG or Norton or Copper Canyon are doing. A lot of poets have first books they must get out of their systems. That’s not a knock against them. I get sent their self-published books, some of them beautifully done. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of self-publishing mechanisms that lean toward a vanity type of publishing that take advantage of poets in particular.
Your authors have won so many awards that I’m not sure if there are any left.
[Laughs.] We’ve had a good run, yes.
Do you have a white whale? One thing you won’t rest until you catch?
It’s remarkable to sit next to your poet when her name is called from the National Book Award podium. I won't pretend otherwise. It was remarkable to open up the New York Times and see that Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize. But that’s not why you’re in the game. We stand behind all of our books, firmly and enthusiastically. But there can only be one book a year that wins the Pulitzer, so it’s extraordinary when that happens.
We would publish those books anyway. We didn’t publish them with an assumption tied to them; we published them because they’re great. The authors are great and those individual books are great. A lot of books deserve that attention, and one or a handful of them get it. As far as a white whale, I want every success for all of our authors that they can possibly have. Whatever it is that keeps Graywolf strong, vibrant, and interesting, and whatever keeps our writers writing.
We talk a lot here about “again.” Can we get the next book by some of these authors? What can we do again with these authors that succeed, and what new authors can we bring on because of that success? It’s exciting having a New York Times bestseller that’s a fascinating and challenging collection of essays. That doesn’t happen very often, for sure. That felt a little like a white whale. The only previous time we’d been on the list was with Out Stealing Horses, and that felt like a huge confirmation.
What have been some of the hardest moments of your career?
The hardest moments have been turning down authors that I’ve worked with before. That’s incredibly painful. So is losing out on an author’s next book. That’s common enough, but we try to work with an author’s career whenever we can. You build relationships, professional and sometimes personal friendships with these authors whose work you continue to admire. But that just wasn’t the right book, or we didn’t do well on the previous one, and it might even be better for that author to go somewhere else. Those haunt me. It is hard to see another publisher take something that slipped through your fingers.
Have you ever had a crisis of confidence in what you’re doing? When you’ve stopped and had to ask: Can I keep doing this? Do I want to keep doing this?
Sure, there are day-to-day moments where things don’t seem to be going well, or sales aren’t what you would like them to be, or you didn’t land that author you hoped to work with. That’s been the minor key for me. My story is one of exuberant fortune and good luck. I am all the time reminding myself how fortunate I am to get to do this work. Everybody gets down, and you look into the abyss from time to time, but most of the time here has been stable. I love working with the people on the staff here, and I learn from them. We all do this together, and I love our authors.
An ongoing challenge for Graywolf, of course, is funding, and keeping our culture aware that it can’t take these kinds of risky books for granted. And then there are the challenges of being an editor and having two little kids and a family. But what a marvelous challenge that part of life is!
Part of my great fortune is trying to show those two boys you can still make a go of it in this cruel world. You can still do something you love, and it’s worth the sacrifice to do something you love even if it means you have to turn and face the wind of the culture. It’s a lovely and marvelous thing to bring something beautiful and meaningful and challenging into the world, and I hope that they’ll see that. I live for that.
How do you make a life that allows for artful thinking to be at the center of your existence? I think that makes me a better person, hopefully a better editor and, God willing, a better father and husband. I take this all incredibly personally. Certain parts of a meaningful life are sometimes at risk, too.
Who else inspires you?
One poet who has inspired me and changed me is Tomas Tranströmer. His lines strike me as inspiring for their vision, for their profundity, for making sense of darkness and conflict, and his life seems emblematic now for the very efforts of speech and meaning. I have tried to remember to live—and to edit—by these lines by Tranströmer, from his poem “The Half-Finished Heaven,” a sort of lifeline: “Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone.” I would offer these lines to anyone as inspiration. We are all capable of reaching each other.
What advice would you give a poet who is trying to place those first poems or that first book?
Read as much as you can. Understand that every part of this enterprise, whether it’s the poet’s part of it, the writer’s part of it, the editor’s part of it, the agent’s part of it, the publisher’s part of it, the magazine’s part of it—it’s a conversation. That conversation has to go two ways, and often more than two ways. Writers can sometimes get trapped in one-dimensionality, and I understand that, because it’s hard to place that first book, and at certain points in your career you look into the abyss and wonder how your work makes a difference. Reading other writers, reviewing other writers, and being involved in as many possible ways as you can with the art is incredibly valuable.
Don’t get caught in the trap of doing one kind of thing. Poetry might be just one aspect of your existence, but make sure that you are also x, y, and z—fill in as many blanks in your life as you can. It will make you a better writer, a more empathetic person. It will give you access to more experiences that will enhance your life. Nobody’s ever one thing.
Whitman: “I contain multitudes.”
Right. And Montaigne wrote something like, “It is very difficult not to be more than one person.” We are not singular entities, and we are all interconnected. What do you do with that as an artist? What do you do with that as someone who’s trying to be a conduit for other artists? That’s the editor’s question.
I want to get over any sense a writer might have that an editor is your adversary. There are hurdles and obstacles, but no one is your adversary. It’s easy to get down when you feel like any time you try to risk something—which is what the poet does, risk everything on the page—there’s somebody there to put a lid on it. I find that so anti-intellectual and problematic, and I see it frequently and try to ignore it as much as possible. But I love seeing all the ways that poets get past it.
I learned a lot by editing Leslie Jamison. Her book has made me think about things in a shifted way. Maybe another piece of advice is: Let yourself be changed.
Michael Szczerban is a senior editor at Regan Arts.
A Thing Meant to Be: The Work of a Book Editor
The following essay was adapted from remarks given at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner, In Celebration of Writers, on March 28 in New York City.
In my senior year of college, having discovered that I generally liked working on other people’s prose a great deal more than my own, I confided to a professor that I was thinking of trying to become an editor. “Pretty thankless job,” she said. The truth is, despite its moments of frustration and overwhelm and failure, I have never found the job thankless.
More than anything, there is this: the sublime moment—and it never stops being sublime—when you get to attend, as beautiful, meaningful, and original work emerges in the world. When I gave birth to my daughters, one of my sisters-in-law said, “It is one of the rare experiences for which ‘miracle’ is not an overstatement.” It’s not an overstatement for the birth of art, either. What’s most miraculous is the “let there be” of it—the way a new and unique something yet again emerges from the wordless deep.
The sense is that the book is trying to communicate what it wants to become, how it wants to incarnate itself. Masha Gessen recently spoke of this process in an interview: “I know what my objectives are and I know what the topic is, and then I’m just reporting. I walk around for a bit, literally, bike and walk, and then suddenly, I get an idea of what it should be, what the structure is. I can’t tell you how I came up with this.” Peter Matthiessen thanked John Irving for his comments on the sprawling early draft of what would become his monumental Shadow Country back in “the book’s cretaceous days, when the whole was still inchoate, crude, and formless.” And when Matthiessen died, just before we at Riverhead had the precious honor of publishing his final book, Irving mourned the loss of “a friend I dared to show what I was up to, when I was still unsure of what it was.”
At its best—and it is often this good—editing means getting to be such a friend, and entering into that strange and almost primal process of divining the shape the work is trying to assume. It was Matthiessen himself who gave me my first experience of being taken seriously as an editor, back when I was an assistant to the formidable Jason Epstein, and Peter was working on a collection of stories. One day he asked if I would look at one he’d been laboring over. Something was hampering it, but he didn’t know what. I read it and instantly saw—or rather, felt—what was off: The story was constructed on a hinge, and the hinge was stuck, much as an actual hinge might be.
It’s as if writer and editor have their eyes not on each other but on the shape of the emergent work, and this angle of approach is wonderfully liberating, breaking down barriers and kindling an immediate intimacy that may be my favorite thing about my job. This past fall, I was invited to give a talk at a conference on Ivan Doig, the great memoirist and novelist of the West. I puzzled over what to say. Writers and editors don’t talk about what a work means, I realized, we talk about how it’s made. Ivan and I began with Bucking the Sun, a novel that opens with a couple found drowned in a truck at the bottom of the Missouri River. Revisiting our correspondence of twenty years ago in the online archive, I was struck by how unceremoniously we got down to business: The mystery of who these characters were was a thread that needed to be pulled more firmly through the entire book.
When I think about the writers and books I have worked with, it’s the dialogue about shape that I most remember. A draft of a story in which a kind of sonic boom goes off at the beginning demands an answering boom at the end. Or: Rather than trying to launch six complicated characters at the outset, how about introducing them one by one, like a juggler putting balls into the air? Perhaps not surprisingly, all my career I have been drawn to writing and writers who are structurally inventive and do not fit into easy categories: fiction/nonfiction, narrative/essay, poets and writers. I love that the very name of this organization allows for the reading that they are one and the same.
What took me much longer to recognize—and is I think less recognized generally—is that the boundary between the “creative” enterprise and the “business” of publishing is worth challenging too. If we keep our focus on the work itself, keep taking our inspiration from it rather than imposing a grid of conventional approaches and expectations on it—the publishing process becomes an extension of the creative moment that gave rise to the book itself. My mentors in this have been my colleagues. The art director, looking to create a jacket that will become the outward expression of a book’s inmost explosive self, runs around for weeks exploding her hands until she finds a photographer willing to let her throw colored dust all over his studio and photograph it. The production editor nerds out on finding the mot that does justice to a magnificent sentence. The publicity director dreams up a campaign that involves pet treats or murals. The shape of a powerful pitch for a book comes to an editor while commuting on her bike. The publisher keeps the whole enterprise aloft, sometimes tugging us back into orbit but also challenging us to boldly go where we haven’t before. When we are doing it right, the work we are trying to put into the world focuses and fuels us, and we recapitulate its Big Bang in a series of detonations all the way through the process.
When work like this goes out into the world—when it goes out into the world like this—I think it is not audacious to say that it becomes, as the phrase goes, an instance of the change we wish to see in the world. This is not only because of the impact it may have, as its fullest and most coherent self, shown in the brightest possible light, presented like nothing we have seen before but a thing necessary, meant to be. It is also because, in putting it into the world this way, we, with our writers, become a community functioning as we would have the world function.
Rebecca Saletan is vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books, a Penguin Random House imprint. Over her thirty-five-year career in publishing, Saletan has worked with a wide range of authors including internationally best-selling novelist and essayist Mohsin Hamid; National Book Award-winning journalist and social critic Masha Gessen; and National Book Award-winning writer and environmentalist Peter Matthiessen. She received the 2018 Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.
Rebecca Saletan (front left, seated) at Poets & Writers’ annual dinner with authors (clockwise from upper left) Garnette Cadogan, Mandy Aftel, Danzy Senna, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Francisco Cantú, Casey Gerald, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Anna Badkhen. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
We Mean Business: Twelve Agents Who Want to Read Your Work
To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.
No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.
These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.
Danielle Svetcov, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency
Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)
What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.
When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.
Where she can be reached: e-mail dsvetcov@lgrliterary.com
Why you should want her as your agent: To quote my clients: “relentless,” “wolfish,” “and she always calls you back.”
How she wants to be contacted: Send query letter with attached proposal or sample of fiction (say, twenty-five pages).
Renée Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents
Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)
What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.
When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.
Where she can be reached: e-mail renee@mmqlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.
How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.
Duvall Osteen, Aragi Inc.
Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)
What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.
When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.
Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen
Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.
Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management
Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J. Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)
What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.
When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.
Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”
How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.
Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)
What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.
Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.
Allison Hunter, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)
What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.
Where she can be reached: e-mail ahunter@janklow.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.
Carrie Howland, Empire Literary
Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)
What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”
When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.
Where she can be reached: e-mail carrie@empireliterary.com
Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.
Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)
What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.
When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed...” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.
Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.
How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.
Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary Agency
Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)
What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.
When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).
Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.
Adam Eaglin, Cheney Associates, LLC
Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)
What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.
When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.
Where he can be reached: e-mail adam@cheneyliterary.com
Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.
How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).
Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners
Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)
What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.
When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.
Where she can be reached: e-mail aatlas@icmpartners.com
Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.
How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.
Julie Barer, The Book Group
Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)
What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.
When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough.
Where she can be reached: The Book Group, c/o Julie Barer; 20 West 20th Street, Suite 601; New York, NY 10011; thebookgroup.com; e-mail submissions@thebookgroup.com
Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job.
How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Agent Advice: The Complete Series
The industry’s best and brightest agents respond directly to readers’ questions in this regular column dating back to 2010. To submit a question for the next featured agent, e-mail editor@pw.org
Jody Kahn of Brandt and Hochman
4.10.19
A literary agent answers questions from writers about genre, age, costs, and client lists.
Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary
10.10.18
An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
Regina Brooks of Serendipity Literary Agency
8.15.18
An agent answers questions on referrals, pitching a self-published book, and what to do if you’re dropped by an agency.
Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management
12.13.17
A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.
Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
4.12.17
A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.
Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary
12.14.16
Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”
Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises
10.14.15
The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.
Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan
4.15.15
Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company
8.20.14
An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.
Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency
3.01.14
The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company
10.06.13
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency
9.01.13
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.
Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency
5.01.13
Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.
Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company
10.17.12
Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.
Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic
4.12.12
The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents
3.01.11
Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.
Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency
10.15.10
When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.
Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
8.11.10
The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.
PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates
5.01.10
The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.
Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
3.01.10
Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent's role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
Agents & Editors: The Complete Series
Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.
Agents
The Book Group
By Michael Szczerban
6.14.16
Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.
Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib
By Michael Szczerban
6.17.15
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.
Jennifer Joel
By Michael Szczerban
2.10.15
Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
PJ Mark
By Michael Szczerban
6.18.14
PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.
Susan Golomb
By Michael Szczerban
5.1.14
Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.
David Gernert
By Michael Szczerban
1.1.14
Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it's like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.
Eric Simonoff
By Michael Szczerban
7.1.13
A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he's learned about staying creative.
Georges Borchardt
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.09
Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.
Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.09
Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.
Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.09
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.
Molly Friedrich
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
9.1.08
Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.
Nat Sobel
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
5.1.08
Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.
Lynn Nesbit
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
1.1.08
With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.
Editors
Rob Spillman
By Michael Szczerban
10.12.16
Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.
Michael Wiegers
By Michael Szczerban
10.14.15
Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
Dawn Davis
By Michael Szczerban
8.19.15
Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
Jeff Shotts
By Michael Szczerban
10.15.14
Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.
Amy Einhorn
By Michael Szczerban
2.12.14
The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.
Jordan Pavlin
By Michael Szczerban
9.1.13
A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.
Jonathan Karp
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.09
As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.
Jonathan Galassi
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.09
Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.
Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.09
Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.
Chuck Adams
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
11.1.08
A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.
Janet Silver
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
7.1.08
Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.
Pat Strachan
By Jofie Ferrari-Adler
3.1.08
With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.
Emily Forland (Credit: Mark Abrams)
Kent Wolf (Credit: Laura S. Wilson)
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Brian Evenson on Writing
“My favorite form is the long short story or the novella because I think it allows you a little bit more breadth and scope in terms of what you can do.” Brian Evenson, whose eighth story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his work and talks about teaching, writing habits, and spirituality in this video from the 2014 Mission Creek Festival.
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Ten Questions for Catherine Chung
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and SanFranciscoChronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.
Ten Questions for Mona Awad
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you.
Mona Awad, author of Bunny.
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Namwali Serpell
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Namwali Serpell, whose novel The Old Drift is out today from Hogarth. Blending historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction, The Old Drift tells a sweeping tale of Zambia, a small African country, as it comes into being, following the trials and tribulations of its people, whose stories are told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. In the words of Chinelo Okparanta, it is a “dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishingly historical and futuristic feat.” Namwali Serpell teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “The Sack.” She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to indentify the best African writers under the age of forty. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
1. How long did it take you to write The Old Drift?
I’ve been writing it off and on since the year 2000. I worked on it in between getting my PhD; publishing my first work of literary criticism, a dozen stories, and a few essays and reviews; getting tenure; and writing a novel that went in a drawer. I concentrated exclusively on The Old Drift after I sold it based on a partial manuscript—about a third—in 2015. I finished in 2017.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Fact-checking. The novel is rife with speculative fiction—fairy tale, magical realism, science fiction—but I was anxious to get historical, scientific, and cultural details right, that the notes didn’t sound off. Because the novel is so sprawling, it was hard to verify everything. I’m grateful for my informants—family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and the blessed internet.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m too nomadic, or “movious” as we say in Zambia, to limit myself to a particular desk in a specific nook with a certain slant of light. I write from late morning to late afternoon, when most people are hungry or sleepy—I seem to find both states conducive to “flow,” as they call it. My writing frequency varies by genre. I can write nonfiction or scholarly prose for about five hours at a time, and as many days in a row as needed. I can write fiction for about three hours at a time, and it improves distinctly if I write every other day. My best work, regardless of genre, often happens in one big burst—an eight hour stretch, say, like a fugue. But I can’t prime my schedule or prepare myself for those eruptions. They come as they wish. I am left spent and grateful.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The chasm between writing the book and marketing the book. It’s a rift in one’s psychology but also in logistics (who does what), and most shockingly, in value. There is simply no calculable relation between these two value systems: the literary and the financial, the good and the goods.
5. What are you reading right now?
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow. I’m excited because it draws on a longstanding preoccupation of mine: the recurrent fantasy of racial transformation in sci-fi.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
María Luisa Bombal.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Blurbs. They tap into our most craven, gratuitous, and back-patting tendencies. End them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The problem of money, of course.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Being able to recognize how things will best coincide—opportunities, ideas, words, people—and not forcing them, but setting up the space for them to do so. It goes by various names: “finger on the pulse,” “a sense of the zeitgest,” “savvy.” I think of it as a feel for kismet.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Amitav Ghosh once visited a graduate course I was taking. And he said of a writer (who shall remain nameless): “If everything is a jewel, nothing shines.”
Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift. (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
First Fiction 2017
For our seventeenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2017 issue of the magazine for interviews between Zinzi Clemmons and Danzy Senna, Hala Alyan and Mira Jacob, Jess Arndt and Maggie Nelson, Lisa Ko and Emily Raboteau, and Diksha Basu and Gary Shteyngart. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
What We Lose (Viking, July) by Zinzi Clemmons
Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May) by Hala Alyan
Large Animals (Catapult, May) by Jess Arndt
The Leavers (Algonquin Books, May) by Lisa Ko
The Windfall(Crown, June) by Diksha Basu
What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons
My parents’ bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was. The big mahogany dresser sits opposite the bed, the doily still in place on the vanity. My mother’s little ring holders and perfume bottles still stand there. On top of all these old feminine relics, my father has set up his home office. His old IBM laptop sits atop the doily, a tangle of cords choking my mother’s silver makeup tray. His books are scattered around the tables, his clothes draped carelessly over the antique wing chair that my mother found on a trip to Quebec.
In the kitchen, my father switches on a small flat-screen TV that he’s installed on the wall opposite the stove. My mother never allowed TV in the kitchen, to encourage bonding during family dinners and focus during homework time. As a matter of fact, we never had more than one television while I was growing up—an old wood-paneled set that lived in the cold basement, carefully hidden from me and visitors in the main living areas of the house.
We order Chinese from the place around the corner, the same order that we’ve made for years: sesame chicken, vegetable fried rice, shrimp lo mein. As soon as they hear my father’s voice on the line, they put in the order; he doesn’t even have to ask for it. When he picks the order up, they ask after me. When my mother died, they started giving us extra sodas with our order, and he returns with two cans of pineapple soda, my favorite.
My father tells me that he’s been organizing at work, now that he’s the only black faculty member in the upper ranks of the administration.
I notice that he has started cutting his hair differently. It is shorter on the sides and disappearing in patches around the crown of his skull. He pulls himself up in his chair with noticeable effort. He had barely aged in the past twenty years, and suddenly, in the past year, he has inched closer to looking like his father, a stooped, lean, yellow-skinned man I’ve only seen in pictures.
“How have you been, Dad?” I say as we sit at the table.
The thought of losing my father lurks constantly in my mind now, shadowy, inexpressible, but bursting to the surface when, like now, I perceive the limits of his body. Something catches in my throat and I clench my jaw.
My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.
“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.
He asks about Peter.
“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.
“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”
He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork. “Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.
I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.
“Are you all right?”
All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.
From What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, published in July by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Zinzi Clemmons.
(Photo: Nina Subin)Salt Houses
by Hala Alyan
On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favorite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.
Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carrying guns. It seems impossible.
The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.
Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.
“My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.
“You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”
Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Married to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was suggesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fobbing her off on a friend in pity.
“Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.
“You could marry me.”
Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the darkest, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen. Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.
But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if woken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled triumphantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.
From Salt Houses by Hala Alyan. Copyright © 2017 by Hala Alyan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
(Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)Large Animals
by Jess Arndt
In my sleep I was plagued by large animals—teams of grizzlies, timber wolves, gorillas even came in and out of the mist. Once the now extinct northern white rhino also stopped by. But none of them came as often or with such a ferocious sexual charge as what I, mangling Latin and English as usual, called the Walri. Lying there, I faced them as you would the inevitable. They were massive, tube-shaped, sometimes the feeling was only flesh and I couldn’t see the top of the cylinder that masqueraded as a head or tusks or eyes. Nonetheless I knew I was in their presence intuitively. There was no mistaking their skin; their smell was unmistakable too, as was their awful weight.
During these nights (the days seemed to disappear before they even started) I was living two miles from a military testing site. In the early morning and throughout the day the soft, dense sound of bombs filled the valley. It was comforting somehow. Otherwise I was entirely alone.
This seemed a precondition for the Walri—that I should be theirs and theirs only. on the rare occasion that I had an overnight visitor to my desert bungalow the Walri were never around. Then the bears would return in force, maybe even a large local animal like a mountain lion or goat, but no form’s density came close to walrusness. So I became wary and stopped inviting anyone out to visit at all.
The days, unmemorable, had a kind of habitual slide. I would wake up with the sun and begin cleaning the house. No matter how tightly I’d kept the doors shut the day before, dust and sand and even large pieces of mineral rock seemed to shove their way inside. I swept these into piles. Then the dishes that I barely remembered dirtying—some mornings it was as if the whole artillery of pots and pans had been used in the night by someone else—then the trash (again always full), then some coffee. Eight o’clock.
This work done, I sat in various chairs in the house following the bright but pale blades of light. I was drying out. oh, an LA friend said somewhat knowingly, from the booze? But I had alcohol with me, plenty of it. It wasn’t that. I moved as if preprogrammed. only later did I realize that my sleep was so soggy that it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me and since it was the middle of winter and the beams were perforce slanted, I’d take all of it I could find.
For lunch I got in my car and drove into town, to the empty parking lot of Las Palmas. There were many Mexican joints along the highway that also functioned as Main Street. I hadn’t bothered to try them out. Las Palmas, with its vacant booths, dusty cacti, and combination platter lunch special for $11.99 including $4 house margarita, was fine.
A waitress named Tamara worked there. She seemed like the only one. She wasn’t my type—so tall she bent over herself and a bona fide chain-smoker. Sometimes to order you’d have to exit your booth and find her puffing outside. A friend who had borrowed the bungalow before I did told me about Tamara and so if I had a crush at all it was an inherited one that even came with inherited guilt—from having taken her on once he could no longer visit her. Regardless, we barely spoke.
I had things I was supposed to be doing, more work than I could accomplish even if I
duct-taped my fists to my laptop, but none of it seemed relevant to my current state. In the afternoons I drove back home slowly, always stopping for six-packs of beer at the Circle K. I enjoyed the task. The beer evaporated once I stuck it in my fridge—it was there and then, it was gone.
My sleeping area was simple: a bed on a plywood platform. A wooden dresser. Built-in closets and a cement floor. At first I would wake up in the night from the sheer flattening silence of the desert. It was impossible that the world still existed elsewhere. After that initial jolt, relief.
Don’t you miss it? my same friend said during our weekly telephone chats. But I couldn’t explain the euphoria of walking up and down the chilly aisles of Stater Bros. In week-old sweatpants if I wanted, uncounted by life. Would I buy refried or whole beans? This brand or that? It didn’t matter, no one cared.
It was in these conditions that the Walri arrived.
* * *
I’d slept as usual for the first few hours, heavily, in a kind of coma state. Then had woken, I thought to pee. But lying there with the gritty sheets braided around me, the violet light that was created from the fly zapper, the desert cold that was entering through the gaps and cracks in the fire’s absence—I felt a new form of suffocation.
It wasn’t supernatural. I’d also had that. The sense of someone’s vast weight sitting on the bed with you or patting your body with ghostly hands. This breathless feeling was larger, as if I was uniformly surrounded by mammoth flesh.
Dream parts snagged at me. Slapping sounds and hose-like alien respiration. I felt I was wrestling within inches of what must be—since I couldn’t breathe—the end of my life. Now the lens of my dream panned backward and I saw my opponent in his entirety.
He lay (if that’s what you could call it) on my bed, thick and wrinkled, the creases in his hide so deep I could stick my arms between them. His teeth were yellow and as long as my legs.
“I’m sexually dormant,” I said aloud to him. “But I want to put my balls in someone’s face.”
Then somehow light was peeling everything back for dawn.
From Large Animals. Used with permission of Catapult. Copyright 2017 by Jess Arndt.
(Photo: Johanna Breiding)The Leavers
by Lisa Ko
The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school. A navy blue hat sat low on her forehead, scarf around her neck like a big brown snake. “What are you waiting for, Kid? It’s cold out.”
He stood in the doorway of P.S. 33 as she zipped his coat so hard the collar pinched. “Did you get off work early?” It was four thirty, already dark, but she didn’t usually leave the nail salon until six.
They spoke, as always, in Fuzhounese. “Short shift. Michael said you had to stay late to get help on an assignment.” Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and he couldn’t tell if she bought it or not. Teachers didn’t call your mom when you got detention, only gave a form you had to return with a signature, which he forged. Michael, who never got detention, had left after eighth period, and Deming wanted to get back home with him, in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down.
Snow fell like clots of wet laundry. Deming and his mother walked up Jerome Avenue. In the back of a concrete courtyard three older boys were passing a blunt, coats unzipped, wearing neither backpacks nor hats, sweet smoke and slow laughter warming the thin February air. “I don’t want you to be like that,” she said. “I don’t want you to be like me. I didn’t even finish eighth grade.”
What a sweet idea, not finishing eighth grade. He could barely finish fifth. His teachers said it was an issue of focus, of not applying himself. Yet when he tripped Travis Bhopa in math class Deming had been as shocked as Travis was. “I’ll come to your school tomorrow,” his mother said, “talk to your teacher about that assignment.” He kept his arm against his mother’s, loved the scratchy sound of their jackets rubbing together. She wasn’t one of those TV moms, always hugging their kids or watching them with bemused smiles, but insisted on holding his hand when they crossed a busy street. Inside her gloves her hands were red and scraped, the skin angry and peeling, and every night before she went to sleep she rubbed a thick lotion onto her fingers and winced. Once he asked if it made them hurt less. She said only for a little while, and he wished there was a special lotion that could make new skin grow, a pair of superpower gloves.
Short and blocky, she wore loose jeans—never had he seen her in a dress—and her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound than when she slapped her knees and cackled at something silly. She laughed at things that weren’t meant to be funny, like TV dramas and the swollen orchestral soundtracks that accompanied them, or, better yet, at things Deming said, like when he nailed the way their neighbor Tommie always went, “Not bad-not bad-not bad” when they passed him in the stairwell, an automatic response to a “Hello-how-are-you” that hadn’t yet been issued. Or the time she’d asked, flipping through TV stations, “Dancing with the Stars isn’t on?” and he had excavated Michael’s old paper mobile of the solar system and waltzed with it through the living room as she clapped. It was almost as good as getting cheered on by his friends.
When he had lived in Minjiang with his grandfather, Deming’s mother had explored New York by herself. There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Who wants to go for a walk?” she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. “Sit down? We’ve been sitting all day!” Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn’t say no to her and they’d go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside—a family named Smith, five kids, father dead, mother addicted to bagels, he speculated the day they went to the Upper East Side. “To bagels?” she said. “What flavor bagel?” “Everything bagels,” he said, which made her giggle harder, until they were both bent over on Madison Avenue, laughing so hard no sounds were coming out, and his stomach hurt but he couldn’t stop laughing, old white people giving them stink eye for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt.
A bus lumbered past, spraying slush. The walk sign flashed on. “You know what I did today?” his mother said. “One lady, she had a callus the size of your nose on her heel. I had to scrape all that dead skin off. It took forever. And her tip was shit. You’ll never do that, if you’re careful.”
He dreaded this familiar refrain. His mother could curse, but the one time he’d let motherfucker bounce out in front of her, loving the way the syllables got meatbally in his mouth, she had slapped his arm and said he was better than that. Now he silently said the word to himself as he walked, one syllable per footstep.
“Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I’m going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger’s toe? That was not my plan.”
Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago, a cashier at the one around the corner had smirked at her lousy English. It was lousy, Deming agreed.
From The Leavers. Printed by permission of Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Ko.
(Photo: Bartosz Potocki)page_5:
The Windfall
by Diksha Basu
The following week, on an unusually overcast September day, Mr. Jha pulled into the quiet lane of his new Gurgaon home. He had never been here by himself, he realized. Mrs. Jha was usually with him, and this summer Rupak had come with them a few times, and there were all the contractors and painters and builders buzzing around, working. He had never really appreciated the silence and the greenery before. Gurgaon felt still while the rest of Delhi throbbed.
The air was heavy with heat and the promise of rain. On the radio, a Bon Jovi song played. “It’s been raining since you left me,” the lyrics said. How funny, Mr. Jha thought. An Indian song would have to say, “It hasn’t rained since you left me.” Unless, of course, you were happy that they left you.
An electronic shoe-polishing machine in a large box was on the passenger seat of his Mercedes. He had strapped it in with the seat belt. It was beautiful. And it was expensive. It was not a planned purchase. This morning he had a breakfast meeting with two young men who were launching a website that would help you find handymen around Delhi, and they asked him to join their team as a consultant. He declined. He did not have time to take on any new work until they were done moving homes. And then they had to visit Rupak, so he was not going to have any free time until November or December. And then it would be the holiday season, so really it was best if he took the rest of the year off work.
The meeting was over breakfast at the luxurious Teresa’s Hotel in Connaught Place in central Delhi, and after filling himself up with mini croissants, fruit tarts, sliced cheeses, salami, coffee, and orange juice, Mr. Jha went for a stroll through the lobby and the other restaurants in the hotel. All the five-star hotels in the center of town were little oases of calm and cool. Mr. Jha was walking by the large windows that overlooked the swimming pool that was for guests only when he thought he would book a two-night stay here. He knew his wife loved the indulgence of nice hotels and he had recently read about what youngsters were calling a staycation—a vacation where you don’t leave the city or the home you usually live in, but you give yourself a few days to take a holiday. Of course, since he didn’t work much anymore, most days, weeks, months were a staycation, but how wonderful it would be to check into a hotel and have a lazy few days. Having room service—or, like they were called at Teresa’s, butlers—was a different sort of pleasure than having servants bringing you food and cleaning your home. Butlers showed that you had made the progression from servants to expensive appliances to uniformed men who ran the expensive appliances.
From The Windfall, published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in June. Copyright © 2017 by Diksha Basu.
(Photo: Mikey McCleary)First Fiction 2016
For our sixteenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2016 issue of the magazine for interviews between Yaa Gyasi and Angela Flournoy, Masande Ntshanga and Naomi Jackson, Rumaan Alam and Emma Straub, Maryse Meijer and Lindsay Hunter, and Imbolo Mbue and Christina Baker Kline. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
Homegoing (Knopf, June) by Yaa Gyasi
The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio, June) by Masande Ntshanga
Rich and Pretty (Ecco, June) by Rumaan Alam
Heartbreaker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July) by Maryse Meijer
Behold the Dreamers (Random House, August) by Imbolo Mbue
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.
Effia’s father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss as a blow to his own family. He knew then that the memory of the fire that burned, then fled, would haunt him, his children, and his children’s children for as long as the line continued. When he came back into Baaba’s hut to find Effia, the child of the night’s fire, shrieking into the air, he looked at his wife and said, “We will never again speak of what happened today."
The villagers began to say that the baby was born of the fire, that this was the reason Baaba had no milk. Effia was nursed by Cobbe’s second wife, who had just given birth to a son three months before. Effia would not latch on, and when she did, her sharp gums would tear at the flesh around the woman’s nipples until she became afraid to feed the baby. Because of this, Effia grew thinner, skin on small bird- like bones, with a large black hole of a mouth that expelled a hungry crywhich could be heard throughout the village, even on the days Baaba did her best to smother it, covering the baby’s lips with the rough palm of her left hand.
“Love her,” Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past one’s lips. At night, Baaba dreamed of leaving the baby in the dark forest so that the god Nyame could do with her as he pleased.
Effia grew older. The summer after her third birthday, Baaba had her first son. The boy’s name was Fiifi, and he was so fat that some- times, when Baaba wasn’t looking, Effia would roll him along the ground like a ball. The first day that Baaba let Effia hold him, she accidentally dropped him. The baby bounced on his buttocks, landed on his stomach, and looked up at everyone in the room, confused as to whether or not he should cry. He decided against it, but Baaba, who had been stirring banku, lifted her stirring stick and beat Effia across her bare back. Each time the stick lifted off the girl’s body, it would leave behind hot, sticky pieces of banku that burned into her flesh. By the time Baaba had finished, Effia was covered with sores, screaming and crying. From the floor, rolling this way and that on his belly, Fiifi looked at Effia with his saucer eyes but made no noise.
Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Effia’s wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Effia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched its branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.
And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the other toes. For each scar on Effia’s body, there was a companion scar on Baaba’ s, but that didn’t stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.
Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning woman- hood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.
Excerpted from HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi. Copyright © 2016 by Yaa Gyasi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Reactive
By Masande Ntshanga
The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.
In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.
Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.
It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.
I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.
In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.
When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.
That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.
The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.
Excerpted from The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga. Copyright © 2016 by Masande Ntshanga. Excerpted by permission of Two Dollar Radio. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rich and Pretty
By Rumaan Alam
Lauren’s office is freezing. You could keep butter on the desk. You could perform surgery. Every woman in the office—they’re all women—keeps a cashmere sweater on the back of her chair. They sit, hands outstretched over computer keyboards like a bum’s over a flaming garbage can. The usual office noises: typing, telephones, people using indoor voices, the double ding of an elevator going down. For some reason, the double ding of the elevator going down is louder than the single ding of the elevator going up. There’s a metaphor in there, waiting to be untangled. They make cookbooks, these women. There’s no food, just stacks of paper and editorial assistants in glasses. She’s worked here for four years. It’s fine.
Today is different because today there’s a guy, an actual dude, in the office with them, not a photographer or stylist popping by for a meeting, as does happen: He’s
a temp, because Kristen is having a baby and her doctor put her on bed rest. Lauren isn’t totally clear on what Kristen does, but now there’s a dude doing it. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, and loafers, not sneakers, which implies a certain maturity. Lauren’s been trying to get him to notice her all day. She’s the second-prettiest woman in the office, so it isn’t hard. Hannah, the prettiest, has a vacant quality about her. She’s not stupid, exactly—in fact, she’s very competent—but she doesn’t have spark. She’s not interesting, just thin and blond, with heavy eyeglasses and a photograph of her French bulldog on her computer screen.
Lauren has it all planned out. She’ll walk past his desk a couple of times, which isn’t suspicious because his desk isn’t far from the kitchen, and the kitchen is where the coffee is, and by the third time, he’ll follow her in there, and she’ll make a wisecrack about the coffee, and he’ll say it’s not so bad, and they’ll talk, and exchange phone numbers, e-mail addresses, whatever, and then later they’ll leave the office at the same time, ride down together in the elevator and not talk because they both understand that the social contract dictates that sane people do not talk in elevators, and then he’ll let her go through the revolving door first, even though she’s pretty sure that etiquette has it that men precede women through revolving doors, and then they’ll both be standing on Broadway, and there will be traffic and that vague smell of charred, ethnic meat from the guy with the lunch cart on the corner, and he’ll suggest they get a drink, and she’ll say sure, and they’ll go to the Irish pub on Fifty-Fifth Street, because there’s nowhere else to go, and after two drinks they’ll be starving, and he’ll suggest they get dinner, but there’s nowhere to eat in this part of town, so they’ll take the train to Union Square and realize there’s nowhere to eat there either, and they’ll walk down into the East Village and find something, maybe ramen, or that Moroccan-y place that she always forgets she likes, and they’ll eat, and they’ll start touching each other, casually but deliberately, carefully, and the check will come and she’ll say let’s split it, and he’ll say no let me, even though he’s a temp and can’t make that much money, right? Then they’ll be drunk, so taking a cab seems wise and they’ll make out in the backseat, but just a little bit, and kind of laugh about it, too: stop to check their phones, or admire the view, or so he can explain that he lives with a roommate or a dog, or so she can tell him some stupid story about work that won’t mean anything to him anyway because it’s only his first day and he doesn’t know anyone’s name, let alone their personality quirks and the complexities of the office’s political and social ecosystem.
Then he’ll pay the driver, because they’ll go to his place—she doesn’t want to bring the temp back to her place—and it’ll be nice, or fine, or ugly, and he’ll open beers because all he has are beers, and she’ll pretend to drink hers even though she’s had enough, and he’ll excuse himself for a minute to go to the bathroom, but really it’s to brush his teeth, piss, maybe rub some wet toilet paper around his ass and under his balls. This is something Gabe had told her, years ago, that men do this, or at least, that he did. Unerotic, but somehow touching. Then the temp will come sit next to her on the couch, please let it be a couch and not a futon, and he’ll play with her hair a little before he kisses her, his mouth minty, hers beery. He’ll be out of his shirt, then, and he’s hard and hairy, but also a little soft at the belly, which she likes. She once slept with this guy Sean, whose torso, hairless and lean, freaked her out. It was like having sex with a female mannequin. The temp will push or pull her into his bedroom, just the right balance of aggression and respect, and the room will be fine, or ugly, and the bedsheets will be navy, as men’s bedsheets always are, and there will be venetian blinds, and lots of books on the nightstand because he’s temping at a publishing company so he must love to read. She’ll tug her shirt over her head, and he’ll pull at her bra, and they’ll be naked, and he’ll fumble around for a condom, and his dick will be long but not, crucially, thick, and it will be good, and then it will be over. They’ll laugh about how this whole thing is against the company’s sexual harassment policy. She’ll try to cover herself with the sheet, and he’ll do the same, suddenly embarrassed by his smaller, slightly sticky dick. When he’s out of the room, to get a beer, to piss, whatever, she’ll get dressed. He’ll call her a car service, because there are no yellow cabs wherever he lives. They’ll both spend the part of the night right before they fall asleep trying to figure out how to act around each other in the office tomorrow.
Or maybe not that. Maybe she’ll find a way to go up to him and say, what, exactly, Hey, do you like parties? Do you want to goto a party . . . tonight? No, the jeans and tie are fine. It’s not fancy. Aparty. A good party. Good open bar, for sure. Probably canapés, what are canapés exactly, whatever they are, there will probably be some. Last party, there were these balls of cornbread and shrimp, like deep fried, holy shit they were great. That was last year, I think. Anyway, there might be celebrities there. There will definitely be celebrities there. I once saw Bill Clinton at one of these parties. He’s skinnier than you’d think. Anyway, think about it, it’ll be a time, and by the way, I’m Lauren, I’m an associate editor here and you are? She can picturehis conversation, the words coming to her so easily, as they do in fantasy but never in reality. They call it meeting cute, in movies, but it only happens in movies.
From Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam. Copyright© 2016 by Rumaan Alam. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Heartbreaker
By Maryse Meijer
Daddy comes over on Thursdays. My husband and son are out watching movies where people blow each other up. They have burgers afterward and buf- falo wings and milkshakes and they talk about TV shows and girls and the latest bloody video game. At least that’s what I imagine they do. No way do they imagine what I am doing, sitting here at the kitchen table doing my math homework as Daddy microwaves the mac and cheese he brought over. We have three hours together and in these three hours I am twelve years old and my daddy is the most wonderful man in the world.
On craigslist I post the photo from my work website, the one with my hair scraped back in a ponytail, expos- ing my shiny forehead, my thin lips, my arms bursting from the sleeves of my blue blouse. Daughter seeks Father is all I write as a caption. In response I receive an avalanche of cell-phone numbers, chat invitations, and penis pics lifted from porn sites.
I delete all the emails except for Richard’s: Sweetheart, please call home. I sit for a moment hunched in my cubicle, sweating, before lifting the receiver and dialing his number.
Daddy? I whisper, hand up to cover my mouth so no one walking by can see it moving.
He doesn’t skip a beat. Sweetheart! he says. Did you see the photo? I ask.
Of course, he says.
I’m not better in person, I warn. You’re perfect, he assures me.
I’m married, I tell him. I have a kid. No problem, he insists.
I chew the inside of my cheek. There’s not going to be any sex, I say.
Absolutely not! he agrees.
I wait for him to say something creepy or disgusting, but he doesn’t. We make arrangements to meet at McDonald’s for dinner on Thursday.
Don’t kill me, I say, and he laughs.
Oh sweetheart, he says. What on earth?
I’m early. I don’t know what Daddy looks like and every time the door swings open my head jerks like a ball on a string. I convince myself I’m going to be stood up and that it will be better anyway if I am. But at seven on the dot he enters and he looks straight at me and waves.
Our usual, sweetheart? he says, loud enough for other people to hear, and I nod. He brings a tray of chicken nugget combos to my table. He kisses my cheek. The food steams in our hands as we look at each other; he seems about twenty, twenty-two, with chinos frayed at the bottoms and red hair and glasses and biceps as skinny as my wrist. Maybe someday he will be good- looking.
Extra barbecue sauce, just the way you like, he says, gesturing to my nuggets. I smile and take a bite. He asks me about school and I ask him about work and he is as interested in how I’m doing in gym class as I am in the stocks he’s trading at the office; we slip into our new roles as easily as knives into butter.
I almost forgot, he says. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a CD with a Christmas bow stuck on it. Just a little something, he adds, and hands it to me. I unstick the bow and turn the CD over in my hands: Britney Spears. I bounce, once, and my left butt cheek, which doesn’t quite fit on the plastic chair, bangs on the edge of the seat.
Oh Daddy, I say, touched because I k now he went into a store and asked what would be the right thing to get for his little girl, and he paid for it with his own money and put it in his pocket and found the gaudy bow to go with it and then brought it all the way here, to me, because he k new he would like me and already wanted to give me something, and this makes me want to give everything I have to him in return.
Apart from Thursday nights—and it’s always Thurs- days, always nights—we don’t communicate, except by email. Sometimes he’ll send me a note just to say, Have a great day!! or he’ll tell me what plans he has for dinner: Working late need a treat pizza sound good??? or he’ll hint at imagined happenings in my little-girl life: Don’t forget dentist today xoxoxoxo!! and Good luck on the history quiz I know you’ll do awesome!!!! I write back in equally breathless terms to report the results of the history quiz or the number of cavities rotting my teeth or to squeal over the impending pizza feast. These exchanges give me a high so intense my chest muscles spasm and when my boss calls and says to bring her such-and-such adocument I hit print and out comes an email from Daddy, not the work document, and I giggle into my hand and hit print again.
He always arrives exactly fifteen minutes after my hus- band and son leave. I sit on the couch with the televi- sion on while he fumbles with the keys and the empty banged-up briefcase he always brings. Sweetheart! he says when he enters, and I yelp Daddy! and if I was maybe ten or twenty or, okay, thirty pounds lighter, I might run toward him, but as it is I wait on the couch for him to come over and k iss my hair. I’ll pour him a soda on the rocks and he’ll pour me some milk and we touch glasses and smile. If my husband calls I stand by the back door with my head down and say Uh-huh, yes, fine, all right, see you soon, no, nothing for me, thanks, I’m enjoying the leftovers, have fun, love you.
Excerpted from Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer. Copyright © Maryse Meijer, 2016. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue
He’d never been asked to wear a suit to a job interview. Never been told to bring along a copy of his résumé. He hadn’t even owned a résumé until the previous week when he’d gone to the library on Thirty-fourth and Madison and a volunteer career counselor had written one for him, detailed his work history to suggest he was a man of grand accomplishments: farmer responsible for tilling land and growing healthy crops; street cleaner responsible for making sure the town of Limbe looked beautiful and pristine; dishwasher in Manhattan restaurant, in charge of ensuring patrons ate from clean and germ-free plates; livery cabdriver in the Bronx, responsible for taking passengers safely from place to place.
He’d never had to worry about whether his experience would be appropriate, whether his English would be perfect, whether he would succeed in coming across as intelligent enough. But today, dressed in the green double-breasted pinstripe suit he’d worn the day he entered America, his ability to impress a man he’d never met was all he could think about. Try as he might, he could do nothing but think about the questions he might be asked, the answers he would need to give, the way he would have to walk and talk and sit, the times he would need to speak or listen and nod, the things he would have to say or not say, the response he would need to give if asked about his legal status in the country. His throat went dry. His palms moistened. Unable to reach for his handkerchief in the packed downtown subway, he wiped both palms on his pants.
“Good morning, please,” he said to the security guard in the lobby when he arrived at Lehman Brothers. “My name is Jende Jonga. I am here for Mr. Edwards. Mr. Clark Edwards.”
The guard, goateed and freckled, asked for his ID, which he quickly pulled out of his brown bifold wallet. The man took it, examined it front and back, looked up at his face, looked down at his suit, smiled, and asked if he was trying to become a stockbroker or something.
Jende shook his head. “No,” he replied without smiling back. “A chauffeur.”
“Right on,” the guard said as he handed him a visitor pass. “Good luck with that.”
This time Jende smiled. “Thank you, my brother,” he said. “I really need all that good luck today.”
Alone in the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, he inspected his fingernails (no dirt, thankfully). He adjusted his clip-on tie using the security mirror above his head; reexamined his teeth and found no visible remnants of the fried ripe plantains and beans he’d eaten for breakfast. He cleared his throat and wiped off whatever saliva had crusted on the sides of his lips. When the doors opened he straightened his shoulders and introduced himself to the receptionist, who, after responding with a nod and a display of extraordinarily white teeth, made a phone call and asked him to follow her. They walked through an open space where young men in blue shirts sat in cubicles with multiple screens, down a corridor, past another open space of cluttered cubicles and into a sunny office with a four-paneled glass window running from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the thousand autumn-drenched trees and proud towers of Manhattan standing outside. For a second his mouth fell open, at the view outside—the likes of which he’d never seen—and the exquisiteness inside. There was a lounging section (black leather sofa, two black leather chairs, glass coffee table) to his right, an executive desk (oval, cherry, black leather reclining chair for the executive, two green leather armchairs for visitors) in the center, and a wall unit (cherry, glass doors, white folders in neat rows) to his left, in front of which Clark Edwards, in a dark suit, was standing and feeding sheets of paper into a pullout shredder.
“Please, sir, good morning,” Jende said, turning toward him and half-bowing.
“Have a seat,” Clark said without lifting his eyes from the shredder.
Jende hurried to the armchair on the left. He pulled a résumé from his folder and placed it in front of Clark’s seat, careful not to disturb the layers of white papers and Wall Street Journals strewn across the desk in a jumble. One of the Journal pages, peeking from beneath sheets of numbers and graphs, had the headline: “Whites’ Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-blind America.” Jende leaned forward to read the story, fascinated as he was by the young ambitious senator, but immediately sat upright when he remembered where he was, why he was there, what was about to happen.
“Do you have any outstanding tickets you need to resolve?” Clark asked as he sat down.
“No, sir,” Jende replied.
“And you haven’t been in any serious accidents, right?”
“No, Mr. Edwards.”
Clark picked up the résumé from his desk, wrinkled and moist like the man whose history it held. His eyes remained on it for several seconds while Jende’s darted back and forth, from the Central Park treetops far beyond the window to the office walls lined with abstract paintings and portraits of white men wearing bow ties. He could feel beads of sweat rising out of his forehead.
“Well, Jende,” Clark said, putting the résumé down and leaning back in his chair. “Tell me about yourself.”
Excerpted from Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Copyright © 2016 by Imbolo Mbue. Reprinted with permission of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Fiction 2016: Nine More Notable Debuts
As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa Gyasi, Masande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.
Remarkable (BOA Editions, May) by Dinah Cox
Set primarily in Oklahoma, the remarkable (that’s right, remarkable) stories in Cox’s award-winning collection spotlight characters whose wit, resilience, and pathos are as vast as the Great Plains landscape they inhabit.
Anatomy of a Soldier (Knopf, May) by Harry Parker
A former officer in the British Army who lost his legs in Afghanistan in 2009, Parker delivers a riveting, provocative novel that captures his wartime experience in an unconventional way. Forty-five inanimate objects—including a helmet, boots, and weapons—act as narrators, together offering the reader a powerful new perspective on war.
Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove, June) by Anna Noyes
With language both sensuous and precise, these interconnected stories immerse us in the lives of women and girls in coastal Maine as they navigate familial intimacy, sexual awakening, and love’s indiscretions.
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers(Graywolf, June) by Max Porter
In the wake of his wife’s sudden death, a man is visited by Crow, a “sentimental bird” that settles into the man’s life and the lives of his children in an attempt to heal the wounded family. A nuanced meditation that not only breaks open the boundaries of what constitutes a novel, but also demonstrates through its fragmentary form the unique challenge of writing about grief.
A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Viking, June) by Bob Proehl
Valerie and her son embark on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles to reunite the nine-year-old with his estranged father, attending comic-book conventions along the way. Proehl weaves the comic-con worlds of monsters and superheroes into a complex family saga, a tribute to a mother’s love and the way we tell stories that shape our lives.
Lily and the Octopus (Simon & Schuster, June)
by Steven Rowley
Rowley’s novel centers on narrator Ted Flask and his aging companion—a dachshund named Lily—but readers who mistake this as a simple “boy and his dog” story are in for a profound and pleasant surprise. This powerful debut is a touching exploration of friendship and grief.
Pond (Riverhead Books, July)
by Claire-Louise Bennett
In this compelling, innovative debut, the interior reality of an unnamed narrator—a solitary young woman living on the outskirts of a small coastal village—is revealed through the details of everyday life, some rendered in long stretches of narrative and others in poetic fragments. Bennett’s unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut.
Champion of the World (Putnam, July) by Chad Dundas
Gangsters, bootlegging, and fixed competitions converge in the tumultuous world of 1920s American wrestling, which disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean and his wife, Moira, must navigate in order to create the life they want. With crisp, muscular prose, this 470-page historical novel illuminates a time of rapid change in America.
Problems (Emily Books, July) by Jade Sharma
Raw, unrepentant, and biting with dark humor, Problems turns the addiction-redemption narrative inside out, as Sharma follows heroin hobbyist Maya through her increasingly chaotic life after the end of both her marriage and an affair.
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Elisa Gabbert
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection The Word Pretty is just out from Black Ocean. Part of the press’s new Undercurrents series of literary nonfiction, the book combines personal essay, criticism, meditation, and craft to offer lyric and often humorous observations on a wide range of topics related to writing, reading, and life—from emojis and aphorisms to front matter, tangents, and Twitter. Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections The French Exit and L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; and a previous collection of essays, The Self Unstable. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, A Public Space, the Paris Review, Guernica, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications, and she writes an advice column for writers, The Blunt Instrument, at Electric Literature. She lives in Denver.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I just turned in a manuscript, another collection of essays, and the way I wrote that was very specific: For between one and three months, depending on my time constraints, I’d surround myself with, or submerse myself in, material on a topic—for example nuclear disasters, or “hysteria,” or memory—and read and watch films and think and take tons of notes. Then after a while the essay would start to take shape in my mind. I’d outline a structure, and then block off time to write it. As this process got systematized, I became more efficient; for the last essay I finished, I wrote most of it, about 5,000 words, in a single day. It was pretty much my ideal writing day: I got up relatively early on a Saturday morning and wrote until dark. Then I poured a drink and read over what I’d written. Of course I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t give myself plenty of processing time. I can write 5,000 good words in a day, but I can only do that maybe once a month. I did most of the work for this book, the note-taking and the actual writing, sitting at the end of our dining room table. I try not to write at the same desk where I do my day job.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Yes. With prose, all I need is time to think and I can generate it pretty easily; a lot of my thoughts are already in prose. Poetry is harder. I feel like I have less material, and I can’t waste it, so it’s this delicate, concentrated operation not to screw it up. It feels like there’s some required resource I deplete. And I have to change my process entirely every three or four years if I’m going to write poems at all. Basically I come up with a form and then find a way to “translate” my thoughts into the form. It wasn’t always like that, but that’s the way it is now. I used to think in lines.
3. How long did it take you to write The Word Pretty?
I hadn’t set out to write a book, per se; I was just writing little essays until eventually they started to feel like a collection. But I think I wrote all of them between 2015 and 2017.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I hope this doesn’t sound like faux humility, but I am surprised by the number of people who have bought it and read it already. I thought this was one for, like, eight to ten of my super-fans. We didn’t have a lot of time or money (read: any money) to promote it. What doesn’t surprise me is everyone commenting on how pretty it is. Black Ocean makes beautiful books.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
One thing? I’d like to change a lot, but I wish both were less beholden to trends and the winner-take-all tendencies of hype and attention.
6. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely cover to cover—I’d only read parts of it before—which got me thinking about the indirect, out-of-sequence nature of influence. My second book, The Self Unstable, looks the way it does (i.e. little chunks of essayistic, aphoristic, sometimes personal prose) in part because I’d just read a few collections of prose poetry I really liked. One was a chapbook by my friend Sam Starkweather, who was always talking about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This was years ago, before Claudia Rankine was a household name. I finally read the whole book and thought, “Oh! This was an influence on me!” Next I am planning to reread The Bell Jar, which I last read in high school, in preparation to write about the new Sylvia Plath story that is being published in January. I have an early copy of the story as a PDF, but I haven’t even opened the file yet. I’m terrified of it.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I didn’t invent Elizabeth Bowen but I just read her for the first time this year and she blew my mind. I’m always telling people to read this hilarious novella about Po Biz called Lucinella by Lore Segal, and Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet I love who doesn’t have a book yet. Also, some people will find this gauche, but my husband, John Cotter, writes beautiful essays that don’t get enough attention.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not being independently wealthy, I guess? I have a job, so I can only work on writing stuff at night and on the weekends.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It would be nice to win some kind of major award—but that would really go against my brand, which is “I don’t win awards.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The best writing advice is always “read stuff,” but you’ve heard that before, so here’s something more novel: My thesis advisor, a wonderful man named John Skoyles, once said in a workshop—I think he was repeating something he’d heard from another poet—that if a poem has the word “chocolate” in it, it should also have the word “disconsolate.” I took this advice literally at least once, but it also works as a metaphor: that is to say, a piece of writing should have internal resonances (which could occur at the level of the word or the phrase or the idea or even the implication) that work semantically like slant rhymes, parts that call back softly to other parts, that make a chime in your mind.
Elisa Gabbert, author of The Word Pretty. (Credit: Adalena Kavanagh)
Ten Questions for Guy Gunaratne
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Guy Gunaratne, whose debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, is out today from MCD x FSG Originals. Inspired by the real-life murder of a British soldier at the hands of religious fanatics, Gunaratne’s novel explores class, racism, immigration, and the chaotic fringes of modern-day London. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Gordon Burn Prize, In Our Mad and Furious City tells a story, Marlon James says, “so of this moment that you don’t even realize you’ve waited your whole life for it.” Gunaratne was born in London and has worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker covering human rights stories around the world. He divides his time between London and Malmö, Sweden.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study, in Malmö. A large wooden desk, surrounded by books set where I left them. I write as much as I can, when I can. The most focused period tends to be early mornings, between 5 AM and 6 AM to 9 AM, and then in dribs and drabs throughout the day.
2. How long did it take you to write In Our Mad and Furious City?
The novel took about four years to write the initial manuscript and then another year with my editor. As someone who enjoys the solitary commitment of writing, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of collaborating on it. I’ve found the process to be rewarding and instructive.
3. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Patience, probably. And space. Once when working on In Our Mad and Furious City, my editor and I were working on a specific part of one character’s voice. She asked me to go away and think about a few specific things. She gave a list. “Just think,” she said. She gave me the time to simmer, which I think is important when making any significant change.
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I try, sometimes with difficulty, not to be cynical about the relationship between art and industry. My hopefulness comes from knowing that there are usually enough dedicated people in any industry who are committed to doing good work. My surprise comes from finding out that I’d actually underestimated the amount of good people I’d meet during the process.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I think about this more as a reader than as a writer. I think we can all agree that homogeneity in any industry is unbearably boring. I’m interested in reading anything surprising, challenging, and provocative, in the best sense of the word. But I do wonder, at least with my experience thus far, how anything truly new, different, or challenging can ever come out of an industry that looks and acts so conservatively. There is still vitality here, and a desire to experiment with what gets published. The challenge is in encouraging those voices to keep on.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a nonfiction book called Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger, which is about the Kurds of Northern Syria. And I’ve finally got around to Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
More people should be reading Machado de Assis and Nawal El Saadawi. But I think, more generally, people should be reading translated fiction. One of the beautiful things about the novel is its capacity to offer the reader a way to transgress beyond the parochial or familiar. It opens new territory to explore. At times it can even help confront learned biases that you wouldn’t have known were there. Many of my most surprising and enriching experiences have come from reading translated fiction.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Inevitably, there was always going to be a degree of friction because of the time I now commit to the public side of all this—the events, publicity, the travel. I think I underestimated how much all that would impact the other side, the writing side. Not to say I don’t like the public facing part. Engaging with readers, for example, I think is hugely rewarding. I find it a privilege, honestly. But I do find myself missing home quite a bit. I find that I need to have an extended period writing in once place in order to gather momentum. Sadly, I’ve been flitting back and forth, which doesn’t help.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I don’t have any external goals with my writing, not really. Right now I just want to write, publish, and keep writing. If I’m still writing novels in my sixties, it would mean that I would have attained something I had once thought impossible. Namely, a writer’s life.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who spoke about this, but there was something I heard early on which I get the sense has become more and more apparent as I continue to write. It’s simple really, it’s just that there is something about your own subconscious that is far more perceptive than whatever your conscious mind can conjure up. Being attentive to allowing that stuff to come through, to trust in allowing a degree of exploration as you write. This has become very important to me, and useful to know, too, any time I sit and stare at a blank page. You’ve got to get out of your own way.
Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City. (Credit: Jai Stokes)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Sherwin Bitsui
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sherwin Bitsui, whose new book of poetry, Dissolve, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, and Dissolve is imbued with Navajo history and tradition. The book is a long poem, an inventive and sweeping work that blurs the lines between past and present, urban and rural, landscape and waste, crisis and continuity, and leads readers on a dissonant and dreamlike journey through the American Southwest. Bitsui is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), which won the 2010 American Book Award in poetry. He lives in Arizona, where since 2013 he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write best when I return from visiting my family on the reservation. The journey home feeds my creative process. I move between language, history, and worldviews—it’s always place between that gives me the most insight into my creative process.
2. How long did it take you to write Dissolve?
Dissolve took about seven years to complete. Most of those seven years I spent revising the poem. It was a challenge to harmonize all its layers and dimensions. I’m excited for people to read and experience this work.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
The care and attention Copper Canyon Press gave to my creative process. They’ve been wonderful—and it’s not so much a surprise. I’m always grateful.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
People should know more about the contributions Indigenous poets and writers have given to world poetry. There’s so much work out there, but many voices are seemingly still invisible to the general public. I would love for the literary world to stay open to all the poets from my community and not focus on only a few “representative” voices. It happens time and time again. Poets Heid Erdrich and Allison Hedge Coke have recently edited great anthologies that may give the larger public a glimpse of the diversity and range of contemporary Indigenous poetry.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading poems by a few contemporary Chinese poets I’ve been asked to translate this week for a translation festival in China. This work is entirely new for me and I’m excited to learn more about poetry from this part of the world.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
There are people I like who deserve more attention—I wouldn’t call them “underrated,” they are incredible in their own right and will receive the attention they deserve. People should read more Indigenous writers. They are writing some of the most innovative and important work in contemporary literature.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value an editor’s ability to trust the poet. I’m fortunate to have great editors in who’ve been absolutely supportive of my poetic vision. I’ve never felt I had to compromise my artistic integrity. It’s a wonderful thing when one’s editor is also protective and supportive of one’s body of work and creative vision.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I hope I continue to feel I can innovate upon previous creations. I want to blend all my poetic and visual work into a singular expression someday. I don’t know what this means. I’ll find out when I get there.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’m grateful for the writers and artist who’ve advised me to maintain my creative and artistic integrity. My poems continue to reach new readers and I’m grateful they can trust that I will always want more from poetry than what is easily available and accessible. I want them to return to my books and feel they experience something new with each reading.
Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve.
Road Trip: A Profile of Sherwin Bitsui
This isn’t really my landscape,” says Sherwin Bitsui as we head east on Interstate 10 through the Sonoran Desert. We’ve just left Tucson, and almost immediately the surroundings open up. No more southwestern tourist traps or neighborhoods heavy with generations of conflict among Mexicans, Native Americans, and whites. Around us, the mesquite and the cholla, with bursts of white spikes, grow in abundance along the highway. Aside from the road itself, the only other man-made objects in sight are the shrines—descansos in Spanish—commemorating tragic highway accidents.
While it may not be his preferred landscape, Bitsui has learned to appreciate it. “Especially with this sky, and when it rains,” he says.
Indeed, the land has just been blessed with rain for the first time in five months—half an inch in a matter of hours, which is rare for southern Arizona, where the average rainfall is twelve inches a year. The heavy downpour caused more than a few traffic mishaps in the city. Sirens blared as the drains flooded at every intersection. But past the city limits everything is calm: Large clouds hover over the Catalina Mountains and the Tucsons, and the land releases the soothing smell of wet earth.
It’s Bitsui who suggested conducting our interview while driving in a car. “It’s how I remember hearing stories when I was a child,” he says. “Riding in my father’s truck.”
And soon, Bitsui, whose second book of poetry, Flood Song, will be released this month by Copper Canyon Press, should be sitting back and enjoying the proverbial ride. Up to now, he’s been laboring over last-minute revisions and worrying a bit about how his work will be received. But Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon’s executive editor, speaks with excitement and confidence when he characterizes Bitsui’s new book: “There’s a distinct music to Flood Song, an almost mournful high-desert mysticism at work among all the wonder and uncertainty he’s addressing. It’s an intensely visual book that jumps back and forth between the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the personal and the tribal; its vision is sprawling and marvelously ambitious—the poem is in constant motion through landscape and time and cultures.”
The landscape that is Bitsui’s preference lies five hours to the north of Tucson, in the Navajo reservation where his family has lived “since time immemorial,” he says, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s difficult to convince people that my upbringing is not like the traumatic ones shown in books and documentaries about Native peoples,” Bitsui says. He points out a turkey vulture descending gracefully from above, and then launches into a story about having seen a caracara, also known as a Mexican eagle (“It’s really a falcon.”), for the first time. What amused him about it was that he spotted the bird in a parking lot, a place far removed from the romantic notions of land and nature that are so often imposed on his work by readers because he’s Native American.
“I have no control over how people perceive me. One time a white woman came to my reading and just cried in front of me,” he says. “She was reacting to my indigenousness, not my poetry, which isn’t even about reservation life.” There have been many other awkward exchanges: Once he was shown a picture of Geronimo and asked if he was related (“No. Geronimo is Apache.”), another time he was given tobacco. “What did that person think I was going to do, trade with it?” he asks, incredulously.
Bitsui shrugs these things off. At thirty-four, he’s more concerned about larger issues, like the fate of the next generation of Native Americans. He has been teaching writing workshops lately with ArtsReach, a Tucson-based program designed to provide Native American youth with avenues for creative expression. “The stories they tell,” Bitsui says sadly, shaking his head. “All violence and poverty.” Indeed, suicide among young Native American people has risen at an alarming rate over the last few years.
“I guess I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “I’m not a displaced Indian, my family lives on our land, and even though problems exist on my reservation, I had a happy upbringing compared with the ones these kids are dealing with.”
As it starts to drizzle again, the raindrops splattering on the windshield trigger his memories of monsoon season on the reservation. In the fall, the monsoons, with their heavy downpours and spectacular lightning shows, rejuvenate the landscape. “For some reason I also have this impression that up there the sun feels closer,” he says. “It must be the joy of being home, where the houses all face east and the taste of mutton always reminds me of the flavors of the land.” He ponders his words for a moment and then adds, “I suppose even I crave myth.”
For Bitsui, the second of five children born to a carpenter and a teacher’s aide, living on the Navajo reservation meant the freedom to wander the land for hours, knowing he wasn’t trespassing. He would sit on the mesa for long stretches of time and meditate while listening to his Walkman. (His musical preference at the time was heavy metal. “It relaxed me,” he says, smiling.)
He was allergic to horses and to hay, so he didn’t become a ranch hand. Instead, he was introduced to the goat- and sheepherding life by his grandparents. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it and the company of his grandmother, especially during the summers, when he wasn’t getting bused to an elementary school outside of the reservation.
“School was the only thing I didn’t like while growing up,” he says. “It’s where I learned to become invisible among the white kids in order to survive.” He contrasts that tactic with the one most of the kids in the ArtsReach program resort to, which is to be loud and confrontational. “I guess neither one works,” he says.
For the past eight years, Tucson has been his home away from home, but adaptation was a shaky process. “When I first moved there,” he says, “it was my introduction to America. And it freaked me out.”
Bitsui initially left home in 1997, at the age of twenty-one, to attend the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I loved it there,” he says. “We were from all sorts of tribes but we were all Indian, and aspiring artists.” Bitsui wanted to become a painter, to capture the colors and textures that had given him so much pleasure as a child. But he lacked the skill. “So I decided on the next best thing: poetry.”
This was an unusual choice for a boy who grew up in a place where the nearest library was over forty miles away. Books and writing were not completely absent on the reservation, just scarce. “There were many stories around,” says Bitsui. “These stories made me see into other worlds that no longer exist. Worlds that were made alive in the retelling.”
Under the tutelage of poet Arthur Sze, Bitsui found his voice. “I remember those first awful poems I wrote,” says Bitsui. “To this day I’m grateful to Arthur for being so patient, for believing in me.” The IAIA, however, didn’t fully prepare Bitsui for what a writing workshop would be like in a public university. With Sze’s encouragement, Bitsui applied for and was accepted to the prestigious writing program at the University of Arizona. He moved to Tucson in 2001, and when he arrived on campus, he had a flashback to his “invisible days” during his early education—feeling marginalized among the greater student population.
“I had a meltdown,” he says, refusing to elaborate, except to say that it was the first time he experienced culture shock. The faculty and students in the program were well meaning, but he rarely found workshops useful. His lyrical, elliptical style was neither personal nor anthropological; it resisted straightforward narrative and folkloric characterizations. Few readers understood what he was doing, and he began to feel claustrophobic in the often insular world of academia. “The communities writing programs promote are true gifts to poets and poetry,” he says. “But it was important for me to find poetry and attempt to define it on my own terms outside of venues where poetry is maintained.” So just as he was about to complete his MFA degree, Bitsui dropped out of the program.
“At the IAIA, I didn’t have to explain where I was coming from, let alone where I was headed to,” he says. But from the painful awareness of his otherness came a body of work that would form his first poetry collection.
University of Arizona Press acquisitions editor Patti Hartmann heard about Bitsui’s poetry from members of Native American literary circles, such as Ofelia Zepeda, a linguist, poet, and MacArthur fellow, who is also the editor of Sun Tracks, the press’s Native American literary series. Hartmann called Bitsui to ask if he had a manuscript. Although he hadn’t finished his MFA, he did have a manuscript completed, which he sent to Hartmann. After several revisions, she accepted the book for publication, and Shapeshift was published in 2003.
The first lines of Shapeshift—“Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened”—refer to the arrival of Columbus in America and the beginning of a major shift in Native American history, culture, and life. For Bitsui, the new millennium, a few years ago, marked a time to reflect on whether Native people were surviving and thriving or heading on a path toward extinction. And the poems in Shapeshift—a collection of mythical journeys, dream images, dead ends, and reservation realities—explore this subject.
“I also wanted to reclaim that word, shapeshift, which has a different connotation to us,” Bitsui says. “It doesn’t only signify physical transformation by power or magic; it also means spiritual or social transition into a new way of being.”
Reviewers received Shapeshift with both skepticism and excitement aroused by its stylistic risks. “Some people were baffled by the book because it did not work in a way that was palpable to certain trends in Native American poetics; others liked it because it was new and distinctive,” Bitsui says.
After the book’s release, Bitsui found himself drawn into the national poetry-reading circuit and onto the international stage. Besides traveling all over the country, he has been featured in the Fiftieth Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte at the Venice Biennial with the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance, and he’s been invited to Colombia to attend the International Poetry Festival of Medellín with Joy Harjo. Most recently he attended Poesiefestival Berlin, where he read alongside Rita Dove and John Yau.
“Every day’s a gift,” Bitsui says, pondering the opportunities he’s had. In 2006 he received news he’d won a prestigious forty-thousand-dollar Whiting Award. At the time, though, he was in the middle of writing an elegy for his cousin. Because his family was grieving, he didn’t want to encroach on their grief with his news, and neither did he understand the magnitude of the prize until he was sitting on the stage in New York City, listening to his work being praised.
When he returned, having made the trip alone, he attempted to describe for his grandmother this place he had visited, where crowds flowed through the streets and the buildings reached high into the sky. “Oh, you went to New York City,” she responded. Bitsui chuckles at the recollection.
As the new face of Native American literature, Bitsui takes his responsibility seriously, which is why he doesn’t turn down any offers to travel or read poetry or be interviewed. “Though I hope I’m not the only one being asked,” he says. He names two of his contemporaries, poets Santee Frazier and Orlando White, who released books earlier this year. Frazier published Dark Thirty with the University of Arizona Press, and White released Bone Light with Red Hen Press.
“I’m excited that there’s a new group out there, but I worry about what’s expected of us,” Bitsui says. He admits that one thing he’s been disappointed by in many of his presentations is the comparisons that audience members will make between him and the Native American superstar, Sherman Alexie.
“Sherman’s charismatic and funny,” Bitsui observes, “but there’s only one Sherman. The rest of us should be allowed to be who we are.”
When we finally arrive in Bisbee, it’s painfully obvious what happens when a place attempts not to change. This old copper-mining town tries to remain the same in order to cultivate tourism. The old brothel is now a hotel decorated to resemble a brothel, and the saloon’s decor includes stuffed javelina heads and hunting rifles. Most of the residents of Bisbee are white, as are the visitors. The original buildings along the main street now house expensive art galleries.
We take a walk to a copper mine, the entrance fenced to prevent tourists from leaning over the edge. “They say that one time water pooled at the bottom,” says Bitsui, “and that a flock of Canadian geese flying overhead detected it and swooped down for a drink. The water was toxic, poisoned. And the next day, the bottom of this mine glowed fluorescent white with the dead pile of birds.”
And as if on cue, it begins to rain again. “Perhaps that’s why I gave my second book that title,” Bitsui says. “The poem is a song that floods, ebbs, and is searching for a name. I feel that it’s a body of work that speaks a third language, combining Navajo sensibilities with English linearity.”
This poetic hybrid is also what attracted Wiegers to Bitusi’s work. “That was another word-of-mouth phone call,” Bitsui says of how Wiegers first contacted him. “I met Michael briefly at an Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. I was introduced to him by Matthew Shenoda, the Coptic poet. And Michael eventually called me up out of the blue to ask if I had a second manuscript.”
Wiegers wanted to hear Bitsui off the page, so in 2007 he accepted an invitation to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where Bitsui was a fellow that year. “I arrived at the conference the day after he read,” Wiegers recalls, “so I pulled him aside and asked him to read a poem to me. We walked down to the pond, where I sat on a big rock while he told me nearly the entirety of the new manuscript, which was still in development. I was impressed, to say the least. I suggested to him that when he finished and was looking to publish the book, he’d have a ready ear in me.”
As we take cover in the local coffee shop, a musician starts to set up his equipment. We are determined to make it to the saloon to have a beer once the rain stops.
“With Flood Song I wanted to go back to my beginning as an aspiring painter,” Bitsui says. “I think of many of those poems as portraits with their own elliptical stories to tell.”
Bitsui says that his ideal readers are visual artists, who discover something of their techniques in his writing style. But he confesses that even his family members are puzzled by his poetry. “They’re waiting for me to write a poem they can understand,” he says, laughing.
In the meantime, Bitsui will continue to live in Tucson, where he has been most productive in his writing. And while he’s scratching out a living as a visiting poet in various tribal schools in the area, he’s also moving forward with other projects. He has decided to return to the University of Arizona to complete his MFA and to finish a screenplay he’s been struggling with since he received a fellowship last year from the Sundance Native Initiative to adapt one of his stories for film. Bitsui doesn’t consider himself a short story writer, but as a descendant of storytellers, he couldn’t refuse the opportunity. The Sundance programmer, N. Bird Runningwater, has been patiently waiting for Bitsui to turn in the script. “It’s not poetry, though, which is hard enough,” Bitsui says.
The beer at the saloon (more like a movie set) is anticlimactic, so after one drink we head back to Tucson, making a brief stop in Tombstone, home of the O.K. Corral. It’s Wyatt Earp Days in the town, and the locals are capitalizing on the occasion with a street fair selling cheap Native American jewelry and charging for a chance to ride in a covered wagon, old Wild West style.
“I once brought my grandmother here,” Bitsui says. “And I remembered her stories about riding in a wagon in the old days, so I asked her if she wanted to relive that memory by taking a wagon ride. She said, ‘Been there, done that. It’s not a very fun ride.’”
We find our way back to I-10, going west this time, riding off into what will become the sunset. It’s been a pleasure being on the road, talking story. But all good things must come to an end. Bitsui needs to return the car by sundown. It’s a rental.
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
(Photos by Jackie Alpers.)
Ten Questions for Grady Chambers
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Grady Chambers, whose debut poetry collection, North American Stadiums, was published this month by Milkweed Editions. The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places “bleached / pale by time and weather”—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces. Born and raised in Chicago, Chambers received an MFA from Syracuse University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have appeared in Adroit Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Nashville Review; Ninth Letter; New Ohio Review; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My routine seems to change every year or two, but for the past six months or so my tendency has been to write once a week, typically on Sundays, in a block of hours beginning around eight or nine in the morning and ending in the early afternoon, and most often at a coffee shop not far from my apartment.
2. How long did it take you to write North American Stadiums?
About six years, I think. The last poem in the book is the oldest, and I wrote the first draft of that poem on Memorial Day, 2012. It’s an interesting question because unlike someone setting out to write a novel, there was no real destination in mind. I didn’t (and probably this is true of writers of most books of poetry) set out to write North American Stadiums as such. The poems that comprise it are simply a curated selection from a much broader collection of writing that began in 2011 or so, when I began to be more strict with myself about making time to write. That the book contains the poems it does seems largely a result of my preferences and inclinations around the time I began thinking I should try and shape that growing stack of poems into a book. That was actually the scariest part in making this come together: the endless possible permutations of inclusion, exclusion, order; the fear of endless possibility.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Probably the way it forces a different relationship to one’s manuscript and writing. By the time I was copyediting the book for the third or fourth time I was so wholly attentive to formatting, spelling, margins—all the aesthetics of language on a page—that I didn’t even feel like I was reading the poems anymore. Thanks to the awesome people at Milkweed Editions I had the unusual opportunity to create an audiobook version of the manuscript, and as I was traveling to the sound studio I was hit with a sudden fearful sense that I’d forgotten the sound and rhythm of the poems because I’d been so wrapped up in the copyediting. But that experience of doing the recording proved to be a great one: sitting down and reading it into a microphone, it was the first time that I was just able to simply read the book without looking at it through the lens of an editor. At that late stage, the book was in its final form, and all I had to do was read what was there. In doing so I felt again the rhythm and pacing and speed (or slowness) of the poems, not their marks and margins and format.
4. Where did you first get published?
The first piece of “creative writing” I wrote that actually ended up being bound between two covers were a few poems written as part of a high school English class. As I remember it, part of the final assignment for the class was for us to collectively make and bind a book (and of course produce the writing it contained). I’m fairly sure I used a phrase along the lines of, “from the lens of my itinerant being,” and it still makes me cringe to think about.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kawabata’s last and unfinished novel, Dandelions, and have been reading around in Turgenev’s great Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook (though the title is sometimes translated differently) and Robin Becker’s wonderful new collection of poems, The Black Bear Inside Me.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I can already envision this answer producing audible groans in some readers of this interview, but in all honesty I’d probably bring Moby Dick. I love the music of so much of that book, the rhythmic and sonic propulsion of Melville’s sentences, the astounding and way-ahead-of-its-time structure of his novel; and I think the book is deeply funny. I’ve mentioned how funny I find the book to a number of people, and that comment is usually met with a perplexed look, but I think there is great humor in the narrative distance between writer Melville and narrator Ishmael. Ishmael is, to me, a narrator who is totally over the top, and doesn’t have the self-awareness to recognize that quality in himself. But Melville certainly knew it, and I can imagine him laughing as he wrote some of Ishmael’s more grandiose meditations.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I find it hard to say because I feel I have such a limited sense of how authors are perceived or rated by others. But a few collections that I think are amazing but that are maybe under-read—or at least don’t seem to be read much among writers my age—are David Ferry’s incredible book, Bewilderment, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of sonnets, Kyrie, and Adrian C. Louis’s Ceremonies of the Damned. I don’t think these writers are underrated, but with so much out there and with this increasing thirst, it seems, for what’s new or what’s next, these are three books that come quickly to mind that are very worth returning to, each one remarkable in its own way.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I sleep very poorly, and that can sometimes really knock my days off course. That said, sleeplessness has also been beneficial to my writing life as, like it or not, my mind seems to be receptive to degrees of fear or strangeness or anxiety in those sleepless hours that come back in sometimes productive or interesting ways when I write.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I’m not sure I have the perfect phrase for it, but something along the lines of “generative inquiry.” What I have in mind is a tendency on the part of a reader, when talking about a certain piece, to press on certain sections of the poem, to push me about the intent or meaning of a certain sequence. In doing so, they communicate their understanding of the poem and I am able to weigh it against my intention. This helps give me a sense of which sections or sequences feel flat or outside the orbit of images and ideas that the poem is working through and forces me to verbalize, and then try and put into words on the page, a sometimes originally cloudy intent.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s not quite advice, but the most important thing someone has said to me about writing, the thing that has had a tangible impact on my work, is what my friend Charif Shanahan (his collection Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing is so good) said during a workshop a couple years ago. He asked the room, “What aren’t you writing about, and why?” Though maybe to some it seems a fairly obvious thing to ask oneself, it had a pretty significant impact on me. It helped me think about and re-examine the ways I defined myself as a writer, and encouraged me to look directly at, and at least attempt to write about, things that daily occupied my mind but for various reasons I previously had overlooked, shied away from, or not thought to write about.
Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums.
Ten Questions for A. M. Homes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features A. M. Homes, whose story collection Days of Awe, published today by Viking, “exposes the heart of an uneasy America...exploring our attachments to one another through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.” Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Days of Awe?
The stories in this collection took twelve years—stories accrue over time. I don’t sit down to write a collection of stories. I have ideas for them that can take years to form and there is a compression to storytelling, the sense that the story is already in progress by the time the reader comes to it—which means that I, like, know what it’s all about before diving in.
And there’s also an editorial/curating process—we build the collection—so once I have six to eight stories I like, I start to think about the balance, of voices within the stories, about narrative threads, ideas that appear in multiple stories—and sometimes we put a few stories aside and I write one or two more. There’s a moment when you know it’s getting close—which is very exciting. For me that was last summer. I was in Oxford, England, and knew I had two stories to finish: “Days of Awe,” the title story, which I’d literally been carrying with me for almost ten years, and “The National Caged Bird Show,” which had been with me for almost two years. Finishing those was thrilling and they’re two of my favorites in the book.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In a perfect world I write daily, starting at about 6 AM. I wake up early, I go into my office and start writing. And then around 1 PM I join the rest of the world.
But as we know it’s not a perfect world, so I often have to fight to carve out work time—a writer’s calendar should be empty—but when most of us look at an empty calendar we think, “Great time to make a dentist appointment.” So it’s a struggle, learning to say no to things.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it takes. The lead time is about a year.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first publications were in Folio, a student publication at American University, and the Sarah Lawrence Review and then On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine, founded in 1984. They published a story of mine called “72 Hours on a Towel.”
5. What are you reading right now?
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. And I love reading history, I love biography. I’m a huge nonfiction fan.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kelly’s Textbook of Internal Medicine. I’m practical and I have a good enough imagination to otherwise entertain myself.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Joyce Carol Oates.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Honesty and a sharp red pencil.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the truth according to the character—from Grace Paley, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.
A. M. Homes, author of Days of Awe (Viking).
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Lillian Li
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lillian Li, whose debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, is out this month from Henry Holt. Loosely based on Li’s own waitressing experience at a Peking duck restaurant in northern Virginia, the novel follows the complicated lives and loves of the people working at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland. The multigenerational, multi-voiced, and darkly comic novel “practically thumps with heartache and dark humor,” says novelist Chang-rae Lee. “If a Chinese restaurant can be seen as a kind of cultural performance,” says Peter Ho Davies, “Lillian Li takes us behind the scenes.” Li received a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction and Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, and Jezebel. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a bookseller at Literati Bookstore and a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write wherever is free (so usually my apartment), and I tend to write whenever I can put it off no longer (so anywhere in the late afternoon to the pre-morning hours). I find that I’m disciplined in short bursts. So I can write every day and sustain that practice for a week. Then I pat myself on the back and forget to write for a week. Rinse and repeat.
2. How long did it take you to write Number One Chinese Restaurant?
About three years. Although the bulk of that time was spent completing just the first draft. I’m a faster reviser than I am a writer.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How much I would grow to depend on my editor (Barbara Jones)! She taught me so much about writing, especially on the character and sentence-level. I hadn’t expected to find such mentorship, especially since the book had already been written, but I’m thrilled I did.
4. Where did you first get published?
I was first published as a Granta New Voice, which was an online feature started by their then–fiction editor Patrick Ryan. I recently ran into Patrick at a conference and had the privilege of gushing my gratitude at him.
5. What are you reading right now?
My Education by Susan Choi. A deeply sexy, emotionally turbulent book about a graduate student who falls for a notorious professor’s equally charismatic wife. Also Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars, which comes out August 14. Hua writes about San Francisco Chinatown with such savvy and heart. Both books are also incredibly funny.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I’ve read it so many times I’ve lost count, and his voice never ceases to thrill. So clearly it would be good company on a desert island.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t know about most underrated, but I wish more people talked about Jessica Hagedorn. Dogeaters remains one of the most awe-inspiring books I’ve ever read.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I only have myself to blame, but I also tend to let myself off the hook pretty easily.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
A combination of a sharp tongue and a big heart.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Avoid the word “it” whenever possible. Which is to say, specificity whenever possible.
Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Christopher Kennedy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Christopher Kennedy, whose fifth poetry collection, Clues From the Animal Kingdom, is out today from BOA Editions. In the collection, Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. “There is joy and dread here, in every carefully considered line,” writes Dave Eggers about the book. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, Kennedy offers prose poems that offer, as George Saunders puts it, “a moving portrait of the human heart examining itself.” Christopher Kennedy is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, 2011), and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write anywhere I happen to be at any time of day, though I tend to write first drafts at night and revise during the day. I take breaks, sometimes for months, usually because I’m teaching and want to devote my energy to my students’ work, but when I’m writing, I write every day.
2. How long did it take you to write the poems in Clues From the Animal Kingdom?
There are some lines in the poems that are decades old, but I’d say most of the poems were written between 2007 and 2016. I tend to save old poems and scavenge from them when I’m stuck working on something newer. I trust that it’s all coming from the same source and can be reshaped to resolve whatever dilemma I’m facing.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I was surprised at the relationship between the poems in the collection. It feels as if it’s part poetry, part fiction, part memoir, in the sense that if you read it cover to cover there is a narrative arc, at least in the sense of moving from one emotional/psychological state to another, as well as temporal shifts that feel organic to a plot I never would have imagined would exist.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I have a fantasy that book publishers could find a way to form consortiums that would allow them to open their own bookstores. I miss being able to browse shelves and strike up conversations with knowledgable staff in a place devoted to books.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mostly I’m reading my students’ work, which impresses me on a daily basis, but I was on leave last semester, so I was able to read a lot over the spring and summer. Here’s a short list of books I read and recommend. Poetry: former students Grady Chambers and Jessica Poli’s book and chapbook, respectively, North American Stadiums and Canyons. Short story collections: Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark, Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved, and Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Novels: Paula Saunders’s debut, The Distance Home, and Jonathan Dee’s The Locals. I also read some unpublished stories from a collection in process by Sarah Harwell, a wonderful poet and fiction writer. They’re linked stories set in an airport, and they’re fantastic.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
If I had a good dictionary, I’d have everything I need and lots of time to recreate everything I’ve ever read. That seems impractical, though, so I’d bring Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge. It had a profound influence on me thirty-plus years ago, and every time I read it again, it holds up.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I could name several, but Gary Lutz comes to mind immediately. One Gary Lutz sentence is worth a thousand pictures.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I don’t have any impediments other than my own psychology. For me, writing is a constant struggle between thinking I have nothing of any importance to say and believing that when I do have something to say I won’t be able to express it properly. I have three states of being: feeling doubt, manifesting a vague desire to say something that seems important, and writing toward ground zero of that desire.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to dunk a basketball, but I’d settle for writing more poems that are focused on the current socio-political scene. Some of my work has that emphasis, but I’d like to expand that part of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Hayden Carruth wrote this in a letter to me several years ago: “The language of a poem is like a balloon, it must be stressed enough to make its shape full and taut, but not enough to make it explode.”
Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues From the Animal Kingdom. (Credit: David Broda)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for May-Lee Chai
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features May-Lee Chai, whose story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants is out today from Blair, an imprint of Carolina Wren Press. Chai’s collection, which Edward P. Jones calls “a splendid gem” and Tayari Jones calls “essential reading,” is, at its essence, about migration—both physical and psychological, between cities and countries, among families and individuals. The stories are marked by complex and vividly rendered characters, Chinese American and Chinese women, men, and children who navigate relationships and the land, asking important questions about themselves, their families, and their culture. As Lisa Ko puts it, “You won’t forget these characters.” May-Lee Chai is the award-winning author of ten books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, the novel Tiger Girl, and her original translation from Chinese into English of Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and is an assistant professor in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing as a student, I used to write after midnight, after all my work was done for the day. But now I find that too tiring. I can write only on days when I’m not teaching and when all my grading and reading are done. Otherwise, I can’t turn off my editing brain to reach my subconscious, creative thoughts.
2. How long did it take you to write Useful Phrases for Immigrants?
I had been working on some of the stories for four or five years before I decided to put together a collection. Some had already been published. Once I came up with my theme, I knew which ones should go together and how to revise the others.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I received the most beautiful blurb quote from Edward P. Jones. After that I thought, “I will never again receive an endorsement as wonderful, as meaningful, as generous as his. You can put this one on my tombstone!”
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish it were easier for writers of color who don’t come from moneyed backgrounds to be heard and celebrated.
5. What are you reading right now?
Just finished reading Vanessa Hua’s novel A River of Stars, which is so good at taking a story that’s ripped from the headlines and then going deeper into the characters and their motivations, and I’m just starting Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection, A Lucky Man, which is full of heartbreak and longing and exquisitely crafted sentences.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Sei Shonagon. She was a member of the Heian Court in 10th-century Japan and wrote a “pillowbook” of diary-like entries on daily life, rituals, human relationships, all kinds of opinionated, lyric-essay-like observations. Everyone should read her.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My editor at Blair, Robin Miura, has the best editors’ traits: an eagle eye and a light hand.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The current political situation is the biggest impediment to my continued well-being as a woman of color in America, so that naturally impedes the writing. It takes time and energy to resist, and it takes time and energy to heal. That leaves relatively little time for everything else.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Peace of mind.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writer Nona Caspers (The Fifth Woman) just visited my undergraduate class and told the students to learn to trust their subconscious. As an example, she said when something turns up in a writing exercise or in their notebooks, they should be willing to explore and unpack and develop what their subconscious is telling them is important. I thought that was great advice.
May-Lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants.
Ten Questions for Rosellen Brown
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rosellen Brown, whose eleventh book, The Lake on Fire, is out today from Sarabande Books. The novel is an epic family narrative that begins among nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm and follows the young protagonist, Chaya, and her brother Asher, who flee to industrialized Chicago with the hopes of finding a better life. Instead, they find themselves confronted with the extravagance of the World’s Fair, during which they depend on factory work and pickpocketing to survive. The Lake on Fire is a “keen examination of social class, family, love, and revolution in a historical time marked by a tumultuous social landscape.” Rosellen Brown is the author of the novels Civil Wars, Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, Before and After, and six other previous books. Her stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories , and Best Short Stories of the Century. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Where depends almost entirely on the shifting light in my apartment that, most marvelously, sits sixteen stories up and a couple of blocks from constantly-changing Lake Michigan. So I follow the sun around and sit wherever it’s brightest (often with my cat on my lap). I sometimes wonder if I’d focus better if I had one desk, one room of my own, but I’m light-thirsty and this seems to work out pretty well. As for the “how often,” when my kids were little and I had to take advantage of every minute they were in school, I’ll admit I was a lot more disciplined; I published three books in three years. Like my waistline, I’m afraid things have slackened a little, but I still try to work every day that I’m not teaching and feel like I’m cheating when I don’t at least try, or on a dry day default to reading. It’s interesting that many people worry that reading while they’re writing might influence their work. On the contrary, I’ve always read just enough (of just about anything good) until I find myself thinking, hungrily, “I want to do that!” Then I put the book or the story away and get down to it, energized by envy.
2. Where did you first get published?
This is crazy to remember: The New York Times used to—I’m talking about the fifties—publish poetry, mostly pretty bad, on their editorial page and while I was in high school I sent them, and had accepted, a sonnet on the ghost of Thomas Wolfe. (I’m not talking about Tom Wolfe but the Thomas of Look Homeward, Angel: “Oh, lost and by the wind-grieved ghost...” and so on. A book not to be read when you’re older than sixteen.) In college, I had a few poems in little magazines and one in Mademoiselle and then my coup, never to be repeated: Poetry Magazine took a sestina of mine and published it in my senior year. A sestina is always a sort of tour de force; maybe if I tried that again, they’d take another poem! As for my fiction, I didn’t start writing that until later, moving gradually from poetry to prose poetry to some pretty unconventional fiction because I didn’t really know (or care about) “the rules.”
3. How long did it take you to write The Lake On Fire?
Oh, what a question! I just discovered, via an old letter that I happened upon, that I had begun talking about what became this book as long ago as 1987! I’m horrified. I published four books between that early hint of curiosity and my actually writing and revising it, so I was obviously not sidelined by that early—I’ll call it an itch. Somewhere along the way I wrote a first version that was set in New Hampshire. Of course, Chicago is at the center of the published novel. I could write a lot more than I have room for here about how long it takes me—and, I suspect, most writers—the coming together of two impulses to ignite a story, and that’s what happened when I moved here and learned so much about the city’s history. I sort of (but only sort of) wish I could find the original manuscript that never took fire but I have no idea what happened to it. (Good metaphor, given the name of the final book.)
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How wonderfully attentive an independent (read: small but not powerless) press could be, if it’s seriously well-run. I got an almost instant response from Sarah Gorham, whose Sarabande has always been one of my favorites—none of that hanging around the (virtual) mailbox waiting for somebody in New York to say yea or nay because, I trust, she didn't have to run things past an army of marketers and others before she could say “I love it!” And their marketing has been another surprise: Really attentive and responsive, Joanna Englert is all in, efficient, and enthusiastic. Though I had a good experience at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with their publicity and marketing for my book Before and After, this is far more personal and agile.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Respect for my intentions and an absence of the need to prevail. A good ear, not always available even from editors who can talk about structure or motivation and so on but who can’t hear a rhythmically perfect (or imperfect) line. I’ve had two great editors: The first, John Glusman, was just starting his family when I worked with him on Before and After, which raises some hard questions about parental responsibility, and he was deeply attuned to what I was trying to do. And my current editor, Sarah Gorham, is herself a terrific poet and essayist who knows how to listen to the rhythm of my writing, which—as someone who herself began as a poet—I take very seriously.
6. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m hardly alone in saying that—both understandably and unforgivably—the “legacy” publishers look at their numbers, past and projected, far more attentively than I think they consider the quality of books they deem marginal. They are, like their counterparts in the entertainment industry, more sheeplike than daring.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Not under-rated—he gets great reviews and sometimes wins prizes—but I find too few people who know Charles Baxter’s stories and novels. I’m not sure why: Too quiet, maybe? Never brings down the house but writes with exquisite sensitivity and great good humor, with his passion for social justice sometimes stage center, sometimes lurking around the edges. I remember him saying, memorably and better than this, that what we need to do is make people less certain about their certainties.
8. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
This is still a little too much like the “who are your favorite writers?” kind of question. I hate ranking writers because it’s so apples and oranges. Two of my favorite novels, for example, are William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. But then, what about Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, which I consider one of the most satisfying collections of (connected) stories I know? To the Lighthouse? And then, on another day, trying keep dry the suitcase I’d have rescued from whatever boat capsized and deposited me on that island, where do I put Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene or Marilynn Robinson’s Houskeeping, novels so different you might want to find another name for their genres? And then there’s poetry. And then there’s nonfiction, at least half the entries in The Art of the Personal Essay. So many delights! How to choose? I refuse.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a plodding, one-idea-at-a-time writer, unlike some of my friends, who are filled to overflowing with great projects jostling each other to be attended to. Then again, with eleven books behind me, I guess I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment Weekly, of all places, recently chose The Lake on Fire as one of their “20 Fall Books Not To Be Missed,” and they called me some very complimentary things, but it was kind of a backhanded compliment because they said people ought to get to know my name because I’d been flying under the radar. Then again, whoever compiled the list was probably in first grade (if that) when my last book came out so I guess that’s on me!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The only teacher with whom I ever took a fiction class, a fine and much undernoticed writer named George P. Elliott cautioned us, at a time when we young ‘uns were too easily snarky and judgmental, to be compassionate toward our characters. He cited a letter by Chekhov in which Chekhov suggested that, at most, we should admonish people whom we find wanting: “Look how you live, my friends. What a pity to live that way.” Hard to live up to and I fail often because cleverness is so much easier to reach for than sympathy, but I try to remember and, without too many compromises, act upon it.
Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire.
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Amy Bonnaffons
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amy Bonnaffons, whose debut story collection, The Wrong Heaven, is out today from Little, Brown. In this collection of funny, strange, and inventive stories, whose “conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places,” Bonnaffons writes about women, desire, and transformation through the lens of the fantastic. Bonnaffons received an MFA from New York University and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and her story “Horse”—which juxtaposes one woman’s journey through IVF with her roommate’s transition from woman to animal—was performed by actresses Grace Gummer and Geraldine Hughes on This American Life.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Ideally every day, for two hours or so in the morning, at home or at a nearby coffee shop. I do my best to stick to that schedule, but interruptions and hiatuses are common—due to the demands of life, work, and school, or the need to replenish myself creatively. I’ve been taking a long break for the past few months, reading and drawing a lot rather than pressuring myself to produce any new writing.
2. How long did it take you to write The Wrong Heaven?
The first story (“Doris and Katie”) was written in 2008; the most recent story is “Horse,” written in 2016. So I’ve been working on these stories for the last decade of my life—while also writing a novel, The Regrets, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How capable and nice everyone has been. I’d heard horror stories about publishing that made me anticipate encountering a lot of incompetent jerks—but everyone I’ve worked with has been really good at their jobs, and also just so darn likable. I want to invite them all over for a potluck where we get drunk and dork out about books.
4. Where did you first get published?
Word Riot and Kenyon Review Online.
5. What are you reading right now?
Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman; Hiromi Kawakami’s Record of a Night Too Brief; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I just finished Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Myriam Gurba’s Mean, and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I could read that book forever.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t really like to rate authors, because everything’s a matter of taste, and taste is political, and hierarchy has no place in the creative life. That said, there are some authors I’ve read recently and wondered, “WHY HAS NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THIS PERSON BEFORE? WHY IS THIS BOOK NOT ON EVERY SYLLABUS EVER?” Sometimes I’m just late to the party—but it’s also true that women, people of color, and authors from the Global South have to fight harder to find an audience. This is changing, but we’re not yet anywhere near where we should be.
The books I’m thinking of at the moment are Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, and The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy (why did no one make me read her in college?). I’m grateful to my professor Susan Rosenbaum to introducing me to Loy and Loos (check out her Mina Loy project), to Reginald McKnight for turning me on to Tutuola, and to Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, which made me run and check out Ingalls.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’d like to say, “being super busy.” If I’m honest, I’m only medium busy, but I really like to sleep. A friend recently sent me a new-age astrology website that claimed to identify, based on birth date and time, “where in your body you generate energy.” When I entered my data it claimed that I am a rare type that “generates no energy,” should only work two to four hours per day, and needs at least ten hours of sleep per night. I’ve never felt so seen.
Seriously, though, aside from just finding the time, I think my biggest problem is pressuring myself to finish something when there’s just no energy in it. That just makes me beat myself up and get depressed. I’ve learned how to strategically take breaks and how to refresh my angle of approach when needed.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Being able to pinpoint where the energy and heat is in the story, and reflecting that back to me. When you’re writing something long, like a novel, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and to forget why you started writing in the first place. A good editor—be it friend, teacher, agent, or publishing-house professional—can show you where your work has pulse and where it doesn’t. It’s helpful sometimes if they have specific suggestions for how to get the rest of the manuscript back on track, but this isn’t always necessary. Usually, for me, once I’ve been re-oriented to what really matters, I can fix the problems myself. The two editors I’ve worked with at Little, Brown—Lee Boudreaux and Jean Garnett—have both been amazing in this respect, as has my agent, Henry Dunow, an excellent editor himself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve gotten many wonderful pieces of writing advice over the years from mentors, friends, and books. Most recently, I’ve been enormously helped by Lynda Barry—in particular by her suggestion to keep the hand moving at all times. Now, when I’m writing, I keep a sketchpad by my desk; when I pause my typing because I’m stumped, or because I need to ponder something further, I pick up a pencil and start doodling rather than staring blankly at my computer screen or looking out the window or checking my phone. I don’t know why this works, other than that it engages the right brain—but it does!
I’m coming to believe more and more that the whole body should be engaged in the writing process, and that drawing is a particularly useful way to connect brain and body and wake up the imagination. My hypothesis—currently being tested in my own pedagogical practice—is that creative writers should be encouraged to draw and diagram as well as to get words down on paper. It also helps to collaborate with folks in other media, as we do at the journal I edit, 7x7. Collaboration can encourage spontaneity and open up fresh perspectives on one’s work.
Amy Bonnaffons, author of The Wrong Heaven. (Credit: Kristen Bach)
Ten Questions for Keith Gessen
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Keith Gessen, whose second novel, A Terrible Country, is out this month from Viking. A literary portrait of modern Russia, A Terrible Country tells the story of Andrei, a young academic living in New York who is called back to Moscow on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis to care for his grandmother. Once there, Andrei sees a country still grappling with the legacy of Soviet Russia and exhausted by Putin’s capitalism. “Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas...while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story,” says George Saunders. “At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing poliltical moment, this novel is a reassurance from a wonderful and important writer.” Gessen is also the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 2008) and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or cotranslator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Diaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). A contributor to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write A Terrible Country?
It took eight years. This is a little embarrassing to admit because it’s not like the book is a thousand pages long. At one point during the writing of it a friend who works in finance asked how long it would physically take to type a book if you knew all the words already, and the answer in my case, given how fast I type, was one week. And yet it still took eight years.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
If I’m writing, then the answer is whenever and however I can—in notebooks, on scraps of paper, whatever. I wrote large portions of this book in the Gmail app of my old Blackberry while on the subway. That was a great writing phone. Now I use “Notes” on the iPhone—am using it right now in fact—and of course compared to the old Blackberries the keyboard on the iPhone is bullshit. Progress isn’t always progressive.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
It’s been ten years since I published my first/previous novel, so a lot has changed. One obvious thing is the number of new outlets that do interviews, podcasts, etc.—I thought I would find this annoying but actually I like it. I’ve met a bunch of great readers and writers already just through the various interviews.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first non-student publication was in AGNI. I sent a story to Sven Birkerts through my friend George Scialabba, and he took it. I was just out of grad school and wondering if anyone outside my workshop would ever read anything I wrote, so it was very encouraging.
5. What are you reading right now?
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Tony Wood’s forthcoming Russia Without Putin. Both excellent.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
A classic question but I find it hard to answer. Under what circumstances did I arrive on this island? Will I have an opportunity to seek revenge on the forces that put me here? And how long am I here for? Am I Lenin in Finland, just biding my time until I return, or Trotsky in Mexico, counting the days till my assassins arrive? Is this a difficult island to survive on—is it literally a desert?—or an easy one? Would I find it useful and heartening to read about someone in a similar situation, like Robinson Crusoe, or would I find it annoying because he had it so much easier? Finally, who owns the island? Do I need to pay rent?
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Rebecca Curtis. She should be a household name.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Sloth. Indecision. Inconstancy.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
My editor at Viking, Allison Lorentzen, is amazing. She is brilliant and ruthless and thoughtful, all at once. I guess if there’s one particular trait, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s passion. Or commitment, to choose a more respectable-sounding word. Either way, it’s the ability to persevere in a very tough business, living with both constant pressure and constant disappointment. You can’t keep doing it and doing it well if you don’t care.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I once heard George Saunders tell a story about being edited at the New Yorker, where his editor kept asking him to cut a highly precise number of lines—18 lines, 25 lines. And George would go do it each time thinking that the editor had a very specific vision for his story. But then he realized the editor just wanted it to be shorter. And the advice here was: There’s almost no piece of writing that can’t be improved by removing 18, then 25, then 21 lines; i.e. you can almost always make something better by making it shorter. This interview being the rare exception to that rule.
Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country (Viking).
Ten Questions for Alexia Arthurs
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alexia Arthurs, whose debut story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, is out today from Ballantine Books. Drawing on Arthurs’s own experiences growing up in Jamaica and moving with her family to Brooklyn, New York, at age twelve, the stories in this collection explore issues of race, class, gender, and family, and feature a cast of complex and richly drawn characters, from Jamaican immigrants in America to their families back home, from tight-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and small Midwestern college towns. Arthurs is a graduate of Hunter College in New York City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her stories have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and the Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I love lattes and coffee shop ambiance, but whenever I try to write in public, I regret it. Everything and everyone is too loud. I need to be in the privacy and quiet of my home, at my desk with a cup of tea. I drink lots of tea when I write. My magic hours are between 12 AM and 2 AM or until I absolutely can’t keep my eyes open anymore. If I’m working on something, I try to write as often as I can—every day, every other day, whenever I can. I can go weeks without writing if the material isn’t pressing. I can’t decide if my writing is better when I feel inspired, or if it’s the process that feels more pleasant.
2. How long did it take you to write How to Love a Jamaican?
I wrote the first story, “Slack,” during my first year of graduate school—this was late 2012 or early 2013. I finished the last story during the winter of 2017.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Often writers talk about writing in an individualized way, our dreams and failures, but on the other end, it feels like a community project—it’s for the culture, for my culture. How to Love a Jamaican feels bigger than me. A surprising and beautiful realization. I’ve gotten messages from people who tell me that they were waiting on a book like mine.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published a short story called “Lobster Hand” in Small Axe.
5. What are you reading right now?
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. It’s incredible. This is such a good year for short story collections.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
The Bible I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s marked-up and worn, and it is one of the most precious things I own. I’m not religious anymore, or I’m still trying to figure out my relationship with religion, but my family is, and my father was a minister when I was growing up, so Biblical stories still hold personal relevance for me.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Whenever I’m asked this question (if I’m asked this question again—I was asked this question last week) I’m going to name short story collections I love. We need to get more people reading story collections! I really admire You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale and Are You Here For What I’m Here For? by Brian Booker.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
All of my feelings and daydreaming. It’s hard sometimes to sit still and trust the process. The other challenge is the pain of recognizing myself in my writing because my stories come from such a personal place. I don’t always feel like looking in a mirror.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Kindness. Intelligence is nice, but kindness is lovelier. Andra Miller has both. I respect her as a person and as a thinker.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I took photographs in high school. There was a dark room, which now feels like a small miracle in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. When I was graduating, my photography teacher, Mr. Solo, gave me a little book—The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He taped one of my photographs in one of the blank pages and wrote a note saying that he hoped I would stay involved in art-making wherever life took me. Not really advice, but encouragement, which for me is the same thing. I still have that book. What he did was one of the most generous things a teacher or anyone has ever done for me.
Alexia Arthurs, author of How to Love a Jamaican. (Credit: Kaylia Duncan)
Ten Questions for Sharlene Teo
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sharlene Teo, whose debut novel, Ponti, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Praised by Tash Aw as “not just a singular debut, but a milestone in Southeast Asian literature,” Ponti is the tale of three women in modern-day Singapore: Szu, a teenager living in a dark house on a cul-de-sac; her mother, Amisa, once a beautiful actress starring in a series of cult horror movies as a beautiful, cannibalistic monster, now a hack medium performing séances with her sister; and the privileged, acid-tongued Circe. Told from the perspective of each of the three women, Ponti explores the fraught themes of friendship, memory, and belonging. A Singaporean writer based in the UK, Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award, the 2013 David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire UK, Magma Poetry, and Eunoia Review.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly at my desk, at home. Thinking best in the morning before the weight of the day and the effluvium of social media and the news cycle settles in. When I’m in the middle of a project I’ll work on it whenever I can. In between projects, or struggling to finish something unpleasant before I can get back to fiction writing (like now), I make cryptic notes that I have trouble decoding later, as often as I can. But I read all the time, which I think is a form of thinking novelistically.
2. How long did it take you to write Ponti?
The first, failed iteration took me two years: from 2012 to 2014. I restarted it and that draft took two years: 2014 to 2016. And then the editorial process.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How gently collaborative it’s been. My editors were exacting but never didactic. Postpublication, my publicist is a life buoy. And everything is out of my control since I handed in the final edits, including (this is hard to let go of) how people respond to it.
4. If you could go anywhere in the world for a writing retreat where would it be?
A really high-tech underwater retreat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where you can see whales and jellyfish through the glass but any time you like you get taken back up to the surface to crystalline beaches. The food would be really good, fresh seafood, and everything would be sustainable and not exploitative in any way and there would be plenty of pasta available too.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s claustrophobic, terrifying, and has incredible narrative momentum. I know it’s been adapted into a film already, but right now as I read it I’m imagining it as a psychological thriller codirected by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfred Hitchcock.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Mary Gaitskill. I feel like she’s always been fearless, way ahead of the curve.
7. Where did you first get published?
It must have been in a creative writing anthology in Singapore, for teenaged poets.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome. My Eeyorish tendencies. My over-analysis and constant need for approval and comparison.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their perceptiveness, empathy, and patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The Anne Lamott classic: The first draft is the down draft; get the words down. The next draft is the up draft: Fix it up, somehow. Or also (I forgot where I heard this from) to doubt yourself means you’re on to the right thing. I find that reassuring.
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti. (Credit: Barney Poole)
Ten Questions for Jos Charles
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jos Charles, whose new poetry collection, feeld, is out today from Milkweed Editions. Charles’s second book is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech. In an inventive transliteration of the English language that is uniquely her own—like Chaucer for the twenty-first century: “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage,” she writes—Charles reclaims the language of the past to write about trans experience. “Jos Charles rearranges the alphabet to survive its ferocity against her body,” writes Fady Joudah, who selected the collection as a winner of the National Poetry Series. “Where language is weaponized, feeld is a whistleblower, a reclamation of art’s domain.” Charles is the author of a previous poetry collection, Safe Space, published by Ahsahta Press in 2016, and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in Long Beach, California.
1. How long did it take you to write the poems in your new book?
I began writing many of the poems in feeld in 2014; I had a compiled set of them in 2016 and completed the edited, to-be-published version in 2017.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When writing the poems that make up Safe Space, I was working retail and then an office job. So I would spend, on a productive weekday, one to two hours writing and editing and about two to three hours a day reading, researching, and taking notes. Weekends I was more intensive. With feeld, I was writing during an MFA program, which meant time was a little less discrete. I wrote an hour or two a day, edited for about two hours a day, and spent four or so hours reading and taking notes. I’ve maintained something close to that now. That said, there can be weeks I don’t write and weeks where I’m writing much more. I write at my laptop, phone, or in a notebook, and just about anywhere.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most unexpected thing is how people have found uses to my work. I say this not to self-negate, but to communicate the surprise, the praise, of people coming to find, leave, return to art.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you can get into a funded program, yes—it is better pay, hours, and easier than working retail. If you can afford to pay for an MFA, it seems you have access to most resources the MFA provides and your money would be better spent elsewhere—like paying for someone else to get an MFA. It seems to me not worth going in debt over.
5. What are you reading right now?
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and manuel arturo abreu’s transtrender, both of which are beautiful works. I recently subscribed to the Trans Women Writers Collective, which sends out a booklet of writing by a different trans woman writer each month. If you’re able, you ought to sign up for it.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I frequently have been finding myself recommending Eduoárd Glissant’s poetry. Le Sel noir is a particularly astounding work.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Its problems are many and the same as the problems most everywhere else, just articulated in a “literary” way. I would, ideally, want the conditions that give rise to all these problems to be fundamentally removed. This would include “big” things like the United States government as it exists, has existed; profit, private ownership of public goods and labor. The old socialist hopes. It would also include those “smaller” things like behaviors and words and presumptions. In lieu of this, if not this, until this, I could see, as a kind of coping with these conditions, an extramarket or extragovernmental body that organizes material support for writers. A public fund where writers get together and try to decide what to do with the pharmaceutical, supermarket, and other such kinds of money that somehow found its way—through tax write offs, donations—to “the writing community,” to be distributed to the most vulnerable within that community. Of course, violences are not equal, so there would need to be some sort of weighted system to determine distribution of funds based on “quantifying” larger social exclusions. I imagine there’d be fewer prizes and grants and more public goods and services—like housing for writers without fixed addresses or legal support for incarcerated writers, online or mailed lending libraries. This would require middle-class, largely academic-situated writers to forgo their grants and, many having faced financial and housing instability before, unfortunately, to become adjacent to those horrors again. That’s what is at stake though. It’s a messy thought for a messy time.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I can’t think of any impediments unique to my writing life, only impediments that are obvious, manifold, to life in general that happen to additionally hinder my writing life: money, other people, myself.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would like to one day run a local, worker’s paper. It would include creative work, organizational events, opinion pieces, and lots of collectivizing of labor, goods. It would also inevitably be time-consuming and a financial failure.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Saeed Jones once said—and I may very well be misquoting—poets don’t make money. If they have money, it came from somewhere that wasn’t, at least initially, directly their writing. Maybe support from parents, another job, or, if lucky, eventually and in addition, a grant here and there, an academic or nonprofit job. As someone who had been writing and publishing for close to ten years before making any money off of my writing, and then certainly not enough to sustain myself, it was good to hear at that time. Which is to say, in a system that doesn’t value writing, but only the marketing possibility of the writer and the written object, to write is the “success” itself. It’s both disheartening and astonishing. So you make a market of yourself and keep what you can off the books. Along the axes of familiar identarian violences, this is typical: You cross the street to walk over there, you shut up there to speak over here, you sell your wares to buy some shoes—and if not shoes, a coke; if not a coke, a book; if not a book, a bag of rice. And what isn’t your wares?
Jos Charles, author of feeld. (Credit: Cybele Knowles)
Ten Questions for Jasmine Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jasmine Gibson, whose debut poetry collection, Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, is out this month from Nightboat Books. In poems that inexorably tie the personal to the political, Gibson speaks to the disillusioned in moments of crisis, whether in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or in the long, slow echo of the Syrian civial war. “Reading this collection is like listening to love poems on a dock while watching transnational cargo ships on fire and sinking,” writes poet Tonga Eisen-Martin about the collection. “Here there are no gods of private causes. Just words dashing on our behalf, only a breath’s distance in front of the beast.” Gibson is also the author of the chapbook Drapetomania, released by Commune Editions in 2015, and coauthor, with Madison Van Oort, of the chapbook TimeTheft: A Love Story (The Elephants, 2018). Originally from Philadelphia, Gibson lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Don’t Let Them See Me Like This?
The book was written over the course of three years. It has changed a lot from what it was originally supposed to be. I thought it would only be two years of work, which is what it was at first. Different things happened, choices made, no love lost, and now it’s a three-year-old maenad waiting to be born.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing about five years ago, I would go to this specific bar in Manhattan’s West Village and do a whole ritual. I’d get my paycheck, get a book from St.Mark’s Bookstore, then a banh mi, and then four margaritas in I’d start writing in the darkness of the bar. I did this ritualistically: a specific day, a specific time, a specific bar, alone in the dark. I don’t do this anymore. I like writing in the sun, in bed, in the middle or after kissing. I’m a true Leo, I love love, and writing is like love. It’s painful sometimes, but it really burns you in a way that everyday stuff doesn’t really do. It reminds me of this Bobby Womack quote I saw once: “I live for love. I’ve always been tortured by love. I don’t mind the pain. I want to be the king of pain.” And in a way I, too, love to be the King of Pain, Queen of Ache.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Everyone says time, but babies come when they want to come, that’s what books are like. I’d say the most surprising thing is how the publication process really makes your world smaller and prepares you for postpartum from your book. It gives you a little taste into the way people think about you and your work. It’s really truth telling.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published first by Commune Editions. They were, at that time, the only people to really dig my work before anyone else.
5. What are you reading right now?
Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo terciario / The Tertiary, Reek Bell’s A Great Act, and Claude McKay’s A Long Way From Home.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Authors outside of institutions. That’s where the most interesting work is coming from. With institutions, it’s always this bait-and-switch thing that happens that puts a straight jacket on people’s work.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself, sometimes I’m unsure, sometimes I’m hubris. I think when I wrote TimeTheft: A Love Story with Madison Van Oort, I was able to balance out my own thoughts with her level headedness.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
My most genuine response would be that it was more accessible to voices that are pushed to the margins. But also I think this response gets perverted by the publishing and literary community, which is why you have “special”(fetish) issues to talk about subjects that are just normal ways of living for a lot of people. So, I’d say: more incendiary small presses and zine makers to the front.
9. When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?
I like to hangout with friends, drink, talk to my mom and sister, and go on dates with my partner. I like reading about strange factoids and record shopping.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There is none really, either it’s classicist or unfeasible. I think sincerity is important to the process of writing, because the work really can speak for itself, and no one can pimp that out. So, mine is this: Get in where you fit in, and where you don’t, break it.
Jasmine Gibson, author of Don’t Let Them See Me Like This. (Credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith)
Ten Questions for J. M. Holmes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features J. M. Holmes, whose debut story collection, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, is out today from Little, Brown. This linked collection follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio, four young friends coming of age in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, grappling with the complexities of family history and class; the discovery of sex, drugs, and desire; and the struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as Black men in America. Holmes is, as Rebecca Makkai puts it, “not just a new voice but a new force: honest, urgent, compelling, often hilarious, and more often gut-wrenching.” Born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island, Holmes is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the White Review, and H.O.W. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is currently at work on a novel.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Starting with a simple question and I can’t even answer this one. I used to write at night a lot, very late when everything is quiet. I’m not much of a morning person. Lately, I’ve been writing on my phone at work when it’s slow and we don’t have any tickets in the kitchen—sacrilege, I know.
2. How long did it take you to write How Are You Going to Save Yourself?
Some of the stories are revamped versions of pieces I wrote as an undergrad, so I guess seven years. It pains me to say that since it makes those 250 pages seem really small. The bulk of the collection was written between 2015 and 2016, though.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How little control I have over it. It is a terrifying process to release your literary babies into the world, where anybody can say anything they want about them. Also, just how long it takes from sale to shelf—slowest seventeen months of my life.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published in some student publications as an undergrad, but the first time I got paid for anything literary was the Paris Review. (Shameless shout out to Anna, my agent. She’s dope.)
5. What are you reading right now?
Currently, I’m reading Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts and Ohio by Stephen Markley. They are very different books. The former is probably in conjunction with my answer to the publication process question. Trying to fill the Zen reserves (even though it definitely doesn’t work like that) before this process really takes off.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
You mean if I couldn’t have any albums? Cause music would be the first piece of art I took with me—probably [Kendrick Lamar’s] Section.80 or Channel Orange. And am I stranded for an indefinite amount of time? Cause if not I’d probably pick something long enough to keep me occupied until I’m rescued. Enough deflecting; tough question. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. I feel like that book would satisfy my philosophy itch and still give me a plot to escape through. I’ve only read it in its entirety once, but the excerpts I’ve read here and there since then keep revealing new things to me.
7. Who is the most underrated author in your opinion?
Claude McKay or Breece D’J Pancake. The latter cause he took his own life so young and has a small body of work. The former, I don’t really know, maybe because he was writing at a time when there were a lot of literary sharks in the water—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. But either way, they both deserve to be on ELA curriculums in the United States.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paying rent.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Attention to detail. I know it sounds like an obvious one, but Ben George is a meticulous dude when it comes to the written word. We’ve had debates over single words. He was also instrumental in helping me hammer out all the age and time continuities in the book.
10. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Almost everything Amity Gaige has ever told me probably ranks up there. When I was graduating from college she told me to go get a job and live a little. She said, “Learn how to write and have a job and if you’re still writing and yearning to write, you’ll be fine. You’ll be a writer.” Either that or, “Don’t write drunk too often, you’ll lose the sound of your own voice.” Her husband might’ve said that one, actually. Either way, they both come from her section and they’re both true.
J. M. Holmes, author of How Are You Going to Save Yourself. (Credit: Julie Keresztes)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Catherine Lacey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Lacey, whose new story collection, Certain American States, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lacey’s formidable range as a fiction writer is on full display in a dozen short stories populated by ordinary people seeking the extraordinary, from a young New Yorker trying to decipher a series of urgent, mysterious messages on a stranger’s phone (“ur heck box”) to a nameless man recently fired by “The Company” who wakes up in a purgatory of linens and pillows (“The Grand Claremont Hotel”). Lacey is the author of the novels The Answers (2017) and Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), both published by FSG. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017. Her novels have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she coauthored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair, published by Bloomsbury last year. Born in Mississippi, she lives in Chicago.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Certain American States?
The oldest story in Certain American States was written in 2012, and the newest was finished in early 2018. But I also wrote two novels during those six years, and I wrote several other stories that I did not include in the collection.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day, usually first thing in the morning until lunch, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Writing regularly has always been the primary way I’ve avoided a nervous breakdown, so it’s unclear to me whether it’s a joyful or medicinal activity. It’s probably both.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Being translated was a shock to me. It continues to be a shock. Based on reception, it seems my novels are better in Italian than English.
4. When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
There are two senses in which a person is a writer; only one of them matters. The more important sense is that you are a person who writes. I don’t recall making the decision to be that writer; I was always writing. The second sense is that you somehow convince other people to pay you to write. I was slow to accept that I wanted to be that sort of writer, or rather I was slow to believe that it was even an option for me, so the moment I realized I had that desire is similarly difficult to track.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Unfortunately, it’s probably someone I’ve never read. The amount of books that were either not written or not published because the authors did not believe anyone would ever care, or could not find the people who would care, is staggering.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish American publishers would pursue more work in translation, especially from smaller countries.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Wanting to read all the time. Illness. The weather. My own overwrought tendency toward nostalgia.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s always the next book. I don’t think beyond the book I’m writing and I’m always writing one.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You can only do a day’s work in a day.
Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States. (Credit: Willy Somma)
The Written Image: The Art of the Affair
Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.
Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Wesley Yang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Wesley Yang, whose debut essay collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is out today from W. W. Norton. A mix of reporting, sociology, and personal history, The Souls of Yellow Folk collects thirteen essays on race and gender in America today. Titled after The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic 1903 collection, Yang’s book takes the reader “deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse,” novelist Karan Mahajan writes. In addition to essays on race and whiteness, The Souls of Yellow Folk includes profile pieces on Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007; political scientist Francis Fukuyama; historian Tony Judt; and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Yang has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, New York magazine, the New Republic, Tablet, and n+1. He lives in Montreal.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day at one of two public libraries in Montreal.
2. How long did it take you to write the essays in The Souls of Yellow Folk?
The essays collected in The Souls of Yellow Folk were written over the course of ten years.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This was the first book I’ve ever published so I had no expectations. I just took everything as it came and accepted it just as it was.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
See above.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Really hard to say. I’m a big fan of Heinrich Kleist, who isn’t universally taught and known.
7. Where was your very first publication?
I worked for a weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, New Jersey, when I graduated from Rutgers. My first publication that wasn’t straight news for a New Jersey local paper was a review of a biography of Albert Speer for Salon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Family life and raising a child requires a writer to organize his workflow in a way that is at odds with the way writing happens, at least for me. I’ve made partial strides in this direction but many remain to be made.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
This collection is a miscellany of previously published essays. Still haven’t written a book that is a single free-standing work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writing is a form of manual labor and should be approached in that spirit.
Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk. (Credit: Rich Woodson)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Kenji C. Liu
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kenji C. Liu, whose second poetry collection, Monsters I Have Been, is out today from Alice James Books. Using an invented method he calls “frankenpo” (or Frankenstein poetry), Liu takes an existing text and remixes it, resurrecting older work to create new poetry that investigates the intersections between toxic masculinity, violence, and marginalization. A book that Douglas Kearney calls “sharp, protean, dextrous, and discontent,” Liu’s collection “shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as hell.” Kenji C. Liu is the author of a previous poetry collection, Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Apogee, Barrow Street, the Progressive, the Rumpus, and other publications. A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of the VONA/Voices workhop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, he lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Monsters I Have Been?
It took about three years, coming on the heels of my first collection. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and received some great advice from Jaswinder Bolina while at the Kundiman retreat. He suggested I pick a line or idea from my first collection that still felt juicy and go all the way down the rabbit hole with it. I did, and Monsters I Have Been is a direct result.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Since the book looks at various types of masculinities, I had to seriously reflect on how to write responsibly about gender. Toxic and conventional masculinities were easier, considering that there are always fresh examples in the news ad nauseam, though I did also try to give them some complexity without excusing away their violence. Unconventional masculinities were more challenging because I didn’t want to replicate dominant forms of representational violence. So I decided to approach these via some of the ways I’ve experienced being racially gendered, misgendered, and sexualized as an Asian American man.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
What’s kept me going is a semi-underground, e-mail–based writing accountability group where you sign up to write every day for a month. Recently I haven’t had time for it, but for many years I joined in for months at a time. When I participate, I write everywhere and anytime, often just a sentence or line per day. I might be at work, in transit, or even stranger places. After doing this consistently for years, writing feels like a habit, something you do every day like brushing your teeth. Writing becomes less “special,” which I consider to be a good thing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
There wasn’t anything in particular about the publication process, but the DIY digital marketing campaign I undertook to promote the book ahead of publication created some unexpected results. Drawing on my experience in design and marketing, I decided to focus on an Instagram account (@monstersihavebeen) dedicated solely to the themes of the book, which cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. I found this created a lot of advance interest, and really helped me gauge the book’s audience ahead of time.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Inheritance of Haunting by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, 2018 winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; I Even Regret Night, poems of Lalbihari Sharma, an indentured Indian servant in the Caribbean, translated by Rajiv Mohabir; American Sutra, on religious freedom and Japanese American Buddhists imprisoned in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, by Duncan Ryuken Williams; and Oculus by Sally Wen Mao.
6. Which authors, in your opinion, deserve wider recognition?
Vickie Vértiz, Muriel Leung, Sesshu Foster, Angela Peñaredondo, Mia Ayumi Malhotra.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I experience my corner of the poetry community as very generous and caring, but I have many issues with professionalizing poetry as a career with certain prizes and residencies you “have to” achieve—it can make people greedy, competitive, and encourage a perception of the world based on lack. I think the poetry community works better when it is cooperative and generous. Poetry shouldn’t be just another capitalist product.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money and time.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I need to sense that they understand what my project is trying to do at a fundamental level. Alice James Books seems to have had that understanding immediately, which I’m grateful for because Monsters I Have Been might take some time for the reader’s brain to adjust to if you have conventional expectations of poetry. If an editor, press, reviewer, or anyone else doesn’t seem to understand the project, it’s clearly not a good fit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
What I actually think of is a writing prompt I received from the poet Suheir Hammad many years ago. She asked us to write about a traumatic experience, and also to find something in the environment of the memory that was beautiful. For me, I think this has translated into ongoing writing advice—to look for beauty and grace even in the challenging material, whenever possible.
Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. (Credit: David Noles)
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Dunya Mikhail With the National Arab Orchestra
“Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and I didn’t notice when it fell from me...” Dunya Mikhail reads her poem “I Was in a Hurry” in Arabic and English, accompanied by the National Arab Orchestra. Her fourth poetry collection, In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Heidi Diehl
“When I get stuck on the question of what’s happening in a piece of fiction, when my words feel stilted or dull, I like to read a bit of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (Burning Deck, 1980). The book consists of thirty-seven prose poems, each one corresponding to a year of Hejinian’s life, each one exactly thirty-seven sentences long. It’s a kind of autobiography, but it’s not narrative—instead, it’s moments, details, language. Freed from the strict confines of a more traditional sense of story, I think about feeling and movement. My mind makes associative connections, wandering to the fictional world I’m struggling with, landing on details of my own life that feel mysterious and charged. My reading lets me tiptoe around the outside of what I’m working on; I can peer through a side window and find something unexpected from that new vantage point. And while this freedom is generative, Hejinian’s use of constraints inspires me, too. A set structure offers a way to make sense of gathered impressions—a way to find patterns and echoes, to tease out emotional meaning. I love thinking about structure, which brings a sense of propulsion, and maybe, paired with the fresh details I’ve discovered, a way to inch forward.”
—Heidi Diehl, author of Lifelines (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)
Writer Photo:
Writer Photo Credit:
Steve Gunn
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Joy Harjo Named U.S. Poet Laureate
Today the Library of Congress announced that Joy Harjo will be the next U.S. poet laureate. Harjo, who is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, is the first Native American poet to serve as laureate. She will begin her term on September 19, succeeding poet Tracy K. Smith.
“Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry—‘soul talk’ as she calls it—for over four decades,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a press release. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”
Harjo is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (Norton, 2015), and the memoir Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012). She is the recipient of the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other honors. On Monday, Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization that supports this publication, awarded Harjo the $65,000 Jackson Poetry Prize.
“I share this honor with ancestors and teachers who inspired in me a love of poetry, who taught that words are powerful and can make change when understanding appears impossible, and how time and timelessness can live together within a poem,” said Harjo of her appointment. “I count among these ancestors and teachers my Muscogee Creek people, the librarians who opened so many doors for all of us, and the original poets of the Indigenous tribal nations of these lands, who were joined by diverse peoples from nations all over the world to make this country and this country’s poetry.”
Harjo succeeds Tracy K. Smith, who served two terms as laureate and focused on bringing poetry to rural and underserved communities. During her tenure, Smith edited and published American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018); launched The Slowdown, a daily poetry podcast produced by American Public Media; and read and spoke at many events across the country as part of her American Conversations tour. “As we approach the end of Tracy K. Smith’s two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, it’s a moment to celebrate her as arguably the most active and effective poet in this role,” tweeted Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts in late May. “That Tracy has done this work, had these conversations, and held this role as a Black woman in a racist and violent nation during this racist and violent presidency is impossible to overstate.”
The poet laureate position, which was originally titled the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,” was established in 1937. Recent poet laureates include Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and Philip Levine.
Joy Harjo: An Interview
Joy Harjo is a poet unafraid of self-discovery. She explored painting, dancing and medicine before focusing on a writing career. Born in Tulsa in 1951 to the Muscogee tribe (of the Creek Nation), Harjo is both Muscogee and white, and her acceptance of both heritages plays a crucial role in her work: Her poetry preserves her Native American background, while integrating aspects of the mainstream American culture in which she was also raised, to create a unique, poignant voice.
Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and went on the study at the University of New Mexico, where in 1976 she was in the first graduating class of its creative writing program. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. She has taught creative writing at the University of Arizona and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico.
Harjo has published four books of poetry and several short stories, and has written several screenplays. She is a winner of several awards, including an Academy of American Poets Award in 1978, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships (in 1978 and 1992), the Josephine Miles Award for Poetry from PEN Oakland in 1991, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1991. Harjo has also served on a policy panel for the NEA.
Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Harjo has a 23-year-old son, Phil Dayn, and a 19-year-old daughter, Rainy Dawn, who is the subject of the poem “Rainy Dawn” that appears in Harjo’s most recent collection of poetry, In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
From a hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, Harjo reminisces about her childhood creative stirrings. “I went outside very early in the mornings to draw in the dirt while everyone was still sleeping. I’d sit there and imagine what I could paint. And what always came to me out of the imaginative sphere were images—not particularly words, but images. Maybe that’s how I think, because sometimes I feel that I write as a painter. It’s almost as if I paint the poems.”
Harjo came from a family of painters. Her grandmother Naomi, a full-blooded Creek Indian, and her Aunt Lois, who was the family member closest to Harjo, were painters. Both women received their BFAs in fine art in the early 1900s and painted in the classical European style, but their subjects were often Native American. In her living room, Harjo has a painting by her grandmother of Osceola, the Seminole warrior who would never surrender to the U.S. government. Harjo uses a different medium, but the same collaboration of classical and Native American influences is the marrow of her poetry.
Reading was a large part of her childhood. She loved poems and memorized them, first because she was forced to in school, and then because she enjoyed doing it. For her birthdays, she requested poetry books, but she was on her own in the quest for quality poetry because she did not have any outstanding educational figures to guide her.
In high school, Harjo trained as a dancer under Rosalie Jones, a dancer of the Blackfeet tribe, and toured as a dancer and an actress with one of the first all-Indian dance troupes in this country. The show was called “Deep Roots, Tall Cedar” and gained recognition from many professional dance companies because it combined elements of classical European drama with traditional tribal drama.
After the tour ended in 1968, Harjo, who was 17 years old, returned to Oklahoma, where her son, Phil, was born. She next moved to New Mexico, leaving Phil’s father behind and enrolled at the University of New Mexico as a premed student. Within one semester she returned to art. The university setting introduced Harjo to a world of poets from backgrounds similar to her own and among the group of Native American writers at UNM she found a poetry that spoke of familiar places in a language she understood, something she had never encountered before. “Most of the poetry available to my generation was set in New England or in the Northeast and was written by men, or women emulating the male experience. I always had to change myself to conform to the poem. But I loved the melodic tones, the rhythm, and the music—those are the things that pulled me into a poem, as much or more than the idea.
One of the first poetry readings Harjo attended was given by Galway Kinnell, who became a source of great inspiration to her. She views him as a musician as well as a poet in the way he writes and reads his poetry. Harjo recounts with verve another significant event that was the turning point in her “unconscious decision” to take up the art of writing poetry: “I was watching a documentary one Sunday afternoon about a tribe in New Guinea. There was a storyteller, but he was also a poet—you could tell by the way he spoke his words. The story was about a hunt for a wild pig, and as he spoke he became—through his inflections and physical movements—the poem, the animal itself, while remaining human. It touched me as nothing else had.”
When asked about other important influences on her poetry, she says, “There are people who were very important to me. They were poets who I felt were human beings with integrity—integrity to the word and integrity to their country (the land), and to their human beingness. I think of people like Pablo Neruda. One of my favorite poets from Uganda, Africa, who influenced me very much is Okot p’Bitek. I love his piece ‘The Song of Lawino.’ I also like the work of other African writers—West African writers especially. In this country, I became excited by the African American writers: Ishmael Reed’s fiction, the work of Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leslie Silko, and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a novel that was pretty much a poem. All were important to my writing.” Harjo had also read the Bible twice by the time she was 12 years old.
Harjo became disenchanted with the academic view of poetry, because it distorted poetry’s sheer beauty. “I think that what’s happened within the past centry, and it probably came with T. S. Eliot—although you can’t blame everything on T. S. Eliot—is that poetry became the property of the academic. It was taken away from the people in a sense, and I don’t believe that’s where poetry belongs—it belongs to the people. Yes, you can take apart literature, separate it, and see how it works, but as with taking apart the human body, you can’t see the spirit, which is at the root of it. It is the same with a poem—you can’t touch the spirit.”
Harjo sought a more creative approach to teaching and adopted a method that was directly influenced by one of her students. “I was teaching a class that involved African music and its connection to the spoken word. There was a young Ghanian man who told an incredible story about how he studied to be a master drummer. At seven years old, he was the apprentice to the master drummer, who would send him out into the bush every morning. He had to listen to all of the sounds going on around him, including the sound of the sun coming up, the insects buzzing, the people going for water, and the sound of the hunters as they went out into the bush. He would take it all in, and his ongoing lesson was to repeat those sounds on the drum and perfect them. Of course, it was the same lesson that went on for years, but it was the first teaching method I felt made sense. The workshop method is useful for technique and craft, but the approach seems more like business rather than the sacred art that poetry is.”
As a poet, Harjo viewed a changing society as an opportunity to explore the new attitudes toward her culture and humanity through writing. “I have felt the explosion of the civil rights movement in this country and have been challenged by the shock waves of human rights struggles all over the world. I’ve been especially involved in the struggles of my Indian peoples to maintain a place and culture in this precarious age. My poetry has everything to do with this. I came into writing at a poignant historical moment. I was lucky to be a part of a major multicultural movement with other writers.”
The beginning of her writing career also coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Harjo noticed a great many poems being written straight from “the kitchen table,” and her poetry fit into this niche as well. “This poetry spoke very openly and honestly of women’s experiences. I considered it to be an incredible revolution in which we gave ourselves back to ourselves. Women had been stripped away by the language, by expectations of the language, and by expectations of the poets and the fathers of the poets. And we are not out of it yet.
“I am seen as a feminist poet. The way I interpret feminism in my own work is the power of a woman to be a warrior—to recognize the warrior characteristics within herself, which include self-love, vulnerability, honesty, integrity, a sense of morals, and so on.” But in a broader sense, Harjo’s poetry reflects the truths of being human, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the physical world we inhabit.
Harjo views herself as a woman who has had to learn—or who is learning—to honor the female within herself. “I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear.
“I’ve had to nurture and accept all the elements of myself—both the creator and the destroyer; accept both my white and my native relatives, and accept the female and the male. It’s an ongoing internal war. I almost destroyed myself by the time I was twenty, because I felt like I had to be one or the other. Finally, at one point I made a stand, and here I am.” If there is any one poem that exemplifies her reconciliation of self, Harjo says it is “I Give You Back” in She Had Some Horses (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983), her second collection of poems.
Harjo’s subject matter is drawn mainly from the Native American tradition of exalting the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her characters may be actual people like Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Russell Moore, or they may be imaginary entities. “I imagine like a fiction writer sometimes. Most readers assume that the events in a poem actually happened to the poet. Not everything I write is autobiographical. In my work, I add to or change the truth. It is still the truth, just presented in a different form.”
There is an inherent spiritual quality to Harjo’s poetry, but she doesn’t feel that she is any more spiritual than the next person. “Part of the way I am comes from being around Native American people, but I wouldn’t really use the world ‘spiritual.’ It is natural for human beings to be in awe of the sacred and to realize that the sacred is everywhere. But humans seem to have lost their way, although every once in a while someone may find it, and I think that’s the artist. The artists and the poets are the ones who search for the sacred place.”
Her first collection of poetry, a chapbook, What Moon Drove Me to This? (I. Reed Books, 1979) is now out of print. “It should stay out of print,” says Harjo. “It was a very young book. There are probably only two good poems in it—poems that showed promise. It was a painful book, written during a difficult period in my life. You could see the beginnings of something, but it wasn’t quite cooked.”
Harjo’s second book, She Had Some Horses, sold over 11,000 copies and is now in its eighth printing by the same publisher. Horses are a recurring image in many of her poems, but when asked about their meaning, she laughs and replies, “I don’t really want to say, and I get asked that question often. I just leave the horses to themselves.”
Secrets From the Center of the World (University of Arizona Press, 1989) was a new kind of book for Harjo, combining photography with poetic language. The photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom was looking for a Native American writer to collaborate with him on his book of photographs of a Navajo reservation. “My friend Rain Perish, a Navajo artist and writer, couldn’t do it and referred him to me. We met, and I loved his photographs. Whichever way you turned the pictures, the perspectives made sense, and I think his being an astronomer and spending so much time looking at the universe affected his vision. He sees the world with immense detail. I wrote some text to go along with the photos, made the rounds to all of those places, and then rewrote the text.” Harjo and Strom worked on the arrangement of the photographs together.
Harjo had already visited most of the places featured in the photographs. “I spent a lot of time going out as a student activist to work with the Navajo people. Many of my friends were Navajo, so I learned the language. I learned the language to the point where I could speak it pretty well, joke in it, and I actually started to dream in it. For me, Secrets From the Center of the World is, in a way a tribute to that time of my life, to those people, to the land, and to the language, which I think influenced my writing very much.”
In Mad Love and War, Harjo’s most recent book of poems, departs from her original chant-oriented writing style. “In Mad Love, the story started to take precedent. Even though the lyric is important for me, the narrative had more of an edge. Maybe I’m getting farther away from the poetics. My next book will be very different. Harjo’s next collection—The Field of Miracles—is a prose narrative, which she hopes to finish within the next year. A recent short story appears in a Norton anthology called Best of the West, a collection of works by writers west of the Missouri, and another story appears in an anthology of short stories by Native American writers called Talking Leaves (Harper, 1991).
Harjo’s work has grown in density and in scope, and her increasing love of music has become a major element in her poetry. She plays tenor and soprano saxophone and is now learning to play the flute. She is excited by the literary possibilities that arise out of writing and playing music. “I started playing the saxophone about halfway into writing Mad Love and could already see the effect of jazz. Even though I’m just learning the elements of jazz, I listen to it a lot.” She doesn’t think that her poetry is “jazz poetry,” although it is very much influenced by the music. “I’m close to my tribal music and ceremony, and there is a relationship to jazz. There is a history of connections among the Muscogee, African American, and Seminole people. What I hear in jazz is my people, and I feel related to the music.”
Harjo’s relationship to jazz runs parallel with her relationship to American poetry. “I am an American, but it took me a while to reconcile my feelings toward American poetry. James Wright praised the American condition, as did Richard Hugo, who truly came out of the American experience. Adrienne Rich, too, is very important—more important to America than America wants to know or realize. I think academics felt betrayed by her when she refused to wear the clothes of her fathers. She refused the forms of her fathers, and left the house of her fathers. When she left the house of the fathers and embraced the mothers, academia felt betrayed. But I look to her honesty as much as her incredible gift of language and intellect.”
Harjo has recently formed a band called Poetic Justice, with a drummer and a bass player, and would like to record a mixture of poetry and music. She has already completed one projected called “Furious Light” (distributed by Watershed Foundation in Washington, D.C.), taped a reading of poetry from She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love recorded over music. The music was taped separately in this instance, but Harjo is eager to produce a tape that integrates poetry and music even more dramatically.
In addition to working on her new book and pursuing her musical career, Harjo is teaching and writing several screenplays for a television series called “Tales From the Center of the Earth.” The acknowledgement and integration of all creative energy—art, history, emotion, music—are highly important to Harjo’s work and daily life. The personal growth Harjo sees through the evolution of her writing is key. “If my style didn’t change and evolve, I would quit writing. Poetry is reciprocal. As poetry feeds you, you have to nurture the art and give it time and attention. It does give back to you, I suppose like anything else.”
Stephanie Izarek Smith is a writer an editor based in New York City. She is currently writing a collection of short prose and poetry.
The opening spread of “An Interview With Joy Harjo” as it appeared in the July/August 1993 issue.
Vote of Confidence: The Life-Changing Support of an NEA Fellowship
For more than fifty years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a vital part of this country’s creative ecosystem, providing funding and support to writers, translators, and organizations, as well as partnering with arts groups and non-arts sectors to create programs, such as Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read, that celebrate America’s rich cultural heritage and promote access to the arts in every community. For readers of this magazine, of course, the most visible—and sought-after—support offered by the NEA comes in the form of creative writing fellowships: $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, enabling them “to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” In short, they allow writers to be writers—even if that means simply giving them the ability to pay the rent or the student loan or the babysitter or the credit card bill—in a world that rarely acknowledges their work in financial terms.
But this isn’t all about the money. This is about being part of a tradition, built over the past half century, that honors artistic excellence in its many forms. This is about writers who are also nurses and farmers and teachers and librarians receiving support and validation from experts in the field—a measure of reassurance that the work they do before or after the day job or the night shift is valuable. And, yes, this is about patriotism: the federal government sending a message that the work of poets and writers is integral to an open society in which free expression is not only protected, but also encouraged.
This and much more is at stake as we move through the congressional budget process following President Trump’s ill-advised proposal to eliminate federal support for the NEA. And while these kinds of decisions often come down to numbers on a spreadsheet, it is important to highlight the real people—with lives and loved ones and dreams and challenges—at the other end of those fellowship checks. I spoke with nine fellowship winners, from 1977 grant recipient Joy Harjo to 2017 fellows Kathryn Nuernberger and Monica Sok, about what receiving the NEA’s creative writing fellowship meant to them, both in terms of practical financial assistance and as a vote of confidence from the federal government at that particular time in their personal and professional lives.
Joy Harjo | Kimiko Hahn | Julia Alvarez | Peter Ho Davies | Anthony Doerr
Benjamin Percy | francine j. harris | Kathryn Nuernberger | Monica Sok
“To be an artist in my family was somewhat expected. My grandmother and great aunt were painters. With Indian oil money, they obtained arts training—but more than that, they were afforded the time to create. Two of my most valued possessions are paintings by them. My grandmother Naomi Harjo even played saxophone. But to be a poet, especially as a single mother, with no additional income, made for a different story. My family was proud of me, but their constant concern was: How are you going to make a living? We already had one poet in our family tree, Alexander Posey, a Muscogee Creek poet who founded the first native daily newspaper, but he made a living as a journalist, not as a poet. I knew that I would write no matter what, and I wrote my way through jobs, classes, and childrearing. The Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Silko was the first writer I knew to be awarded an NEA fellowship, and she urged me to apply. I was about to graduate with my MFA and didn’t have anything lined up except a return home to New Mexico and an application for teaching creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. I remember that late spring afternoon of 1977 opening the letter from the NEA announcing my fellowship. It was the gift I needed. It was enough money to assist me with writing what would be my breakout/breakthrough book of poetry, She Had Some Horses. I used the money for rent, utilities, supplies, and childcare. The fellowship bought me time. And it bought more than that; it brought affirmation. It put my family and community on notice that what I was doing as a poet—a strange occupation for a young native mother who needed to make a living—was considered worthy of support. My next fellowship came in 1992. It gave me the time I needed to get over that hump period that happens in the lives of all of us who create art. She Had Some Horses had set a mark. The second fellowship helped me leap the fence and make a collection that envisioned a book of poetry as an oral event.” —Joy Harjo, NEA fellow, 1977, 1992; author of ten poetry collections and a memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012)
“In the early 1980s I was studying Japanese at Columbia University and working in one of the college’s secretarial pools. When I wasn’t retyping a professor’s paper, I took advantage of the best typewriter in the world, the IBM Selectric, and put it to use for my own purposes. I was the busiest-looking secretary on campus, writing poems that would become my first two books, Air Pocket then Earshot. I was also a thirty-one-year-old new mother without an MFA—which is to say, without mentors or connections—and I felt alone, isolated. All my poet friends had books, but the support for presses was rapidly drying up. For me, mailing out a manuscript with the enclosed SASE was expensive. And waiting for snail mail was crushing. This was the backdrop to a parcel I received in our small mailbox: a thin envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts. I read it in the crack-infested vestibule of my apartment building in New York City and wept. It was 1986, the year I knew I’d be okay—more than okay. The NEA fellowship in poetry gave me validation that cannot be measured. Validation, for me, was a license to trespass: to continue writing fragments about the female body from an Asian American woman’s point of view. It may be difficult now to believe how radical this was: to hold a legal pad and pen in a coffee shop and write with confidence. The fellowship marked a turning point in my life, as it does for so many writers who receive the same gift of validation from the NEA.” —Kimiko Hahn, NEA fellow, 1986, 1992; author of nine poetry collections, including Brain Fever (Norton, 2014)
“My first job out of graduate school was as a poet in the schools in Kentucky, a two-year residency funded by the Kentucky Arts Council and the NEA in 1975. I traveled around the state giving writing workshops and exposing people of all ages and backgrounds to poetry—students in elementary schools and colleges, farmers in communities in Appalachia, and reform-school teens in Louisville. After the Kentucky residency, I went on to teach across America in poetry programs funded by the NEA. I taught migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley; bilingual elementary school students in Baltimore; senior citizens in nursing homes, church basements, and Sunshine Centers, as they were called, centers where a free meal was provided, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This last residency culminated in a book of their writings, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, as well as a series of public readings in the community funded by the NEA. African American eighty-year-olds recited their poems before enthusiastic audiences, feeling for the first time in their lives that they had a voice and were being heard. The program helped create a strong, compassionate, connected community. The NEA is a cultural resource we can’t afford to lose. No other programs are so widespread, addressing so many different age populations and areas of the country. We must not think of the NEA and its programs as something ‘just for artists.’ It is a vital educational resource, which doesn’t quit after our school years are over. We are educating our citizenry in the rich literary resources of this great country and helping them evolve and develop their own expressive tools. An informed citizenry means a stronger, more united, compassionate, and educated America. The individual grant I received from the NEA in 1987 allowed me to take time from full-time teaching and work on the stories that would eventually become my first published novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, based on my family’s immigrant experience after escaping the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. The novel now forms part of the curriculum in many schools and universities—the NEA at work again, enabling the creation of a diverse culture that enriches us all. Finally, in 2015, it was the NEA that nominated me for a National Medal in the Arts. For a little immigrant girl to end up receiving an award from the president of the United States was the American Dream come true. But none of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers. The NEA has served that role for me and so many others. I don’t have a magic wand to wave, but I do have a pen to write down this plea: Keep this incredible national treasure endowed and vital for the next generations of students, artists, writers, and readers, so that they can continue creating the country we all dream this can be.” —Julia Alvarez, NEA fellow, 1987; author of twenty-two books, including the children’s book Where Do They Go? (Triangle Square, 2016)
“I was lucky enough to receive NEA fellowships in 1998 and 2016. Both enabled me to write for a year. Both provided a considerable morale boost. Both made possible the books I was working on. That much is likely true for most recipients, of course. In my case, though, as an immigrant to this country, both also felt like an embrace from my adopted home. The emotional significance of the $25,000 grants, in other words, far exceeded their already handsome monetary value. The NEA also cemented my bond to the U.S. in another way. In between my two awards I had the privilege of serving on the panel that selects NEA fellows, which is how I found myself in a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9 AM on September 11, 2001. We saw smoke rising from the Pentagon through the windows of our conference room. Shortly thereafter, we were evacuated. That afternoon, back at the hotel, we decided, in spite of shock and sorrow, to continue our work. A small gesture, of course, but it felt like something worthwhile, a modest assertion of life and hope, of creativity, in the face of destruction, and one only made possible by dedicated NEA staffers. That night I walked down to the White House, which was floodlit like a beacon, and stood with the hushed crowd gathered before it. There’s been much talk of patriotism in the years between then and now, much talk about what the country stands for. The NEA, representing as it does a nation’s faith in the arts, seemed to me that day and ever since, an institution any country could and should be proud of. The federal building where the NEA was based on 9/11, incidentally, was the Old Post Office Pavilion, now the Trump International Hotel. The cost for a night in its largest suite on September 11, 2017: $25,000.” —Peter Ho Davies, NEA fellow, 1998, 2016; author of four books, including the novel The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
“My wife and I were married in 2000, but we couldn’t figure out how to live in the same town. She was working for Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho, and I was hopscotching around the Midwest chasing teaching gigs and fellowships. We were paying two rents, spending all our money on airfare and telephone bills, and multiple times a year I cajoled my Subaru across Wyoming and Nebraska with our goldfish in a gallon water jug beside me. Every night I asked myself, ‘How important is it to me to be a writer? Important enough to spend anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and random Tuesdays apart? Just because I want to chase a silly dream?’ Then I won an NEA fellowship. I promptly sold the kitchen table, gave away most everything else, drove two thousand miles west, and moved in with my wife. For the first time since we were married, we got to wake up together every morning on a consistent basis. And after she went to work, I got to turn on my computer and face down the dragon of my next book. Years later, serving as a judge on a panel to award those same fellowships, I discovered that all over the country, writers and their loved ones were weighing similar choices: Make a car payment, or write an essay? Take a second job so a partner can finish her novel? The National Endowment for the Arts allows artists and their families to prioritize creativity, even if only for a few months, and sometimes those months are all an artist needs to give back to the country a piece of work that will outlast us all.” —Anthony Doerr, NEA fellow, 2002; author of five books, including the novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014)
Benjamin Percy | francine j. harris | Kathryn Nuernberger | Monica Sok
“If I could have any superpower, it would be to stop or stretch time. And whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say, ‘Time.’ There is never enough of it. Here is the math of 2011: Two young kids, one still in diapers; two teaching gigs—at a traditional and a low-res MFA program—which translates to maybe a thousand manuscript pages in need of editing; one leaky roof; one totaled car; one novel under way; twelve speaking gigs; ten book reviews; six short stories; $40,000 in student loans; a five-hour flight to one set of grandparents; a five-hour drive to the other. There’s nothing startling or appalling about these numbers; I was responsible for many of them, and I was building the life I wanted. But working sixty hours a week and chasing bills and scrambling from one speaking engagement to the next and trying to be there for my family sometimes added up to a schedule that made me feel stretched so thin you could see through me. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I’m not sure I can keep up this pace,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you to.’ The NEA fellowship allowed me to slow down and carve out time so that I could properly research and pour all of my creative energy into a book that I couldn’t have written in such a harried, exhausted state. Time. That’s what these grants give their recipients. The gift of time, which is in such short supply for all of us. And, of course, money: to hire a babysitter. To fly out a grandparent for help. To teach fewer classes or take on fewer freelance assignments—or escape whatever other obligations are keeping us away from the page, the canvas, the studio, the darkroom. And here is the lovely, complicated calculus of the NEA: Those dollars become hours, and those hours become novels, memoirs, sonnets, sonatas, landscapes, photo essays, documentaries that have an incalculable effect on enriching and expanding the lives of their audience.” —Benjamin Percy, NEA fellow, 2012; author of seven books, including the novel The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
“Being awarded the NEA Fellowship changed the direction of my life. At the time it was awarded, I was teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a secondary school in northern Michigan. I enjoyed the job but wasn’t writing enough. While a brilliant few are able to meet the time demands of high school teaching loads and still write, I didn’t have that stamina. Additionally, northern Michigan, though beautiful, was culturally isolating. Short on money and time, I worried I might get stuck in a career that would have meant limits on my writing. Winning this fellowship allowed me to accept my current residency at Washington University in St. Louis. It also gave credibility to my work. For poets, that’s a big deal. While, as artists, we all want to make work that is satisfying on its own merit, most poets do not survive on their work alone. As important as the work is to our audiences, I believe part of the reason harsh critics of the genre can get away with claiming poetry has no social poignancy is because we stand to make so little money in our field. Book contracts offer smaller advances than in other genres, so publishing does not always equal income. People who love poetry often depend on this community of reading and performance, and those events are generally free to the public. With our short form, we have a vibrant and accessible presence online. But it means the power of this art is not in its capital. We do what we love, and fellowships, such as the NEA’s, are monetarily crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has, quite simply, allowed me to continue my work.” —francine j. harris, NEA fellow, 2015; author of two poetry collections, including Play Dead (Alice James Books, 2016)
“The recipient of an NEA grant sits precariously at the nexus of contradictory forces: art, government, and money. Great art ought to have nothing to do with money or power, and so paradoxically it comes to have a great deal to do with both. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggested the distinction between entertainment and art is that entertainment has purpose (to inspire people to pay for it), while art has ‘purposiveness.’ Purposiveness is the feeling that a work of art is accomplishing something beyond its own ends. By providing financial support and putting a spotlight on my recently released collection, The End of Pink, the NEA grant encourages me to focus more on purposive writing and less on a purposeful hustle to find readers, royalties, and otherwise ‘succeed’ in the literary marketplace. I’m able to use this year of grant funding to finalize a third book of poems, Rue, which considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical expeditions and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control through a lens of intersectional feminism. The grant has also allowed me to plan poetry readings in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, often in rural areas that are disconnected from more urban literary hubs. How bold and brilliant a democracy is to invite paradox and dissent into its agencies, its budget, its apparatuses of power and control. Governmental support for the arts, which by their nature challenge the government that funds them, is a mechanism that inculcates within itself a relentless seeking after deeper understandings of what a democratic government should do and be for its people. Though not everyone who deserves these grants receives one, the presence of the NEA reminds all of us that our creative work is essential to the advancement of a great nation with even greater as-yet-unfulfilled ideals.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, NEA fellow, 2017; author of two poetry collections, including The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016)
“My manuscript needs work. It’s full of myth-making and family narratives in the context of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to dwell in my dream space longer, to take more risks in my poetry. With the support of an NEA fellowship, I feel more confident about the imaginary world I’ve been trying to create over the last three years. Every week I continue my process of world-building. I spread out all my drafts and swim in the poems I’ve started. At this time in my personal life, I want to create new structures within my craft, to be wildly imaginative, to survive better in my search for love and healing. Without the financial burdens of rent and utilities, monthly student loans, credit card bills, and medical expenses, I can rest and practice more self-care while dealing with the difficult subject of genocide and intergenerational trauma. The award will also help me travel to Cambodia over the course of writing my first book. When I learned that the NEA might be defunded and then eliminated, I thought about the Khmer Rouge and its horrific transition into power, one where hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted in the early days of the regime. I’ve always been aware of myself as a poet in this country. The urgency to write remains the same for me, but I renew my desire to hone the subversiveness that my craft relies on so heavily. In 1990, the NEA also supported my grandmother Em Bun, a weaver, through a National Heritage Fellowship. My grandmother was a refugee. Over the course of three generations, the NEA has helped two women artists in my family. I strongly believe that it must continue to do the necessary work of preserving the arts.” —Monica Sok, NEA fellow, 2017; author of the poetry chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2015)
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Photo credits: Joy Harjo: Karen Kuehn; Kimiko Hahn: Beowulf Sheehan; Julia Alvarez: Bill Eichner; Peter Ho Davies: Dane Hillard; Anthony Doerr: Todd Meier; Benjamin Percy: Arnab Chakladar; francine j. harris: Cybele Knowles; Monica Sok: Sy J. Abudu
NEA at Risk: The Future of Arts Funding Under Trump
Update: May 23, 2017. The Trump administration today released its first full budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018 (running from October 1, 2017, through September 30, 2018). The $4.1 trillion budget is notable for its cuts to domestic programs focused on social welfare programs, science and research, and the arts, including the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Each of the proposed cuts must pass through Congress before becoming law.
Update: May 1, 2017. The House Appropriations Committee released the FY 2017 Omnibus Appropriations bill, the legislation that will provide discretionary funding for the federal government for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017. The bill includes $150 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), $2 million above the fiscal year 2016 level. Congress is expected to vote early this week on the full spending package.
Update: May 1, 2017. The House Appropriations Committee released the FY 2017 Omnibus Appropriations bill, the legislation that will provide discretionary funding for the federal government for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017. The bill includes $150 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), $2 million above the fiscal year 2016 level. Congress is expected to vote early this week on the full spending package.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a word commonly used to describe the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, was nonideological. Running from outside—and to some extent against—the Republican establishment, Trump appeared ready to offer a policy agenda that would depart from his party’s traditional platforms in ways large and small.
Following his Electoral College victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, however, President-elect Trump launched a transition during which he announced one rock-ribbed conservative appointment after another, including that of Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of far-right media company Breitbart News, who is committed to what he has called “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” as his chief strategist. And in the first six weeks of his administration, President Trump took a series of hard-line Republican positions: cracking down on immigrants, rolling back a slew of Obama-era regulations protecting the environment, nominating a Supreme Court justice said to be “an heir to Antonin Scalia,” reversing federal guidelines on restroom rights for transgender students, and, more recently, announcing a massive military buildup. This last increase is to be funded by deep budget cuts in other programs—including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), an independent agency of the federal government that offers support and funding for individuals and organizations through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector.
On March 16, Trump became the first American president to propose not just cutting funds for the NEA but abolishing it outright. The White House unveiled a proposed budget that includes eliminating the NEA and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, which helps fund PBS, National Public Radio, and local public radio stations across the country.
“We are disappointed,” NEA chairman Jane Chu said in a statement, “because we see our funding actively making a difference with individuals of all ages in thousands of communities, large, small, urban and rural, and in every congressional district in the nation.”
Why kill the NEA? If the $3.9 trillion federal budget is envisioned as a pie, the Endowment’s most recent slice under President Barack Obama ($147.9 million, or .004 percent of the total) would hardly register as a crumb, much less a sliver. And yet the NEA quickly surfaces in nearly any discussion of budget cuts in the Trump era—not because gutting or killing it would contribute meaningfully to any fiscal imperative, but because many Republicans object to it on the ideological grounds that taxpayer funds shouldn’t be spent on the arts, which they consider inessential (or even “waste,” as Brian Darling, a former staffer of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank and longtime NEA opponent, put it in a recent article in the Hill, a newspaper covering politics).
“I am deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s proposed FY 2018 budget calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of the lobbying group Americans for the Arts, said in a statement. “Our nation’s parents, teachers, community leaders, arts advocates, government officials, and even economists will not accept this proposal.”
Although Trump has now gone further than any of his predecessors in the Oval Office, the NEA has been the target of Republican budget hawks since early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of what became known as “supply-side” economics, planned to abolish the NEA and NEH over three years. Those plans—later confirmed in a book by Livingston Biddle, NEA chairman from 1977 to 1981—were shelved when a special task force (which included Reagan’s former Hollywood colleague Charlton Heston) concluded that the two agencies performed a valuable service to the nation. Still, and simply put, conservatives have been critical of the NEA for more than three decades because they consider it a frill.
That philosophy was carried to its logical conclusion at the state level in 2011 in Kansas, where Republican governor Sam Brownback gutted the Kansas Arts Commission by line-item-vetoing the $689,000 in state funding that would have qualified it for matching grants from the NEA and a second group. “In difficult fiscal times such as these, the state must prioritize how to spend its limited resources and focus its attention on providing core services,” Brownback said in a statement at the time. In an interview for Poets & Writers Magazine, Kansas Arts Commission chairman Henry Schwaller called it “a devastating loss.” “This has happened because of the governor’s ideological belief that public funds should not be used to fund the arts,” he said. “But it’s also related to his clear misunderstanding of the role of the arts in society and in Kansas in particular. Children and seniors, especially in rural communities, will lose access to the arts because of this.”
Cultural conservatives also still harbor an animus against the NEA that has its roots in the controversies that erupted in 1989 over photographer and NEA grantee Andres Serrano—whose “Piss Christ,” part of the artist’s Immersions series, showed a plastic crucifix submerged in what was said to be his own urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs depicting the gay S&M subculture were shown in an NEA-supported exhibition in Cincinnati. The Serrano and Mapplethorpe firestorms, stoked by subsequent flare-ups involving the so-called “NEA Four” (performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, whose grant proposals were approved by the NEA’s peer review panels but vetoed by then chairman John Frohnmayer in 1990), turned the NEA into a national lightning rod. Led by Republican senators Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, conservatives in and out of government repeatedly called for the arts agency to be dismantled as an affront to traditional American values. “Do not dishonor our Lord,” Helms railed on the Senate floor in reference to Serrano. “I resent it, and I think the vast majority of the American people do. And I also resent the National Endowment for the Arts spending the taxpayers’ money to honor this guy.”
In recent years, controversies involving NEA-supported art have become exceedingly rare, in part because most grants to individual artists were discontinued, by congressional mandate, in 1995. The exceptions were literature fellowships and two lifetime honor programs, the NEA Jazz Masters and the NEA National Heritage Fellowships. At the same time the NEA’s advocates have successfully made the case for the arts as an economic engine, contributing $704.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013 alone, according to a study conducted by the NEA and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. (That includes for-profit arts activity such as filmmaking.) The NEA has also staked a claim as the nation’s most effective instigator of contributions to the arts by others. For every dollar it awards in grants, the NEA says, up to nine dollars is generated in matching support from private and public sources, leading to an additional $500 million in arts funding in 2016. Still, that onetime shibboleth of the religious right—that the NEA supports degenerate art—still bubbles up now and again on alt-right Internet forums.
Weeks before President Trump unveiled his budget plan, two powerful conservative groups—the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of 173 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives—called upon him to abolish the NEA and the NEH. And the NEA remains a perennial target of right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News, once edited by Bannon and known to be on Trump’s daily reading list. Breitbart has been publishing articles critical of the NEA at least since 2009, when it claimed the agency was encouraging artists to support President Obama’s agenda on education, health care, the environment, and other topics. “The National Endowment of the Arts is under attack—again,” poet Dana Gioia, who led the NEA from 2003 to 2009, wrote recently in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. “The foes are the same tired cast of characters who have assaulted the agency for the last thirty years. Their arguments are the same threadbare notions that have been repeatedly rejected. They are mounting a partisan battle that will do the nation no good. But for the sake of the arts, it needs to be fought again and won.”
Gioia continued: “Both the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee have long been obsessed with ending federal support for the arts. During my six years as the chairman of the NEA under president George W. Bush, these groups launched one unsuccessful volley after another. Their stated rationale was that the federal government had no business funding the arts. Beneath that small-government ideal, however, was another openly acknowledged motive not related to the public good but to political advantage. By eliminating the NEA, they could deliver a symbolic victory against leftist urban constituencies.”
For all these reasons, the NEA finds itself once again in potentially mortal danger. With Republicans now firmly in control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress, the agency’s prospects for continued survival may be dimmer than at any point in its history.
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The NEA was established by Congress in 1965, during the Johnson administration, to “support the survival of the best of all forms that reflect the American heritage in its full range of cultural and ethnic diversity and to provide national leadership on behalf of the arts.” Over the years, the Endowment has dispensed more than $5 billion to artists and arts organizations in the fields of dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, media arts, music, opera, multidisciplinary works, performance art, theater, and the visual arts. (Poets & Writers, Inc., the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine, receives an annual grant that supports the magazine and the website pw.org. Poets & Writers is also a cofounder of the Literary Network, or LitNet, a coalition of sixty-eight nonprofit literary organizations that was established in 1992 as an extension of the now-defunct Coalition of Writers Organizations and in response to the freedom of expression controversies surrounding the NEA.)
In the 2016 fiscal year, more than 80 percent of the NEA’s $147.9 million appropriation was distributed as grants and awards to organizations and individuals across the country. About 40 percent of that money was awarded directly to the states through their arts agencies. The other 60 percent was distributed to artists and arts organizations applying through the NEA funding categories.
In a clear response to past criticism of its grant-making process as “elitist,” the NEA now earmarks a portion of its grants for underserved communities. Forty percent of NEA-supported activities happen in neighborhoods with high poverty rates, and 36 percent of NEA grants go to organizations that reach people with disabilities, people in institutions (including prisons), and veterans. One-third of NEA grants serve audiences with low incomes.
And while some have charged that the NEA favors large cultural institutions that would more appropriately be funded by their presumably wealthy patrons, the majority of NEA grants—65 percent—go to small and medium-sized organizations in every congressional district in the nation.
All grant applications to the NEA are reviewed on the basis of “artistic excellence and artistic merit,” according to “Art Works for America,” the NEA’s 2014–2018 strategic plan. Applications are first evaluated by independent panels consisting of experts in the various disciplines and “at least one knowledgeable layperson.” The panels’ recommendations are forwarded to the NEA’s advisory body, the National Council on the Arts, whose members are artists, scholars, and arts patrons appointed by the president. The council’s recommendations are sent to the NEA chairman (currently Jane Chu, a holdover from the Obama administration), who makes the final decision.
But will there be any grant decisions to be made in the new fiscal year? Will there be a National Endowment for the Arts at all? As of this writing, it’s unclear how Trump’s budget will fare in Congress, where the NEA still enjoys the support of most Democrats and some Republicans, including moderates and even some conservatives. In his statement, Lynch quotes North Carolina Republican representative Mark Walker, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, as saying he opposes Trump’s plans for the arts: “I appreciate the education that is found in the arts, so at this point I have no path to making any kind of hard cuts right now.” In her statement, Chu implied that anything could still happen. “We understand that the president’s budget request is a first step in a very long budget process,” she said. “As part of that process we are working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare information they have requested.”
A message posted to the grant application page of the NEA’s website on the same day the president’s proposal was unveiled reads, “We continue to make FY 2017 grant awards and will continue to honor all obligated grant funds made to date. In addition, we will continue to accept grant applications for FY 2018 at our usual deadlines.... The agency continues to operate as usual and will do so until a new budget is enacted by Congress.”
In the coming months the House and Senate budget committees will each write and vote on budget resolutions, at which point the subcommittee’s “markup” appropriation bills determine the level of spending for all discretionary programs. Then the full House and Senate debate and vote on those bills; only after each bill passes Congress can the president sign them and the budget becomes law.
Whatever happens during this process, it won’t occur under the radar. It will be done in the full glare of the public eye, and under the careful scrutiny of those who benefit from NEA’s support, including members of the literary community who stand ready to protect the future of arts funding.
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Vote of Confidence: The Life-Changing Support of an NEA Fellowship
For more than fifty years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a vital part of this country’s creative ecosystem, providing funding and support to writers, translators, and organizations, as well as partnering with arts groups and non-arts sectors to create programs, such as Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read, that celebrate America’s rich cultural heritage and promote access to the arts in every community. For readers of this magazine, of course, the most visible—and sought-after—support offered by the NEA comes in the form of creative writing fellowships: $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, enabling them “to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” In short, they allow writers to be writers—even if that means simply giving them the ability to pay the rent or the student loan or the babysitter or the credit card bill—in a world that rarely acknowledges their work in financial terms.
But this isn’t all about the money. This is about being part of a tradition, built over the past half century, that honors artistic excellence in its many forms. This is about writers who are also nurses and farmers and teachers and librarians receiving support and validation from experts in the field—a measure of reassurance that the work they do before or after the day job or the night shift is valuable. And, yes, this is about patriotism: the federal government sending a message that the work of poets and writers is integral to an open society in which free expression is not only protected, but also encouraged.
This and much more is at stake as we move through the congressional budget process following President Trump’s ill-advised proposal to eliminate federal support for the NEA. And while these kinds of decisions often come down to numbers on a spreadsheet, it is important to highlight the real people—with lives and loved ones and dreams and challenges—at the other end of those fellowship checks. I spoke with nine fellowship winners, from 1977 grant recipient Joy Harjo to 2017 fellows Kathryn Nuernberger and Monica Sok, about what receiving the NEA’s creative writing fellowship meant to them, both in terms of practical financial assistance and as a vote of confidence from the federal government at that particular time in their personal and professional lives.
Joy Harjo | Kimiko Hahn | Julia Alvarez | Peter Ho Davies | Anthony Doerr
Benjamin Percy | francine j. harris | Kathryn Nuernberger | Monica Sok
“To be an artist in my family was somewhat expected. My grandmother and great aunt were painters. With Indian oil money, they obtained arts training—but more than that, they were afforded the time to create. Two of my most valued possessions are paintings by them. My grandmother Naomi Harjo even played saxophone. But to be a poet, especially as a single mother, with no additional income, made for a different story. My family was proud of me, but their constant concern was: How are you going to make a living? We already had one poet in our family tree, Alexander Posey, a Muscogee Creek poet who founded the first native daily newspaper, but he made a living as a journalist, not as a poet. I knew that I would write no matter what, and I wrote my way through jobs, classes, and childrearing. The Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Silko was the first writer I knew to be awarded an NEA fellowship, and she urged me to apply. I was about to graduate with my MFA and didn’t have anything lined up except a return home to New Mexico and an application for teaching creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. I remember that late spring afternoon of 1977 opening the letter from the NEA announcing my fellowship. It was the gift I needed. It was enough money to assist me with writing what would be my breakout/breakthrough book of poetry, She Had Some Horses. I used the money for rent, utilities, supplies, and childcare. The fellowship bought me time. And it bought more than that; it brought affirmation. It put my family and community on notice that what I was doing as a poet—a strange occupation for a young native mother who needed to make a living—was considered worthy of support. My next fellowship came in 1992. It gave me the time I needed to get over that hump period that happens in the lives of all of us who create art. She Had Some Horses had set a mark. The second fellowship helped me leap the fence and make a collection that envisioned a book of poetry as an oral event.” —Joy Harjo, NEA fellow, 1977, 1992; author of ten poetry collections and a memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012)
“In the early 1980s I was studying Japanese at Columbia University and working in one of the college’s secretarial pools. When I wasn’t retyping a professor’s paper, I took advantage of the best typewriter in the world, the IBM Selectric, and put it to use for my own purposes. I was the busiest-looking secretary on campus, writing poems that would become my first two books, Air Pocket then Earshot. I was also a thirty-one-year-old new mother without an MFA—which is to say, without mentors or connections—and I felt alone, isolated. All my poet friends had books, but the support for presses was rapidly drying up. For me, mailing out a manuscript with the enclosed SASE was expensive. And waiting for snail mail was crushing. This was the backdrop to a parcel I received in our small mailbox: a thin envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts. I read it in the crack-infested vestibule of my apartment building in New York City and wept. It was 1986, the year I knew I’d be okay—more than okay. The NEA fellowship in poetry gave me validation that cannot be measured. Validation, for me, was a license to trespass: to continue writing fragments about the female body from an Asian American woman’s point of view. It may be difficult now to believe how radical this was: to hold a legal pad and pen in a coffee shop and write with confidence. The fellowship marked a turning point in my life, as it does for so many writers who receive the same gift of validation from the NEA.” —Kimiko Hahn, NEA fellow, 1986, 1992; author of nine poetry collections, including Brain Fever (Norton, 2014)
“My first job out of graduate school was as a poet in the schools in Kentucky, a two-year residency funded by the Kentucky Arts Council and the NEA in 1975. I traveled around the state giving writing workshops and exposing people of all ages and backgrounds to poetry—students in elementary schools and colleges, farmers in communities in Appalachia, and reform-school teens in Louisville. After the Kentucky residency, I went on to teach across America in poetry programs funded by the NEA. I taught migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley; bilingual elementary school students in Baltimore; senior citizens in nursing homes, church basements, and Sunshine Centers, as they were called, centers where a free meal was provided, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This last residency culminated in a book of their writings, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, as well as a series of public readings in the community funded by the NEA. African American eighty-year-olds recited their poems before enthusiastic audiences, feeling for the first time in their lives that they had a voice and were being heard. The program helped create a strong, compassionate, connected community. The NEA is a cultural resource we can’t afford to lose. No other programs are so widespread, addressing so many different age populations and areas of the country. We must not think of the NEA and its programs as something ‘just for artists.’ It is a vital educational resource, which doesn’t quit after our school years are over. We are educating our citizenry in the rich literary resources of this great country and helping them evolve and develop their own expressive tools. An informed citizenry means a stronger, more united, compassionate, and educated America. The individual grant I received from the NEA in 1987 allowed me to take time from full-time teaching and work on the stories that would eventually become my first published novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, based on my family’s immigrant experience after escaping the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. The novel now forms part of the curriculum in many schools and universities—the NEA at work again, enabling the creation of a diverse culture that enriches us all. Finally, in 2015, it was the NEA that nominated me for a National Medal in the Arts. For a little immigrant girl to end up receiving an award from the president of the United States was the American Dream come true. But none of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers. The NEA has served that role for me and so many others. I don’t have a magic wand to wave, but I do have a pen to write down this plea: Keep this incredible national treasure endowed and vital for the next generations of students, artists, writers, and readers, so that they can continue creating the country we all dream this can be.” —Julia Alvarez, NEA fellow, 1987; author of twenty-two books, including the children’s book Where Do They Go? (Triangle Square, 2016)
“I was lucky enough to receive NEA fellowships in 1998 and 2016. Both enabled me to write for a year. Both provided a considerable morale boost. Both made possible the books I was working on. That much is likely true for most recipients, of course. In my case, though, as an immigrant to this country, both also felt like an embrace from my adopted home. The emotional significance of the $25,000 grants, in other words, far exceeded their already handsome monetary value. The NEA also cemented my bond to the U.S. in another way. In between my two awards I had the privilege of serving on the panel that selects NEA fellows, which is how I found myself in a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9 AM on September 11, 2001. We saw smoke rising from the Pentagon through the windows of our conference room. Shortly thereafter, we were evacuated. That afternoon, back at the hotel, we decided, in spite of shock and sorrow, to continue our work. A small gesture, of course, but it felt like something worthwhile, a modest assertion of life and hope, of creativity, in the face of destruction, and one only made possible by dedicated NEA staffers. That night I walked down to the White House, which was floodlit like a beacon, and stood with the hushed crowd gathered before it. There’s been much talk of patriotism in the years between then and now, much talk about what the country stands for. The NEA, representing as it does a nation’s faith in the arts, seemed to me that day and ever since, an institution any country could and should be proud of. The federal building where the NEA was based on 9/11, incidentally, was the Old Post Office Pavilion, now the Trump International Hotel. The cost for a night in its largest suite on September 11, 2017: $25,000.” —Peter Ho Davies, NEA fellow, 1998, 2016; author of four books, including the novel The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
“My wife and I were married in 2000, but we couldn’t figure out how to live in the same town. She was working for Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho, and I was hopscotching around the Midwest chasing teaching gigs and fellowships. We were paying two rents, spending all our money on airfare and telephone bills, and multiple times a year I cajoled my Subaru across Wyoming and Nebraska with our goldfish in a gallon water jug beside me. Every night I asked myself, ‘How important is it to me to be a writer? Important enough to spend anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and random Tuesdays apart? Just because I want to chase a silly dream?’ Then I won an NEA fellowship. I promptly sold the kitchen table, gave away most everything else, drove two thousand miles west, and moved in with my wife. For the first time since we were married, we got to wake up together every morning on a consistent basis. And after she went to work, I got to turn on my computer and face down the dragon of my next book. Years later, serving as a judge on a panel to award those same fellowships, I discovered that all over the country, writers and their loved ones were weighing similar choices: Make a car payment, or write an essay? Take a second job so a partner can finish her novel? The National Endowment for the Arts allows artists and their families to prioritize creativity, even if only for a few months, and sometimes those months are all an artist needs to give back to the country a piece of work that will outlast us all.” —Anthony Doerr, NEA fellow, 2002; author of five books, including the novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014)
Benjamin Percy | francine j. harris | Kathryn Nuernberger | Monica Sok
“If I could have any superpower, it would be to stop or stretch time. And whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say, ‘Time.’ There is never enough of it. Here is the math of 2011: Two young kids, one still in diapers; two teaching gigs—at a traditional and a low-res MFA program—which translates to maybe a thousand manuscript pages in need of editing; one leaky roof; one totaled car; one novel under way; twelve speaking gigs; ten book reviews; six short stories; $40,000 in student loans; a five-hour flight to one set of grandparents; a five-hour drive to the other. There’s nothing startling or appalling about these numbers; I was responsible for many of them, and I was building the life I wanted. But working sixty hours a week and chasing bills and scrambling from one speaking engagement to the next and trying to be there for my family sometimes added up to a schedule that made me feel stretched so thin you could see through me. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I’m not sure I can keep up this pace,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you to.’ The NEA fellowship allowed me to slow down and carve out time so that I could properly research and pour all of my creative energy into a book that I couldn’t have written in such a harried, exhausted state. Time. That’s what these grants give their recipients. The gift of time, which is in such short supply for all of us. And, of course, money: to hire a babysitter. To fly out a grandparent for help. To teach fewer classes or take on fewer freelance assignments—or escape whatever other obligations are keeping us away from the page, the canvas, the studio, the darkroom. And here is the lovely, complicated calculus of the NEA: Those dollars become hours, and those hours become novels, memoirs, sonnets, sonatas, landscapes, photo essays, documentaries that have an incalculable effect on enriching and expanding the lives of their audience.” —Benjamin Percy, NEA fellow, 2012; author of seven books, including the novel The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
“Being awarded the NEA Fellowship changed the direction of my life. At the time it was awarded, I was teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a secondary school in northern Michigan. I enjoyed the job but wasn’t writing enough. While a brilliant few are able to meet the time demands of high school teaching loads and still write, I didn’t have that stamina. Additionally, northern Michigan, though beautiful, was culturally isolating. Short on money and time, I worried I might get stuck in a career that would have meant limits on my writing. Winning this fellowship allowed me to accept my current residency at Washington University in St. Louis. It also gave credibility to my work. For poets, that’s a big deal. While, as artists, we all want to make work that is satisfying on its own merit, most poets do not survive on their work alone. As important as the work is to our audiences, I believe part of the reason harsh critics of the genre can get away with claiming poetry has no social poignancy is because we stand to make so little money in our field. Book contracts offer smaller advances than in other genres, so publishing does not always equal income. People who love poetry often depend on this community of reading and performance, and those events are generally free to the public. With our short form, we have a vibrant and accessible presence online. But it means the power of this art is not in its capital. We do what we love, and fellowships, such as the NEA’s, are monetarily crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has, quite simply, allowed me to continue my work.” —francine j. harris, NEA fellow, 2015; author of two poetry collections, including Play Dead (Alice James Books, 2016)
“The recipient of an NEA grant sits precariously at the nexus of contradictory forces: art, government, and money. Great art ought to have nothing to do with money or power, and so paradoxically it comes to have a great deal to do with both. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggested the distinction between entertainment and art is that entertainment has purpose (to inspire people to pay for it), while art has ‘purposiveness.’ Purposiveness is the feeling that a work of art is accomplishing something beyond its own ends. By providing financial support and putting a spotlight on my recently released collection, The End of Pink, the NEA grant encourages me to focus more on purposive writing and less on a purposeful hustle to find readers, royalties, and otherwise ‘succeed’ in the literary marketplace. I’m able to use this year of grant funding to finalize a third book of poems, Rue, which considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical expeditions and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control through a lens of intersectional feminism. The grant has also allowed me to plan poetry readings in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, often in rural areas that are disconnected from more urban literary hubs. How bold and brilliant a democracy is to invite paradox and dissent into its agencies, its budget, its apparatuses of power and control. Governmental support for the arts, which by their nature challenge the government that funds them, is a mechanism that inculcates within itself a relentless seeking after deeper understandings of what a democratic government should do and be for its people. Though not everyone who deserves these grants receives one, the presence of the NEA reminds all of us that our creative work is essential to the advancement of a great nation with even greater as-yet-unfulfilled ideals.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, NEA fellow, 2017; author of two poetry collections, including The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016)
“My manuscript needs work. It’s full of myth-making and family narratives in the context of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to dwell in my dream space longer, to take more risks in my poetry. With the support of an NEA fellowship, I feel more confident about the imaginary world I’ve been trying to create over the last three years. Every week I continue my process of world-building. I spread out all my drafts and swim in the poems I’ve started. At this time in my personal life, I want to create new structures within my craft, to be wildly imaginative, to survive better in my search for love and healing. Without the financial burdens of rent and utilities, monthly student loans, credit card bills, and medical expenses, I can rest and practice more self-care while dealing with the difficult subject of genocide and intergenerational trauma. The award will also help me travel to Cambodia over the course of writing my first book. When I learned that the NEA might be defunded and then eliminated, I thought about the Khmer Rouge and its horrific transition into power, one where hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted in the early days of the regime. I’ve always been aware of myself as a poet in this country. The urgency to write remains the same for me, but I renew my desire to hone the subversiveness that my craft relies on so heavily. In 1990, the NEA also supported my grandmother Em Bun, a weaver, through a National Heritage Fellowship. My grandmother was a refugee. Over the course of three generations, the NEA has helped two women artists in my family. I strongly believe that it must continue to do the necessary work of preserving the arts.” —Monica Sok, NEA fellow, 2017; author of the poetry chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2015)
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Photo credits: Joy Harjo: Karen Kuehn; Kimiko Hahn: Beowulf Sheehan; Julia Alvarez: Bill Eichner; Peter Ho Davies: Dane Hillard; Anthony Doerr: Todd Meier; Benjamin Percy: Arnab Chakladar; francine j. harris: Cybele Knowles; Monica Sok: Sy J. Abudu
Tracy K. Smith Named U.S. Poet Laureate
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has named Tracy K. Smith the next poet laureate of the United States. Smith, who will take on the role in the fall, will succeed Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served as poet laureate since 2015. “It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching,” said Hayden in a press release. “Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion, and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us human.”
Smith, forty-five, is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program. She has written three poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and a memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015). “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture,” said Smith in the announcement. “I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future-readers across this marvelously diverse country.”
Smith is the first poet Hayden has appointed to the position, which was established in 1936 as the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress” and later renamed the “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” in 1985. Each poet laureate serves for at least one year and is responsible for raising national awareness and appreciation of poetry. Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic have all served as the poet laureate in recent years.
Each poet approaches the role, which comes with a $35,000 stipend and minimal specific duties, with a different focus. Robert Pinsky, who served as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, launched the Favorite Poem Project, through which more than eighteen thousand Americans shared their favorite poems. Several laureates have focused more on bringing poetry into the classroom: Billy Collins curated 180 poems for high school teachers to share with their students every day in the school year as part of the Poetry 180 project, while Kay Ryan strengthened poetry’s presence in community colleges through a national contest and videoconference. Other laureates have opted to raise awareness poetry by collaborating with the media, such as Natasha Trethewey with her Where Poetry Lives video series with PBS NewsHour, and Ted Kooser with his weekly newspaper column, American Life in Poetry.
Smith will have plenty of inspiration to draw on when she starts her term in the fall. She is the first poet laureate appointed under the Trump administration, a time that has highlighted the political divisions in the country. If there’s anyone who can remind the American public of the power of poetry to give people a more nuanced way of thinking and understanding one another, though, it’s Smith. “It makes sense to me that the world of commerce and the world of politics would be invested in convincing us that we can each be one thing only: loyal to one brand, one party, one candidate,” she said in an interview with Yale Literary Magazine in 2015. “Too often we forget that we can say no to such false thinking, that nobody is single-sided, two-dimensional…. Poems activate and affirm our sense of being individuals, of having feelings, of having been affected powerfully by the events and people that touch us.”
Read more about Tracy K. Smith in “Far From Ordinary: A Profile of Tracy K. Smith,” written by Renée H. Shea and published in the March/April 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tracy K. Smith (Credit: Christy Whitney)
It & Co. by Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith reads "It & Co." from her third poetry collection, Life on Mars, published by Graywolf Press in May.
Far From Ordinary: A Profile of Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
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In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
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Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Tracy K. Smith (Credit: Christy Whitney)
Q&A: Hayden Leads America’s Library
Nominated by President Obama this past February, Carla Hayden took office in September as the nation’s fourteenth Librarian of Congress. She is the first woman, and the first African American, to hold the position, which involves overseeing the library (a collection composed of more than 162 million books and other items) and its three thousand employees, as well as the nation’s law library, the office of the poet laureate, and the U.S. Copyright Office. Just a little over a month into her term, Dr. Hayden spoke about her plans for making the library more accessible, and a typical day in the life of the Librarian of Congress.
How are you hoping to make the library more accessible to the public?
We’re working on a digital strategy to make the collections available to everyone online. The collections range from comic books to the papers and memorabilia of Rosa Parks to the manuscript collections of twenty-three presidents. We just launched our new home page. It’s more active—you can really get a sense of what the collections are. We’ve also been tweeting every day, one or two things I find in the collections. The response has already been pretty wonderful because I’m tying it to what’s going on in the world. During the World Series we tweeted the baseball-card collections we have. On Halloween we posted the collection of Harry Houdini’s memorabilia—his personal scrapbooks and his funeral program—because he died on Halloween, in 1926. So we’re using social media and technology to touch as many people as possible in interesting ways.
How else do you envision people engaging with the library?
We’re really excited about the possibility of traveling exhibits that can go to local communities, including an eighteen-wheeler that can pull up in a rural area or on a reservation. We want people to be able to get on that truck and have an experience they might not have had if they can’t visit Washington, D.C. We’re hiring a new exhibit designer who has museum experience, and we’re hitting the road and drawing people in. And raising general awareness of the fact that it’s the nation’s library, it’s America’s library.
What do you see as the role of the poet laureate?
Our current laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, shows how to bring poetry into people’s lives in an active and everyday way. He’s demystifying it, and working with teachers, librarians, and people who work with young people to get them excited about poetry and to recognize it around them and in themselves. He wants poetry to be more spontaneous. As he has said, it shouldn’t be something you labor over—you should feel it and write it. He has this activity where he has the kids line up, like a soul-train line—the kids go down the line and write down words they’re hearing. They come out with a poem at the end.
What happens during a day in the life of the Librarian of Congress?
One month in, it is a period of discovery and getting to know not only the collections and the resources, but also the people who care for those collections. That’s been one of the greatest joys and discoveries—the curators are so knowledgeable at the library. So I go from budget meetings to visiting a collection to having the head of the British Library visit to participating in the National Book Festival and things like the poetry slam at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
What are you reading now?
Mysteries. I also just picked up The Gershwins and Me by Michael Feinstein; I got a chance to meet him, and got him to sign it, which was really cool. I have so many books stacked in my home—I have baskets of books waiting, just waiting. I try to think of them as pieces of candy, that they’re treats. If you walked into my apartment, you’d probably think, “This person likes to read,” and be able to find a few things to pick up.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tracy K. Smith’s Poetry Podcast Goes to Radio
Since its launch in November of last year, U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown, has been bringing five minutes of carefully curated poetry to subscribers each day. Starting this month the podcast is expanding its reach, airing on local public radio stations in several cities across the country, including San Francisco, Honolulu, Toledo, Lexington, Charleston, Spokane, and Southampton, New York.
Each episode of The Slowdown features a poem selected, introduced, and read by Smith. Featured poems have ranged from work by well-known contemporary poets—such as Patricia Smith’s “Hip-Hop Ghazal,”Ada Limón’s “The Raincoat,” and Aracelis Girmay’s “On Kindness”—to the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert’s “Love (III).” A full archive of episodes is available, and radio listeners can find the show’s specific airtime by visiting their local public radio station online.
Produced by American Public Media in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress, The Slowdown was created “to make a daily space for poetry in an increasingly busy and chaotic world, a way of slowing things down, looking at them closely, mining each moment for all that it houses,” and to explore the ways in which poetry can help us better understand one another. Through its expansion as a syndicated radio program, the show will reach a wider audience, which speaks directly to Smith’s mission as the country’s ambassador of poetry.
Currently serving her second term as the nation’s twenty-second poet laureate, Smith has launched several initiatives during her post that focus on increasing poetry’s accessibility and readership, specifically in rural America: Her 2018 American Conversations tour, for instance, involved traveling to different cities and towns across the country, giving poetry readings and leading discussions about poetry with communities at libraries, senior centers, churches, and elsewhere. “I’m excited to continue the work I’ve done as poet laureate in celebrating poems and the conversations they foster,” Smith said of the podcast in a press release. “And thanks to technology’s ability to collapse the distance between people—to give you the feeling that there is one person out there speaking directly and only to you—geography is no longer a barrier to participation. I think this is a perfect medium for talking about the very real and natural ways that poems speak to the daily experience of being alive.”
Apart from her work as poet laureate, Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton University and is the author of four books of poetry, including most recently Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018) and Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. Read a Poets & Writers Magazine profile of Smith, “Far From Ordinary,” on the release of her memoir.
Sarah Ahmad is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
Tracy K. Smith (Credit: Christy Whitney)
Three Poets Laureate: Lightning Rods for Poetry
The title of poet laureate is one of the highest honors a poet can hold, but beyond the honor, the post can mean a variety of things. The United States has a national poet laureate, forty state poets laureate, and countless more at the local level, in dozens of cities and towns across the country. All of these offices are overseen by different organizations, from the Library of Congress to local arts councils, and almost none of them have a universally agreed-upon definition of the title. Some have launched initiatives to bring poetry to the classroom, while others have sent poets themselves to the schools. Robert Pinsky asked Americans to send him their favorite poems, while Ted Kooser told the country about his favorites. We talked to three poets laureate—Luis J. Rodriguez, the current poet laureate of Los Angeles; Joseph Bathanti, the former poet laureate of North Carolina; and Natasha Trethewey, the former poet laureate of the United States and current poet laureate of Mississippi—to find out exactly what the title means to them. While they each have a different take, all three shared a common mission: to go out into the community (whether that be a city, a state, or the entire country) and talk to people about poetry and explore the influence it can have on our lives.
Luis J. Rodriguez
Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2014–2016
The author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, published by Touchstone in 2011. His most recent poetry collection is My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Books in 2005.
Before becoming the second poet laureate of Los Angeles, you founded a cultural center, helped start an organization for at-risk youth, worked in gang intervention, and campaigned for urban peace, actually helping to broker peace agreements between warring gangs. As poet laureate, what do you envision as your main project? How will this differ from the extensive work you’ve done in the past? Does the position afford you resources you didn’t have before?
I have forty years of experiences working with troubled youth, in gangs and outside of gangs, for urban peace…for a healthy and clean environment, against poverty, and for social justice. This makes me a unique addition to the poet laureate tradition. Poets laureate are supposed to sing the praises of rulers, kings, queens, or the state; I [want to] sing the beauty and bounty of Los Angeles, but also point out its faults, such as income inequality, [how it is] both the poorest county in the country and one of the richest. My goal is beauty, truth, and the good.
But to do that I have to address the darkness as well as be a beacon for what’s possible, to consider new ways of thinking, living, and relating. An aim then is to use words, images, sound, and movement to convey the parameters of a just, equitable, and free world. However, I don’t want to make this position a “bully pulpit.” While I have a lot to say, and much to decry, I will do this with dignity, responsibly and artfully. There is far more good in Los Angeles, and from here the threads of a caring, cooperative, and fully conscious governance and economy should be imagined and created.
All this informs what I plan to do as poet laureate, including establishing and/or taking part in at least six city-wide events a year; facilitating workshops with youth and neglected communities; visiting and incorporating as many venues, open mics, and important spaces as possible; and, of course, writing poems. I will also work with others—the Mayor’s office, the City Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the L.A. Public Library system, community organizations, and more—to help poetry and the arts explode everywhere. I have always been doing this; now I can continue and magnify my life’s work by other means. I’m eager to use whatever resources this position may afford me to do just that.
You’ve also run for public office—including governor of California—a couple of times. Do you consider the office of poet laureate to be a political position? Do your personal politics inform the way you plan to operate as poet laureate?
Everything I do is intertwined with politics. But I can discern the difference between running for political office, which is ultimately about governance, and being a poet laureate, which I see as being representative of a vast and diverse city with many voices, stories, flavors, and tongues. Mayor Eric Garcetti is moving in the right direction by addressing minimum wage, the environment, and the arts. Politically we may agree. But I’m aware that I have to be careful of how I use this position—neither to be the mayor’s “water boy” nor to seek occasions to attack him. Mostly I want to look outward, to people and their everyday concerns.
By its nature, poetry can address any and all issues, including governance. It is also a highly personal and revealing art form. I aim to help bring poetry to the center of our culture. Presently, poetry in our city, state, and country is highly marginalized, concentrated in a few hands; it’s not promoted and mostly unused. People are much more engaged in popular culture, sports teams, video games, reality shows, celebrity gossip—which is all entertaining, but very much pushed on the rest of us. There’s big money in this. Poetry is not that easily appropriated. You don’t need an industry to do poetry. Anyone is capable. Poetry, like most art, is internal. Provide skills, mentoring, and cultural spaces, and poetry can come alive for anyone.
Poetry is deep soul talk, truth derived, and therefore immanently scary. It’s a prophetic act, not in the sense that poetry or art “predicts” the future, but that it pulls from the threads of the past, the dynamics of the present, to point to a future free of uncertainties and inequities. I [want to use] my assignment as poet laureate to emphasize the healing and revolutionary qualities of poetry to a city hungry for authenticity and personal authority. Therefore, my politics, ideas, and experiences inform this position; I’ve also taken into account the particular limits and requirements of being poet laureate. They are not contradictory.
I’m curious about this idea of poetry being both healing and revolutionary—can you say more about that?
I found poetry to be healing in my life. Without pressures from teachers, I wrote my heart out as a teenager in jails, in the street, but mostly in a small room next to the family garage that I stayed in until age eighteen. I became expressive, emotive, revealing—unlike the stammering and inarticulate noises of a sensitive and shy child. For me, writing became inseparable from spiritual and psychological growth. As a raging young man, writing provided a powerful outlet. All rage ultimately has roots in deep grief. I tapped into this as well. That’s why many therapists use writing in their treatments. I don’t claim that poetry is a full treatment program, but it’s therapeutic nonetheless. And in thirty-five years of doing workshops in schools, prisons, juvenile lockups, migrant camps, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, universities, and colleges, I’ve seen the power of writing and poetry to awaken the dream of one’s life.
Later when I decided to make writing a profession, I went back to school to learn grammar, spelling, and syntax. These are invaluable. These helped me sharpen the three aspects of any great art: clarity, gravity, and integrity. These are also aspects of a developed life. Yet they are not necessary to draw stories, imaginings, fears, and hopes from the most reticent of audiences.
The revolutionary nature has much to do with poets being the truth-tellers of the culture. They are the first to point out that the “emperor has no clothes”—or that a society at its core is bankrupt. Poets do this artfully—with powerful images, interesting language, and a musical sense. In addition, expanding any concept of revolution, it is also of the mind, the heart, and culture. Revolution is for the right kind of change to re-balance the right kind of inequity. Not simply ideological, but tied to objective and palpable needs. Poetry, like all art, can be politically and humanly charged. I’m for that, challenged also by the nature of the art.
You also mentioned the limits and requirements of being poet laureate. What do you consider those limits and requirements to be?
So far the requirements are basic: Enhance the presence and appreciation of poetry and the literary arts in Los Angeles by engaging with the community in all its diversity, [through] a number of readings, workshops, and events; honor historic L.A. writers; and create new work. There’s a plan for a monthly blog on the city’s website, and I can write one or more commemorative poems to Los Angeles. Of course, I can do more—anthologies, publications, social media outreach, my own blogs and podcasts. My aim is to go broader and deeper. I [want to] be keenly aware of social mores, differences, and a general sense of propriety. I personally won’t use inappropriate language or insulting and divisive images. As long as I’m in this position, I won’t lend my name to political office seekers or be used for commercial purposes. Be that as it may, I will address as many issues as I can with dignity. I will assert my voice and help create spaces for more voices, ideas, and stories to be heard. I will continue to speak out, but as delicately and artfully as I can. This is a great responsibility and opportunity, not to be squandered or misused. And as I’ve stated before, this position should also not be so limiting that I can’t be who I’ve been most of my life—a revolutionary thinker, activist and truth-teller.
In terms of writing poems to Los Angeles, is there any pressure on you to write poems portraying the city in a positive light, to gloss over its problems? Or, in a more general sense, is there an expectation that you write a certain kind of poem?
Mayor Eric Garcetti chose me knowing I’ve spoken my heart, written about hard, dark things, run for office, and fought for a just world. There is no pressure to write poems that make L.A. appear more—or less—than what it is.
Though you’ve spent most of your life in Los Angeles, you also lived in Chicago for a number of years. How do you view the two cities? Did you see similarities between the communities? Is the role of poetry different in Chicago than in LA?
I see Chicago as my second home. I was enmeshed in Chicago politics, youth work, and poetry for fifteen years. I started Tia Chucha Press, a small cross-cultural poetry publisher, in Chicago—it’s now the publishing wing of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Even my most famous “L.A.” book, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., was published while I was in Chicago. On the surface, Los Angeles and Chicago are as different as two cities can be. Chicago is Midwestern, compact, flat, old, with three-story flats, and home to amazing blues, jazz, and the now world-renowned poetry slams. But the similarities are striking. They are both the largest manufacturing centers of the country. Chicago is known for its meatpacking yards, steel mills, and trains. But L.A. also had meatpacking, steel mills, auto plants, aerospace industries, a massive harbor, garment plants, canneries, and more (I worked in many of those industries as a young man).
Unfortunately, most people think L.A.’s industry is solely in Hollywood. During the de-industrialization that first struck the U.S. in the mid-1970s, picking up steam in the 80s and 90s, both cities got hit hard. For four decades, L.A. and Chicago have been the country’s gang capitals, mostly generating armies of economically strapped youth during this de-industrialization process when the trade in drugs and guns took the place of industrial-based work. Chicago today has more gang violence, but for years L.A. led in this area. Both Chicago and L.A. have been active in “squeezing” black and brown communities through versions of gang injunctions, gentrification, and high rents, forcing many poor to move to suburbs or outlying communities and states. But L.A. has been more successful at this, including massive deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans. Because of these two cities, I’m working-class in my ideology, writings, work ethic, and make-up—in my blood.
As for poetry, Chicago sparked a literary explosion in the mid-1980s that has moved across the country and other parts of the world, including slam poetry. I took part in this phenomenon not long after it began at the Green Mill Lounge in Uptown. I moved to Chicago in 1985 and in three years I became integral to this, as cofounder of the Guild Complex and cofounder of the Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, which at one time brought three thousand people to the city’s lakefront. I was even on the first slam poetry tour of Europe in 1993. I was at the heart of this particular brand of performance poetry that also included poetry bands, poetry videos, poetry theater, and more.
I also did writing workshops in homeless shelters, prisons, and juvenile lockups. And I worked as a journalist and editor, primarily in community newspapers, magazines, and radio. In addition, I pioneered gang intervention work through Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach Program. When I returned to Los Angeles in 2000, I took this spirit and experience with me. This became the catalyst for the creation of Tia Chucha’s—in thirteen years we’ve raised more than a million dollars for community-based multi-arts training and presentation.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement—as a writer, an activist, or a community organizer—so far?
I can’t say any area is more valuable or more appreciated. I am every one of these—writer, activist, organizer—and I’ll add father, husband, elder, teacher. However, I incorporate them as a whole. For example, my writing cannot exist outside of activism, family, and community. Because I’ve been largely fractured, with various aspects of myself at odds with one another, it’s important for me to be keenly aware of this process. Any achievement I’ve had as a writer is integrated with revolutionary ideas and actions. Being L.A.’s poet laureate, given to me largely because of my development as a poet, my discipline, my contribution to spreading the power of poetry, is inextricable from being a long-time change agent. Not change [as in], “Let’s do something different” (though this can be part of it), but what needs to be changed in order to align. In my personal life it was for my emotional, spiritual, psychological, creative, and physical aspects to align to the dream of my life—to my gifts, my passions, what I was inherently born to do. I had to change addictive, raging, and impulsive dispositions in my nature. For society it’s aligning to the regenerative capacities of the earth and of people—which means having the right relationships so both can thrive. Presently we are not aligned this way in society or in our governance. This means changing those characteristics of the post-industrial capitalist world that tear away at the healing qualities of earth and people. So while I may emphasize poetry these next two years, including the vitality of poetry in anyone’s life, the underlying motives are these alignments—both for the short and the long range; for the immediate demands, and for our future.
Joseph Bathanti
North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2012–2014
The author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Life of the World to Come, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Concertina, published by Mercer University Press in 2013.
You initially moved to North Carolina as part of the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. How did this experience shape the sort of poet and teacher—and, by extension, poet laureate—you would go on to become?
When I arrived as a VISTA volunteer in North Carolina, in 1976, recently out of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, I was burning to write, though I hadn’t really engaged in it with the kind of steadiness necessary to pile up pages. By happenstance, I was assigned as a VISTA to the North Carolina Department of Corrections and spent the next fourteen months, more or less, in a cell block or on a prison yard—mainly at Huntersville Prison, about twelve miles north of Charlotte—immersed in the tangle of things related to incarceration and reentry.
Prison is a place of extremes where very dramatic things happen by the moment. Young writers often harp about not having anything to write about, but suddenly I was handed a trove of material. Thus I started writing, rather obsessively, about the surreal world of prison. What’s more, my first foray into teaching began in prisons. One of the first things I did as a new VISTA was to organize informal writing workshops in the trailer [connected to] the prison that served as the de facto classroom. I’d supply the guys with a prompt, they’d read what they wrote, and then we’d kick it around. I was also able to put together a couple of saddle-stitched anthologies that featured their poems, stories, and artwork.
I wasn’t thinking at all, back then, that those weekly sessions in that too-hot or too-cold trailer might be therapeutic for the prisoners. It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms, nor had the big conversation about the indisputable benefit of writing in dealing with various sorts of trauma been initiated on a widespread scale. I initiated those sessions because I saw them as extensions of my own desire to write and as a way to contribute to the VISTA project. I became, of course, mystified and intoxicated by the stories those men had to tell and the manner in which they told them. I also launched into reading everything I could get my hands on about prison, especially poetry and fiction.
When asked to recapitulate my career, I always say that my first teaching job was in a prison, and in the narrowest sense this is true. More importantly, my VISTA assignment and teaching in prison were not only the beginning of my own education, but the true genesis of my writing life.
I discovered in VISTA that prisons are but one shackle in the ponderous chain of group homes, halfway houses, soup kitchens, mental hospitals, women’s shelters, juvenile detention centers, and homeless shelters. The same characters show up in each script. It’s no secret that all social ills are intimately connected, but it’s something I had to learn by seeing for myself. I became not only aware of the vast subculture of poverty and affliction, but also of the often invisible network of agencies, organizations, and socially [engaged], charitable individuals committed to helping the kinds of folks who find themselves in such places.
The philosopher and theologian Thomas Moore said, “Deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.” As a result of being not only with prison inmates daily, but also in close proximity to the community of mercy which inevitably responds to suffering, I experienced a radical shift in my imagination. Revealed to me was a rare and secret world and I was an eyewitness to it. Not only was it consciousness-raising, it was life-changing.
As North Carolina’s poet laureate, I was interested in getting in front of every citizen of the state I could manage to visit, but I was also especially keen on visiting those people and those regions of the state—very rural and/or underserved—that did not have regular access to writers and literature, including the populations my service in VISTA revealed to me.
It seems like the act of teaching writing lay at the heart of your work as poet laureate, especially in your signature project of working with returning veterans and their families. How did this go for you? Did you have any specific goals or hopes in mind for the project, and were they achieved?
Ultimately, teaching is at the heart of a poet laureate’s service. A solid poet laureate, certainly at the state level, has to be a teacher, an educator. It’s a job that demands a decided pedagogical range to work with all kinds of folks in unimaginably diverse locales—not to mention all the planning and preparation that goes into it all. Traditionally North Carolina poets laureate spend a considerable amount of time in K–12 schools, cheerleading not only for the children, but for those embattled, dedicated, hard-working teachers who ensure that writing and reading endure. That same kind of teaching by the poet laureate also occurs in county libraries, community colleges, universities, churches, shelters, and hospitals. The laureateship in North Carolina remains, I’m pleased to say, a grass-roots service position.
When I declared my signature project as poet laureate—to work with military veterans, those returning from combat and others, and involve their families whenever possible, to tell their stories through poetry and other genres—I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’m dramatically smarter today about the issues plaguing veterans and their families than I was thirty-two months ago, when I declared my aim to pursue that work, but I’m still very much on the front end of that apprenticeship.
Since then, I’ve taught at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the Veterans Writing Project summer workshops at George Washington University, and a number of other venues. But, primarily, my work with vets and their families has been in North Carolina. There is nothing terribly fancy about what I do. In the main, I walk into those places and simply talk to those folks for a while, then ask them to talk, and then I ask them to write—not necessarily about their wartime experiences, but inevitably that’s exactly what they end up writing about. And the writing these sessions yield is always breathtaking.
At the outset of my project, I had hoped to launch a statewide initiative, to create a model that would be perpetuated beyond my tenure as poet laureate. I don’t think anything quite that ambitious was ever achieved, in a codified sense. Yet—because of my work, in part, and the attention the North Carolina Arts Council focused on it, and other like-minded agencies and committed folks that rallied to the cause—I do think there was a certain amount of concentrated attention devoted to vets and their families and how writing and other arts can be implemented to not only bring to light their stories, but also to assist them as they deal with the often debilitating fallout associated with deployment.
Again, I cannot at all take credit for this. So many terrific initiatives were already in place or in the process of taking hold when I was appointed poet laureate in 2012. I more or less became a focal point for the crucial intersection among vets, their families, and writing. The North Carolina Arts Council took up that torch, spread the word, and paved the way. Essentially, I mimicked what others had hatched before me. And I reached out initially for help, notably and especially to Ron Capps, founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project in D.C., and Donald Anderson, editor of War, Literature & the Arts, at the Air Force Academy.
In your essay “Ghostwriting,” you mention an aspect of teaching creative writing in prisons that I would think carries over to working with veterans as well: “In prison there are certain stories you simply do not criticize; to do so would be an epic breach of etiquette. Disrespect. Like you didn’t get it.” This can sometimes feel true even in more traditional creative writing settings, when someone shares a piece that is too real, too much from the heart, to be given the normal workshop critique. In these situations, what services are left for a writing teacher to provide?
There are times when a writing teacher’s number-one task is to get the heck out of the way. I’m thinking primarily of the work I’ve done with prisoners and veterans—and I taught for a year in a battered women’s shelter—but also students of mine at the university. These folks might be taking their very first crack at articulating how they really feel about subjects that are often explosive and intimate—things they’ve kept hidden inside, possibly for years—in language, on paper, with strangers in the room.
They are suddenly exposed. It’s terrifically dangerous terrain. The teacher’s initial job is to get them to write anything, to assure them they have something to say in the first place, that they indeed have stories worthy of being told and listened to. Worrying about whether it’s good or not can come later—the assessment part, the craft part. Critical appraisal at this point is irrelevant. What’s more, their presence in such a class—especially in the case of vets and prisoners (and other immured populations)—might be a one-shot deal. The teacher has to ensure, through his very measured response, that he does not convince them that they were fools to put pen to paper in the first place.
The fact that certain folks even show up in a class or workshop strikes me as poignant. It’s not about style. It’s like being in church. You don’t criticize the style of someone’s prayer. You don’t tell someone who’s learning to talk again after a four-decade silence—as in the case of some Vietnam vets I’ve had in classes—that he’s going about it improperly. A hush pervades the room when one of these silent sealed vets—or anyone—elects finally and mysteriously to open up. The first draft sometimes is a wail, a keen—what Whitman called that barbaric yawp—and it tends to look very different on the outside than it did on the inside. And once it’s out, it can’t be called back. The teacher’s crucial goal with beginning writers, in any setting, is to keep them talking, keep them writing—until what’s too raw, too hot, seasons and cools. So you have to be pretty darned careful with any kind of knee-jerk qualitative judgment. The teacher’s job, initially, in these instances, is to back off, and get invisible in a hurry, and simply listen.
When Valerie Macon was appointed as your successor, there was an uproar over her perceived lack of qualifications and the governor’s rejection of the traditional nomination process, causing her to step down less than a week later. One positive that came out of the situation was the revelation that North Carolina really does care about its poet laureate. It’s obviously much more than a ceremonial role or an empty political gesture. What about the state and its poets do you think fosters that attitude?
The uproar that ensued as a result of Valerie Macon’s appointment was triggered by a number of things, chiefly the fact that the long-standing process that had been in place to select North Carolina’s poet laureate was completely ignored. A great deal has been written about that fiasco, and everybody, everywhere, knows about it, so I won’t beat that straw man anymore. However, there was a terrifically positive side to that uproar. North Carolina poets and writers and readers sent out the message loud and clear that the poet laureate post in North Carolina matters very much to them and, by extension, and more importantly, that the cherished integrity of North Carolina’s legacy of writing and literature is something very much worth fighting for.
We often hear the word community used to describe a body of writers; and, in truth, the community of North Carolina writers is the real thing, not merely a rhetorical community. The writers of this state tend to know one another and support one another and care about one another; and, without getting too saccharine, there’s much about that community that’s familial. It’s a big state, but the literary community is very connected. It’s like a union. What’s more, the legacy of North Carolina and its writers, current and past, are supported and celebrated in every county in the state, in large places and very small places—in public schools, colleges and universities, community colleges, public libraries, local arts councils, and bookstores.
Of course, as in any other state, there are tiers and hierarchies among the writers here, but nothing elitist or hegemonic, nothing cutthroat. When I first arrived in North Carolina, thirty-eight years ago—a Pittsburgh Italian Yankee—the only writing credential I had was my yearning. I could not have been treated any more generously, any more graciously, by the established writers here. They nurtured me. They welcomed me into their ranks. And I really do believe that spirit of generosity, of inclusiveness, has continued to earmark North Carolina as the best place to be a writer. That’s certainly been my experience.
What rankled me more than anything during the flap over Valerie Macon’s appointment were the charges—from those folks who thought having a poet laureate was superfluous—that the post was “honorary,” “ceremonial,” “symbolic.” These were three words used to describe the appointment. Nothing is further from the truth. Poets laureate in North Carolina get in their cars and travel to the people. They show up everywhere. I made upwards of three hundred appearances during my tenure as poet laureate. I’ve said before that I don’t want a medal. It was my honor. But I do want to underscore that I took all my cues from my North Carolina poet laureate predecessors, the tradition of pride and service they exemplified, and the trails they blazed ahead of me.
In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of poet laureate positions in the country. Most states appoint a poet laureate, and many cities do as well. What do you think is behind this surge in the desire to name an “official” poet of a region?
The surge in poet laureate posts has been prompted, I’d assume, by the surge in poetry, of all stripes, all across the country. Such proliferation is another indication of the health of poetry and its democratization among, hopefully, the working class and the most marginalized citizens, folks who perhaps do not have ready access to poetry—and here I’m thinking about my own childhood and the very working class, ethnic neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I grew up.
State poets laureate work very hard, but realistically can reach only so many people; and, again, my chief concern is that poets laureate maintain a vibrant visible presence among public school children as well as various immured populations—among everyone. The appointment of city, town, and county poets laureate certainly instigates dialogue and activities (workshops, readings, classes, you name it) that zero in on poetry in specific communities and spread the benefits of poetry as avenues to the obvious art of reading and writing and performing poetry, its timeless culture and appreciation, the enjoyment, the fun, that it provides. But those kinds of activities and dialogue also underscore essential keys to life enhancement: literacy, critical thinking, cultural awareness, community solidarity, and the groundedness and self-esteem that familiarity with one’s own stories—in one’s own language—and their importance brings.
Poets laureate who are from—in every sense of the word—those communities that appoint them (urban and rural, enormous and tiny)—who know and live among their target audiences—have a cachet that creates extraordinary groundswells around poetry in a particular locale. What’s more, the nominal dollars invested in launching these grassroots poet laureate programs repay those dollars exponentially in healthier, safer, and more rooted communities.
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Natasha Trethewey
United States Poet Laureate, 2012–2014
Mississippi Poet Laureate, 2012–2016
The author of five collections of poetry, most recently Thrall, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2012.
Could you talk about your signature project as the U.S. poet laureate, “Where Poetry Lives?” What were your goals behind that project?
Well, just what the title says: to show how and where poetry lives in the United States. How people are making use of poetry in their everyday lives in order to contend with all sorts of social issues. For example, we went to the juvenile detention facility in Seattle and looked at a program called Pongo there that uses poetry with incarcerated teens, as well as with homeless teens who are often coming to the homeless shelter after being released from a juvenile facility.
Do you feel like the project was a success? Or was there anything you would do differently now?
Oh, I think it was wonderful. We hit such a wide variety of places, from a juvenile detention facility to Harvard Medical School, where the poet [and physician] Rafael Campo believes in teaching poetry to interns because it helps make better doctors. It helps make physicians better able to treat the whole patient—physicians who have more empathy. We also [visited] an MFA program in Los Angeles that has a service component as part of its curriculum where the graduate students go out and find ways to bring poetry into their communities.
Could you talk a bit about your office-hours project? It had been a while since a poet laureate had held office hours before, right?
Right, not since the position was a consultantship, before it became the laureateship [in 1985]. I thought of it because, when I was named poet laureate, one of the things that happened was newspapers called and asked, “What’s your project going to be?” And I doubt that most people are sitting around thinking, “When I get named poet laureate, this is what I’m going to do.” So of course I didn’t have a project in mind, and it occurred to me that since the Library of Congress thinks of the poet laureate position as a “lightning rod” for poetry in America, and that the role that they like to see the laureate take on is to bring poetry to a wider audience, I wanted to figure out how best to do that. And it seemed to me that one of the best ways was to talk to people about the role of poetry in their lives and to see how they imagined poetry could be brought to a wider audience in the country. And so that’s why I decided to open my office and invite people in to talk to me about just that.
And through these meetings, by talking to people about poetry in this way, did you feel like you learned about what was happening in poetry in America?
I did. You know, every few years an article comes out in the Wall Street Journal or other places about how nobody cares about poetry and it doesn’t mean anything. We hear that again and again, and yet that was not the case at all when I met with people, from all walks of life, who came in to talk about what poetry means to them, and how it is important. And so I learned with even more conviction that poetry is alive and well and matters to people in this country.
What kinds of people were coming in to meet with you?
Everybody, really. I had everybody from groups of schoolchildren to senior citizens, writing groups who either got together because of a fellowship program at their church or at their senior community center. I think someone who was a lobbyist in Washington came. I should have made a list of all the different kinds of people, but it was just people who did all sorts of things. Sometimes it was researchers or people writing about poetry, or other poets themselves, or college students. It was a big list of people who were very different. But all lovers of poetry.
You once said in an interview for PBS NewsHour that you considered the role of poet laureate to be as a “cheerleader for poetry.”
[Laughs.] Oh, yes, I did say that, didn’t I?
I was wondering if you could expand a little more on what you meant by that. You also said that part of the role is to be a promoter. How do you feel like you as a poet laureate can promote or be a cheerleader for poetry?
Yeah, you know, that’s one of the funniest things I think I ever said. If only I’d said ‘advocate,’ or ‘ambassador,’ or something more dignified. [Laughs.] But I just had to come on record and say that the University of Georgia, when I was in college, I was head cheerleader. Yes I was. And I think I had been talking to Rob Casper right before I went in to speak with [PBS NewsHour’s] Jeff Brown—Rob is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is, to use another one of those phrases, like an Energizer bunny. He has so much energy that he gets me kind of hyped. And so we were sitting there, getting excited about what we were going to do about poetry, and then I go in [to the interview] and say, “I want to be a cheerleader for poetry!”
But I guess in some ways it’s not that silly. It’s a very plain way of saying that I have great enthusiasm for poetry and I want to share that with other people in ways that gets them enthusiastic about it, too. That’s what a cheerleader does.
During your tenure as U.S. poet laureate, you had also begun serving your four-year term as the state poet laureate of Mississippi. How do those two roles differ, in your experience?
Well, because I was doing both at the same time, a lot of my focus was drawn to the national level. And so I did the kinds of things that I did on the state level, which are of course ongoing, because I have two more years on my term. I participated in, for example, going to the state house, the capital, in Jackson on the day that they promote the arts, where various arts groups come to talk to the state senators and people in the house about the roles of arts in our lives. And so I was there to participate in that and to promote the arts and poetry in the state of Mississippi. I’ve also done other events, readings and other kinds of visits in the state. Not as much as what I was doing on the national level.
What has been your greatest challenge during your time as poet laureate?
Oh, goodness. That’s a good question. I’ve only had the opportunity to talk about the things that have been the greatest rewards of it. Well, I suppose the greatest challenge for me would have been that, because I wanted to be an advocate and because I wanted to see the role as a public service position, I occupied a very public place for those two terms and I traveled a lot and I did a lot of things and it made it harder for me to have the quiet time that a poet needs to write poems. So my biggest challenge was finding time to also still be a poet—not just an advocate for poetry, but a working poet who could sit down and have some time to write poems.
Nick Narbutas is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
Three Poets Laureate: Lightning Rods for Poetry
The title of poet laureate is one of the highest honors a poet can hold, but beyond the honor, the post can mean a variety of things. The United States has a national poet laureate, forty state poets laureate, and countless more at the local level, in dozens of cities and towns across the country. All of these offices are overseen by different organizations, from the Library of Congress to local arts councils, and almost none of them have a universally agreed-upon definition of the title. Some have launched initiatives to bring poetry to the classroom, while others have sent poets themselves to the schools. Robert Pinsky asked Americans to send him their favorite poems, while Ted Kooser told the country about his favorites. We talked to three poets laureate—Luis J. Rodriguez, the current poet laureate of Los Angeles; Joseph Bathanti, the former poet laureate of North Carolina; and Natasha Trethewey, the former poet laureate of the United States and current poet laureate of Mississippi—to find out exactly what the title means to them. While they each have a different take, all three shared a common mission: to go out into the community (whether that be a city, a state, or the entire country) and talk to people about poetry and explore the influence it can have on our lives.
Luis J. Rodriguez
Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2014–2016
The author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, published by Touchstone in 2011. His most recent poetry collection is My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Books in 2005.
Before becoming the second poet laureate of Los Angeles, you founded a cultural center, helped start an organization for at-risk youth, worked in gang intervention, and campaigned for urban peace, actually helping to broker peace agreements between warring gangs. As poet laureate, what do you envision as your main project? How will this differ from the extensive work you’ve done in the past? Does the position afford you resources you didn’t have before?
I have forty years of experiences working with troubled youth, in gangs and outside of gangs, for urban peace…for a healthy and clean environment, against poverty, and for social justice. This makes me a unique addition to the poet laureate tradition. Poets laureate are supposed to sing the praises of rulers, kings, queens, or the state; I [want to] sing the beauty and bounty of Los Angeles, but also point out its faults, such as income inequality, [how it is] both the poorest county in the country and one of the richest. My goal is beauty, truth, and the good.
But to do that I have to address the darkness as well as be a beacon for what’s possible, to consider new ways of thinking, living, and relating. An aim then is to use words, images, sound, and movement to convey the parameters of a just, equitable, and free world. However, I don’t want to make this position a “bully pulpit.” While I have a lot to say, and much to decry, I will do this with dignity, responsibly and artfully. There is far more good in Los Angeles, and from here the threads of a caring, cooperative, and fully conscious governance and economy should be imagined and created.
All this informs what I plan to do as poet laureate, including establishing and/or taking part in at least six city-wide events a year; facilitating workshops with youth and neglected communities; visiting and incorporating as many venues, open mics, and important spaces as possible; and, of course, writing poems. I will also work with others—the Mayor’s office, the City Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the L.A. Public Library system, community organizations, and more—to help poetry and the arts explode everywhere. I have always been doing this; now I can continue and magnify my life’s work by other means. I’m eager to use whatever resources this position may afford me to do just that.
You’ve also run for public office—including governor of California—a couple of times. Do you consider the office of poet laureate to be a political position? Do your personal politics inform the way you plan to operate as poet laureate?
Everything I do is intertwined with politics. But I can discern the difference between running for political office, which is ultimately about governance, and being a poet laureate, which I see as being representative of a vast and diverse city with many voices, stories, flavors, and tongues. Mayor Eric Garcetti is moving in the right direction by addressing minimum wage, the environment, and the arts. Politically we may agree. But I’m aware that I have to be careful of how I use this position—neither to be the mayor’s “water boy” nor to seek occasions to attack him. Mostly I want to look outward, to people and their everyday concerns.
By its nature, poetry can address any and all issues, including governance. It is also a highly personal and revealing art form. I aim to help bring poetry to the center of our culture. Presently, poetry in our city, state, and country is highly marginalized, concentrated in a few hands; it’s not promoted and mostly unused. People are much more engaged in popular culture, sports teams, video games, reality shows, celebrity gossip—which is all entertaining, but very much pushed on the rest of us. There’s big money in this. Poetry is not that easily appropriated. You don’t need an industry to do poetry. Anyone is capable. Poetry, like most art, is internal. Provide skills, mentoring, and cultural spaces, and poetry can come alive for anyone.
Poetry is deep soul talk, truth derived, and therefore immanently scary. It’s a prophetic act, not in the sense that poetry or art “predicts” the future, but that it pulls from the threads of the past, the dynamics of the present, to point to a future free of uncertainties and inequities. I [want to use] my assignment as poet laureate to emphasize the healing and revolutionary qualities of poetry to a city hungry for authenticity and personal authority. Therefore, my politics, ideas, and experiences inform this position; I’ve also taken into account the particular limits and requirements of being poet laureate. They are not contradictory.
I’m curious about this idea of poetry being both healing and revolutionary—can you say more about that?
I found poetry to be healing in my life. Without pressures from teachers, I wrote my heart out as a teenager in jails, in the street, but mostly in a small room next to the family garage that I stayed in until age eighteen. I became expressive, emotive, revealing—unlike the stammering and inarticulate noises of a sensitive and shy child. For me, writing became inseparable from spiritual and psychological growth. As a raging young man, writing provided a powerful outlet. All rage ultimately has roots in deep grief. I tapped into this as well. That’s why many therapists use writing in their treatments. I don’t claim that poetry is a full treatment program, but it’s therapeutic nonetheless. And in thirty-five years of doing workshops in schools, prisons, juvenile lockups, migrant camps, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, universities, and colleges, I’ve seen the power of writing and poetry to awaken the dream of one’s life.
Later when I decided to make writing a profession, I went back to school to learn grammar, spelling, and syntax. These are invaluable. These helped me sharpen the three aspects of any great art: clarity, gravity, and integrity. These are also aspects of a developed life. Yet they are not necessary to draw stories, imaginings, fears, and hopes from the most reticent of audiences.
The revolutionary nature has much to do with poets being the truth-tellers of the culture. They are the first to point out that the “emperor has no clothes”—or that a society at its core is bankrupt. Poets do this artfully—with powerful images, interesting language, and a musical sense. In addition, expanding any concept of revolution, it is also of the mind, the heart, and culture. Revolution is for the right kind of change to re-balance the right kind of inequity. Not simply ideological, but tied to objective and palpable needs. Poetry, like all art, can be politically and humanly charged. I’m for that, challenged also by the nature of the art.
You also mentioned the limits and requirements of being poet laureate. What do you consider those limits and requirements to be?
So far the requirements are basic: Enhance the presence and appreciation of poetry and the literary arts in Los Angeles by engaging with the community in all its diversity, [through] a number of readings, workshops, and events; honor historic L.A. writers; and create new work. There’s a plan for a monthly blog on the city’s website, and I can write one or more commemorative poems to Los Angeles. Of course, I can do more—anthologies, publications, social media outreach, my own blogs and podcasts. My aim is to go broader and deeper. I [want to] be keenly aware of social mores, differences, and a general sense of propriety. I personally won’t use inappropriate language or insulting and divisive images. As long as I’m in this position, I won’t lend my name to political office seekers or be used for commercial purposes. Be that as it may, I will address as many issues as I can with dignity. I will assert my voice and help create spaces for more voices, ideas, and stories to be heard. I will continue to speak out, but as delicately and artfully as I can. This is a great responsibility and opportunity, not to be squandered or misused. And as I’ve stated before, this position should also not be so limiting that I can’t be who I’ve been most of my life—a revolutionary thinker, activist and truth-teller.
In terms of writing poems to Los Angeles, is there any pressure on you to write poems portraying the city in a positive light, to gloss over its problems? Or, in a more general sense, is there an expectation that you write a certain kind of poem?
Mayor Eric Garcetti chose me knowing I’ve spoken my heart, written about hard, dark things, run for office, and fought for a just world. There is no pressure to write poems that make L.A. appear more—or less—than what it is.
Though you’ve spent most of your life in Los Angeles, you also lived in Chicago for a number of years. How do you view the two cities? Did you see similarities between the communities? Is the role of poetry different in Chicago than in LA?
I see Chicago as my second home. I was enmeshed in Chicago politics, youth work, and poetry for fifteen years. I started Tia Chucha Press, a small cross-cultural poetry publisher, in Chicago—it’s now the publishing wing of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Even my most famous “L.A.” book, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., was published while I was in Chicago. On the surface, Los Angeles and Chicago are as different as two cities can be. Chicago is Midwestern, compact, flat, old, with three-story flats, and home to amazing blues, jazz, and the now world-renowned poetry slams. But the similarities are striking. They are both the largest manufacturing centers of the country. Chicago is known for its meatpacking yards, steel mills, and trains. But L.A. also had meatpacking, steel mills, auto plants, aerospace industries, a massive harbor, garment plants, canneries, and more (I worked in many of those industries as a young man).
Unfortunately, most people think L.A.’s industry is solely in Hollywood. During the de-industrialization that first struck the U.S. in the mid-1970s, picking up steam in the 80s and 90s, both cities got hit hard. For four decades, L.A. and Chicago have been the country’s gang capitals, mostly generating armies of economically strapped youth during this de-industrialization process when the trade in drugs and guns took the place of industrial-based work. Chicago today has more gang violence, but for years L.A. led in this area. Both Chicago and L.A. have been active in “squeezing” black and brown communities through versions of gang injunctions, gentrification, and high rents, forcing many poor to move to suburbs or outlying communities and states. But L.A. has been more successful at this, including massive deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans. Because of these two cities, I’m working-class in my ideology, writings, work ethic, and make-up—in my blood.
As for poetry, Chicago sparked a literary explosion in the mid-1980s that has moved across the country and other parts of the world, including slam poetry. I took part in this phenomenon not long after it began at the Green Mill Lounge in Uptown. I moved to Chicago in 1985 and in three years I became integral to this, as cofounder of the Guild Complex and cofounder of the Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, which at one time brought three thousand people to the city’s lakefront. I was even on the first slam poetry tour of Europe in 1993. I was at the heart of this particular brand of performance poetry that also included poetry bands, poetry videos, poetry theater, and more.
I also did writing workshops in homeless shelters, prisons, and juvenile lockups. And I worked as a journalist and editor, primarily in community newspapers, magazines, and radio. In addition, I pioneered gang intervention work through Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach Program. When I returned to Los Angeles in 2000, I took this spirit and experience with me. This became the catalyst for the creation of Tia Chucha’s—in thirteen years we’ve raised more than a million dollars for community-based multi-arts training and presentation.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement—as a writer, an activist, or a community organizer—so far?
I can’t say any area is more valuable or more appreciated. I am every one of these—writer, activist, organizer—and I’ll add father, husband, elder, teacher. However, I incorporate them as a whole. For example, my writing cannot exist outside of activism, family, and community. Because I’ve been largely fractured, with various aspects of myself at odds with one another, it’s important for me to be keenly aware of this process. Any achievement I’ve had as a writer is integrated with revolutionary ideas and actions. Being L.A.’s poet laureate, given to me largely because of my development as a poet, my discipline, my contribution to spreading the power of poetry, is inextricable from being a long-time change agent. Not change [as in], “Let’s do something different” (though this can be part of it), but what needs to be changed in order to align. In my personal life it was for my emotional, spiritual, psychological, creative, and physical aspects to align to the dream of my life—to my gifts, my passions, what I was inherently born to do. I had to change addictive, raging, and impulsive dispositions in my nature. For society it’s aligning to the regenerative capacities of the earth and of people—which means having the right relationships so both can thrive. Presently we are not aligned this way in society or in our governance. This means changing those characteristics of the post-industrial capitalist world that tear away at the healing qualities of earth and people. So while I may emphasize poetry these next two years, including the vitality of poetry in anyone’s life, the underlying motives are these alignments—both for the short and the long range; for the immediate demands, and for our future.
Joseph Bathanti
North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2012–2014
The author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Life of the World to Come, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Concertina, published by Mercer University Press in 2013.
You initially moved to North Carolina as part of the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. How did this experience shape the sort of poet and teacher—and, by extension, poet laureate—you would go on to become?
When I arrived as a VISTA volunteer in North Carolina, in 1976, recently out of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, I was burning to write, though I hadn’t really engaged in it with the kind of steadiness necessary to pile up pages. By happenstance, I was assigned as a VISTA to the North Carolina Department of Corrections and spent the next fourteen months, more or less, in a cell block or on a prison yard—mainly at Huntersville Prison, about twelve miles north of Charlotte—immersed in the tangle of things related to incarceration and reentry.
Prison is a place of extremes where very dramatic things happen by the moment. Young writers often harp about not having anything to write about, but suddenly I was handed a trove of material. Thus I started writing, rather obsessively, about the surreal world of prison. What’s more, my first foray into teaching began in prisons. One of the first things I did as a new VISTA was to organize informal writing workshops in the trailer [connected to] the prison that served as the de facto classroom. I’d supply the guys with a prompt, they’d read what they wrote, and then we’d kick it around. I was also able to put together a couple of saddle-stitched anthologies that featured their poems, stories, and artwork.
I wasn’t thinking at all, back then, that those weekly sessions in that too-hot or too-cold trailer might be therapeutic for the prisoners. It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms, nor had the big conversation about the indisputable benefit of writing in dealing with various sorts of trauma been initiated on a widespread scale. I initiated those sessions because I saw them as extensions of my own desire to write and as a way to contribute to the VISTA project. I became, of course, mystified and intoxicated by the stories those men had to tell and the manner in which they told them. I also launched into reading everything I could get my hands on about prison, especially poetry and fiction.
When asked to recapitulate my career, I always say that my first teaching job was in a prison, and in the narrowest sense this is true. More importantly, my VISTA assignment and teaching in prison were not only the beginning of my own education, but the true genesis of my writing life.
I discovered in VISTA that prisons are but one shackle in the ponderous chain of group homes, halfway houses, soup kitchens, mental hospitals, women’s shelters, juvenile detention centers, and homeless shelters. The same characters show up in each script. It’s no secret that all social ills are intimately connected, but it’s something I had to learn by seeing for myself. I became not only aware of the vast subculture of poverty and affliction, but also of the often invisible network of agencies, organizations, and socially [engaged], charitable individuals committed to helping the kinds of folks who find themselves in such places.
The philosopher and theologian Thomas Moore said, “Deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.” As a result of being not only with prison inmates daily, but also in close proximity to the community of mercy which inevitably responds to suffering, I experienced a radical shift in my imagination. Revealed to me was a rare and secret world and I was an eyewitness to it. Not only was it consciousness-raising, it was life-changing.
As North Carolina’s poet laureate, I was interested in getting in front of every citizen of the state I could manage to visit, but I was also especially keen on visiting those people and those regions of the state—very rural and/or underserved—that did not have regular access to writers and literature, including the populations my service in VISTA revealed to me.
It seems like the act of teaching writing lay at the heart of your work as poet laureate, especially in your signature project of working with returning veterans and their families. How did this go for you? Did you have any specific goals or hopes in mind for the project, and were they achieved?
Ultimately, teaching is at the heart of a poet laureate’s service. A solid poet laureate, certainly at the state level, has to be a teacher, an educator. It’s a job that demands a decided pedagogical range to work with all kinds of folks in unimaginably diverse locales—not to mention all the planning and preparation that goes into it all. Traditionally North Carolina poets laureate spend a considerable amount of time in K–12 schools, cheerleading not only for the children, but for those embattled, dedicated, hard-working teachers who ensure that writing and reading endure. That same kind of teaching by the poet laureate also occurs in county libraries, community colleges, universities, churches, shelters, and hospitals. The laureateship in North Carolina remains, I’m pleased to say, a grass-roots service position.
When I declared my signature project as poet laureate—to work with military veterans, those returning from combat and others, and involve their families whenever possible, to tell their stories through poetry and other genres—I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’m dramatically smarter today about the issues plaguing veterans and their families than I was thirty-two months ago, when I declared my aim to pursue that work, but I’m still very much on the front end of that apprenticeship.
Since then, I’ve taught at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the Veterans Writing Project summer workshops at George Washington University, and a number of other venues. But, primarily, my work with vets and their families has been in North Carolina. There is nothing terribly fancy about what I do. In the main, I walk into those places and simply talk to those folks for a while, then ask them to talk, and then I ask them to write—not necessarily about their wartime experiences, but inevitably that’s exactly what they end up writing about. And the writing these sessions yield is always breathtaking.
At the outset of my project, I had hoped to launch a statewide initiative, to create a model that would be perpetuated beyond my tenure as poet laureate. I don’t think anything quite that ambitious was ever achieved, in a codified sense. Yet—because of my work, in part, and the attention the North Carolina Arts Council focused on it, and other like-minded agencies and committed folks that rallied to the cause—I do think there was a certain amount of concentrated attention devoted to vets and their families and how writing and other arts can be implemented to not only bring to light their stories, but also to assist them as they deal with the often debilitating fallout associated with deployment.
Again, I cannot at all take credit for this. So many terrific initiatives were already in place or in the process of taking hold when I was appointed poet laureate in 2012. I more or less became a focal point for the crucial intersection among vets, their families, and writing. The North Carolina Arts Council took up that torch, spread the word, and paved the way. Essentially, I mimicked what others had hatched before me. And I reached out initially for help, notably and especially to Ron Capps, founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project in D.C., and Donald Anderson, editor of War, Literature & the Arts, at the Air Force Academy.
In your essay “Ghostwriting,” you mention an aspect of teaching creative writing in prisons that I would think carries over to working with veterans as well: “In prison there are certain stories you simply do not criticize; to do so would be an epic breach of etiquette. Disrespect. Like you didn’t get it.” This can sometimes feel true even in more traditional creative writing settings, when someone shares a piece that is too real, too much from the heart, to be given the normal workshop critique. In these situations, what services are left for a writing teacher to provide?
There are times when a writing teacher’s number-one task is to get the heck out of the way. I’m thinking primarily of the work I’ve done with prisoners and veterans—and I taught for a year in a battered women’s shelter—but also students of mine at the university. These folks might be taking their very first crack at articulating how they really feel about subjects that are often explosive and intimate—things they’ve kept hidden inside, possibly for years—in language, on paper, with strangers in the room.
They are suddenly exposed. It’s terrifically dangerous terrain. The teacher’s initial job is to get them to write anything, to assure them they have something to say in the first place, that they indeed have stories worthy of being told and listened to. Worrying about whether it’s good or not can come later—the assessment part, the craft part. Critical appraisal at this point is irrelevant. What’s more, their presence in such a class—especially in the case of vets and prisoners (and other immured populations)—might be a one-shot deal. The teacher has to ensure, through his very measured response, that he does not convince them that they were fools to put pen to paper in the first place.
The fact that certain folks even show up in a class or workshop strikes me as poignant. It’s not about style. It’s like being in church. You don’t criticize the style of someone’s prayer. You don’t tell someone who’s learning to talk again after a four-decade silence—as in the case of some Vietnam vets I’ve had in classes—that he’s going about it improperly. A hush pervades the room when one of these silent sealed vets—or anyone—elects finally and mysteriously to open up. The first draft sometimes is a wail, a keen—what Whitman called that barbaric yawp—and it tends to look very different on the outside than it did on the inside. And once it’s out, it can’t be called back. The teacher’s crucial goal with beginning writers, in any setting, is to keep them talking, keep them writing—until what’s too raw, too hot, seasons and cools. So you have to be pretty darned careful with any kind of knee-jerk qualitative judgment. The teacher’s job, initially, in these instances, is to back off, and get invisible in a hurry, and simply listen.
When Valerie Macon was appointed as your successor, there was an uproar over her perceived lack of qualifications and the governor’s rejection of the traditional nomination process, causing her to step down less than a week later. One positive that came out of the situation was the revelation that North Carolina really does care about its poet laureate. It’s obviously much more than a ceremonial role or an empty political gesture. What about the state and its poets do you think fosters that attitude?
The uproar that ensued as a result of Valerie Macon’s appointment was triggered by a number of things, chiefly the fact that the long-standing process that had been in place to select North Carolina’s poet laureate was completely ignored. A great deal has been written about that fiasco, and everybody, everywhere, knows about it, so I won’t beat that straw man anymore. However, there was a terrifically positive side to that uproar. North Carolina poets and writers and readers sent out the message loud and clear that the poet laureate post in North Carolina matters very much to them and, by extension, and more importantly, that the cherished integrity of North Carolina’s legacy of writing and literature is something very much worth fighting for.
We often hear the word community used to describe a body of writers; and, in truth, the community of North Carolina writers is the real thing, not merely a rhetorical community. The writers of this state tend to know one another and support one another and care about one another; and, without getting too saccharine, there’s much about that community that’s familial. It’s a big state, but the literary community is very connected. It’s like a union. What’s more, the legacy of North Carolina and its writers, current and past, are supported and celebrated in every county in the state, in large places and very small places—in public schools, colleges and universities, community colleges, public libraries, local arts councils, and bookstores.
Of course, as in any other state, there are tiers and hierarchies among the writers here, but nothing elitist or hegemonic, nothing cutthroat. When I first arrived in North Carolina, thirty-eight years ago—a Pittsburgh Italian Yankee—the only writing credential I had was my yearning. I could not have been treated any more generously, any more graciously, by the established writers here. They nurtured me. They welcomed me into their ranks. And I really do believe that spirit of generosity, of inclusiveness, has continued to earmark North Carolina as the best place to be a writer. That’s certainly been my experience.
What rankled me more than anything during the flap over Valerie Macon’s appointment were the charges—from those folks who thought having a poet laureate was superfluous—that the post was “honorary,” “ceremonial,” “symbolic.” These were three words used to describe the appointment. Nothing is further from the truth. Poets laureate in North Carolina get in their cars and travel to the people. They show up everywhere. I made upwards of three hundred appearances during my tenure as poet laureate. I’ve said before that I don’t want a medal. It was my honor. But I do want to underscore that I took all my cues from my North Carolina poet laureate predecessors, the tradition of pride and service they exemplified, and the trails they blazed ahead of me.
In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of poet laureate positions in the country. Most states appoint a poet laureate, and many cities do as well. What do you think is behind this surge in the desire to name an “official” poet of a region?
The surge in poet laureate posts has been prompted, I’d assume, by the surge in poetry, of all stripes, all across the country. Such proliferation is another indication of the health of poetry and its democratization among, hopefully, the working class and the most marginalized citizens, folks who perhaps do not have ready access to poetry—and here I’m thinking about my own childhood and the very working class, ethnic neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I grew up.
State poets laureate work very hard, but realistically can reach only so many people; and, again, my chief concern is that poets laureate maintain a vibrant visible presence among public school children as well as various immured populations—among everyone. The appointment of city, town, and county poets laureate certainly instigates dialogue and activities (workshops, readings, classes, you name it) that zero in on poetry in specific communities and spread the benefits of poetry as avenues to the obvious art of reading and writing and performing poetry, its timeless culture and appreciation, the enjoyment, the fun, that it provides. But those kinds of activities and dialogue also underscore essential keys to life enhancement: literacy, critical thinking, cultural awareness, community solidarity, and the groundedness and self-esteem that familiarity with one’s own stories—in one’s own language—and their importance brings.
Poets laureate who are from—in every sense of the word—those communities that appoint them (urban and rural, enormous and tiny)—who know and live among their target audiences—have a cachet that creates extraordinary groundswells around poetry in a particular locale. What’s more, the nominal dollars invested in launching these grassroots poet laureate programs repay those dollars exponentially in healthier, safer, and more rooted communities.
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Natasha Trethewey
United States Poet Laureate, 2012–2014
Mississippi Poet Laureate, 2012–2016
The author of five collections of poetry, most recently Thrall, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2012.
Could you talk about your signature project as the U.S. poet laureate, “Where Poetry Lives?” What were your goals behind that project?
Well, just what the title says: to show how and where poetry lives in the United States. How people are making use of poetry in their everyday lives in order to contend with all sorts of social issues. For example, we went to the juvenile detention facility in Seattle and looked at a program called Pongo there that uses poetry with incarcerated teens, as well as with homeless teens who are often coming to the homeless shelter after being released from a juvenile facility.
Do you feel like the project was a success? Or was there anything you would do differently now?
Oh, I think it was wonderful. We hit such a wide variety of places, from a juvenile detention facility to Harvard Medical School, where the poet [and physician] Rafael Campo believes in teaching poetry to interns because it helps make better doctors. It helps make physicians better able to treat the whole patient—physicians who have more empathy. We also [visited] an MFA program in Los Angeles that has a service component as part of its curriculum where the graduate students go out and find ways to bring poetry into their communities.
Could you talk a bit about your office-hours project? It had been a while since a poet laureate had held office hours before, right?
Right, not since the position was a consultantship, before it became the laureateship [in 1985]. I thought of it because, when I was named poet laureate, one of the things that happened was newspapers called and asked, “What’s your project going to be?” And I doubt that most people are sitting around thinking, “When I get named poet laureate, this is what I’m going to do.” So of course I didn’t have a project in mind, and it occurred to me that since the Library of Congress thinks of the poet laureate position as a “lightning rod” for poetry in America, and that the role that they like to see the laureate take on is to bring poetry to a wider audience, I wanted to figure out how best to do that. And it seemed to me that one of the best ways was to talk to people about the role of poetry in their lives and to see how they imagined poetry could be brought to a wider audience in the country. And so that’s why I decided to open my office and invite people in to talk to me about just that.
And through these meetings, by talking to people about poetry in this way, did you feel like you learned about what was happening in poetry in America?
I did. You know, every few years an article comes out in the Wall Street Journal or other places about how nobody cares about poetry and it doesn’t mean anything. We hear that again and again, and yet that was not the case at all when I met with people, from all walks of life, who came in to talk about what poetry means to them, and how it is important. And so I learned with even more conviction that poetry is alive and well and matters to people in this country.
What kinds of people were coming in to meet with you?
Everybody, really. I had everybody from groups of schoolchildren to senior citizens, writing groups who either got together because of a fellowship program at their church or at their senior community center. I think someone who was a lobbyist in Washington came. I should have made a list of all the different kinds of people, but it was just people who did all sorts of things. Sometimes it was researchers or people writing about poetry, or other poets themselves, or college students. It was a big list of people who were very different. But all lovers of poetry.
You once said in an interview for PBS NewsHour that you considered the role of poet laureate to be as a “cheerleader for poetry.”
[Laughs.] Oh, yes, I did say that, didn’t I?
I was wondering if you could expand a little more on what you meant by that. You also said that part of the role is to be a promoter. How do you feel like you as a poet laureate can promote or be a cheerleader for poetry?
Yeah, you know, that’s one of the funniest things I think I ever said. If only I’d said ‘advocate,’ or ‘ambassador,’ or something more dignified. [Laughs.] But I just had to come on record and say that the University of Georgia, when I was in college, I was head cheerleader. Yes I was. And I think I had been talking to Rob Casper right before I went in to speak with [PBS NewsHour’s] Jeff Brown—Rob is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is, to use another one of those phrases, like an Energizer bunny. He has so much energy that he gets me kind of hyped. And so we were sitting there, getting excited about what we were going to do about poetry, and then I go in [to the interview] and say, “I want to be a cheerleader for poetry!”
But I guess in some ways it’s not that silly. It’s a very plain way of saying that I have great enthusiasm for poetry and I want to share that with other people in ways that gets them enthusiastic about it, too. That’s what a cheerleader does.
During your tenure as U.S. poet laureate, you had also begun serving your four-year term as the state poet laureate of Mississippi. How do those two roles differ, in your experience?
Well, because I was doing both at the same time, a lot of my focus was drawn to the national level. And so I did the kinds of things that I did on the state level, which are of course ongoing, because I have two more years on my term. I participated in, for example, going to the state house, the capital, in Jackson on the day that they promote the arts, where various arts groups come to talk to the state senators and people in the house about the roles of arts in our lives. And so I was there to participate in that and to promote the arts and poetry in the state of Mississippi. I’ve also done other events, readings and other kinds of visits in the state. Not as much as what I was doing on the national level.
What has been your greatest challenge during your time as poet laureate?
Oh, goodness. That’s a good question. I’ve only had the opportunity to talk about the things that have been the greatest rewards of it. Well, I suppose the greatest challenge for me would have been that, because I wanted to be an advocate and because I wanted to see the role as a public service position, I occupied a very public place for those two terms and I traveled a lot and I did a lot of things and it made it harder for me to have the quiet time that a poet needs to write poems. So my biggest challenge was finding time to also still be a poet—not just an advocate for poetry, but a working poet who could sit down and have some time to write poems.
Nick Narbutas is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
Q&A: Hayden Leads America’s Library
Nominated by President Obama this past February, Carla Hayden took office in September as the nation’s fourteenth Librarian of Congress. She is the first woman, and the first African American, to hold the position, which involves overseeing the library (a collection composed of more than 162 million books and other items) and its three thousand employees, as well as the nation’s law library, the office of the poet laureate, and the U.S. Copyright Office. Just a little over a month into her term, Dr. Hayden spoke about her plans for making the library more accessible, and a typical day in the life of the Librarian of Congress.
How are you hoping to make the library more accessible to the public?
We’re working on a digital strategy to make the collections available to everyone online. The collections range from comic books to the papers and memorabilia of Rosa Parks to the manuscript collections of twenty-three presidents. We just launched our new home page. It’s more active—you can really get a sense of what the collections are. We’ve also been tweeting every day, one or two things I find in the collections. The response has already been pretty wonderful because I’m tying it to what’s going on in the world. During the World Series we tweeted the baseball-card collections we have. On Halloween we posted the collection of Harry Houdini’s memorabilia—his personal scrapbooks and his funeral program—because he died on Halloween, in 1926. So we’re using social media and technology to touch as many people as possible in interesting ways.
How else do you envision people engaging with the library?
We’re really excited about the possibility of traveling exhibits that can go to local communities, including an eighteen-wheeler that can pull up in a rural area or on a reservation. We want people to be able to get on that truck and have an experience they might not have had if they can’t visit Washington, D.C. We’re hiring a new exhibit designer who has museum experience, and we’re hitting the road and drawing people in. And raising general awareness of the fact that it’s the nation’s library, it’s America’s library.
What do you see as the role of the poet laureate?
Our current laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, shows how to bring poetry into people’s lives in an active and everyday way. He’s demystifying it, and working with teachers, librarians, and people who work with young people to get them excited about poetry and to recognize it around them and in themselves. He wants poetry to be more spontaneous. As he has said, it shouldn’t be something you labor over—you should feel it and write it. He has this activity where he has the kids line up, like a soul-train line—the kids go down the line and write down words they’re hearing. They come out with a poem at the end.
What happens during a day in the life of the Librarian of Congress?
One month in, it is a period of discovery and getting to know not only the collections and the resources, but also the people who care for those collections. That’s been one of the greatest joys and discoveries—the curators are so knowledgeable at the library. So I go from budget meetings to visiting a collection to having the head of the British Library visit to participating in the National Book Festival and things like the poetry slam at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
What are you reading now?
Mysteries. I also just picked up The Gershwins and Me by Michael Feinstein; I got a chance to meet him, and got him to sign it, which was really cool. I have so many books stacked in my home—I have baskets of books waiting, just waiting. I try to think of them as pieces of candy, that they’re treats. If you walked into my apartment, you’d probably think, “This person likes to read,” and be able to find a few things to pick up.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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The Future of Books
“The questions that I try to answer in the book, through fiction, are questions about people I knew when I was a child…I made up the answers because I could not access the real answers.” In this Entertainment Weekly video, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of the debut novel, In West Mills (Bloomsbury, 2019), speaks with fellow debut authors Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sarah M. Broom, Linda Holmes, and Lisa Taddeo about the inspiration and evolution of their books. Winslow is featured in “First Fiction 2019” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Nathan Englander on Ritual
“I adopted the six days for creation and a seventh for rest model. I figured, if it worked for building this world, it should work for fictional ones as well.” Novelist Nathan Englander, author of kaddish.com (Knopf, 2019), shares how his religious upbringing has influenced his writing rituals in this PBS NewsHour video.
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The Nutritionist
“I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind / and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.“ Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018), reads their poem “The Nutritionist” for this animated TED-Ed film directed by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat.
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Yoko Tawada
“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
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Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
“Ultimately I knew that words have power.” Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary about Toni Morrison is an exploration of the author’s life story, her values and challenges, and her creative work. The film includes engaging interviews with Morrison, as well as notable peers, colleagues, and admirers such as Hilton Als, Russell Banks, Angela Davis, Walter Mosley, Sonia Sanchez, and Oprah Winfrey.
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Poetry Society of America Honors Alice Quinn and Paul Simon
On June 18 the Poetry Society of America honored its longtime executive director, Alice Quinn, and singer-songwriter Paul Simon at its annual benefit, held at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, New York. The event featured tributes to Quinn, who will step down as executive director at the end of the month, and a musical performance by Simon.
U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith presented the award to Quinn, who has led the organization for the past eighteen years, calling her “one of the greatest literary citizens of our time,” who has tended to the “cultural life and the inner life across this country and beyond.” Before starting at the PSA, Quinn was the poetry editor at the New Yorker for twenty years and an editor at Knopf for more than ten.
Smith, who met Quinn when she was a graduate student at Columbia, described Quinn’s impact on her growth as a writer. “It was Alice’s gentle feedback that guided me to see what my poems were attempting to do, and what I might, when I was ready, free myself to attempt,” she said. She went on to note the many places she found poetry because of Quinn: the pages of the New Yorker, the subways of New York City, and museums and performance spaces across the United States. “The work to which she has dedicated herself to for most of her life has forever changed poetry and public life for the better,” said Smith.
Quinn accepted the award and thanked her friends and family, including Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi, New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young, W. W. Norton editor Jill Bialosky, actress Maria Tucci, and many more. Quinn also noted that fifty of her family members had come to the event. “I shall cherish all of you here for your generosity and friendship, and for all the special feeling you’ve brought into this room tonight,” she said.
Billy Collins presented the award to Paul Simon, singling out his devotion to poetry. “Paul was the first popular rock singer that I ever heard mention the word poetry—‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me,’” said Collins, quoting Simon’s song “I Am a Rock.” Upon accepting the award, Simon read two poems: Les Murray’s “Performance” and W. S. Merwin’s “For the Anniversary of My Death.” He discussed writing poetry versus lyrics and mused on the difference between the two forms. “Lyric writing can be poetic, but I can be most powerful by being straight-ahead simple with the lyrics,” he said. “Melody is the other voice, the nonverbal voice. That’s the great power that unites the heart all over the world—there’s something mysterious about that.”
Simon then performed five songs, inviting the audience to sing with him during “The Boxer” and concluding with a solo performance of “The Sound of Silence.”
The evening was a tribute to poetry and lyrics and to two pioneers in their fields. Earlier in the evening, Kimiko Hahn, the president of the board of the PSA thanked both Simon and Quinn. “Thank you, Paul and Alice, for your contributions to listening, sharing, and—each in a different way—giving back to the world the sounds we need to hear.”
Read more about Alice Quinn’s work at the Poetry Society of America in “Q&A: Quinn Bids Farewell to the PSA” in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
(Photos: Beowulf Sheehan)Q&A: Alice Quinn Bids Farewell to PSA
This summer Alice Quinn will step down as the executive director of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a position she has held for the past eighteen years. During her tenure, the PSA launched multiple new poetry prizes, organized hundreds of events across the United States, and expanded the Poetry in Motion program, which brings poetry into U.S. transit systems. Previously, Quinn was the poetry editor at the New Yorker for twenty years and an editor at Knopf for more than ten years. She also teaches at Columbia University and is the editor of a book of Elizabeth Bishop’s writings, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), as well as a forthcoming book of Bishop’s journals. A few months before departing the PSA, Quinn, accompanied by her dachshund, Daisy, talked about her work at the nonprofit organization.
What are you most proud of achieving at the PSA?
I’m proud of Poetry in Motion, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in New York and its twentieth in Los Angeles. We have a new transit initiative in partnership with San Francisco Beautiful that is a wonderful variation on the program involving local artists and poets. I’m also thrilled with our PSA Chapbook Fellowship program, founded in 2003, which has launched the careers of sixty-four new poets selected and introduced by major figures. We also have two splendid new prizes to add to our distinguished roster of annual awards, the Four Quartets Prize for a unified sequence of poems…and the Anna Rabinowitz Prize for an interdisciplinary project involving poetry and any other art.
And I’ve loved our innovative programming. We’ve presented more than seven hundred programs since I joined the PSA, many of them multi-arts events with actors, musicians, and great visuals. We’ve had vibrant tributes honoring twentieth-century Polish poetry, Black iconic poets of the twentieth century, classic poets and beloved contemporaries—Philip Larkin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Galway Kinnell, Seamus Heaney, Jean Valentine—and we’ve celebrated major anniversaries of institutions like our own; the PSA was founded in 1910.
I’ve also been gratified by our more than forty partnerships with fellow cultural institutions allowing us to reach many new audiences with poetry—perhaps chief among them the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where we’re in our tenth year of presenting poetry with each new seasonal exhibit. That alliance is generating more and more collaborative opportunities, including an “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil” day at the start of the garden’s Roberto Burle Marx exhibit this June.
Why did you choose to step down now?
I thought I might stay until I’d reached the twenty-year mark, but eighteen-plus seems just fine. And I’ve been working on the journals of Elizabeth Bishop for too long. I have a new home in the Hudson Valley not far from where Bishop’s papers are lodged at Vassar, and I’m so excited about that. The archive is closed during the week, so for years I’ve had to use my vacations and a day here and there to access the archive for Bishop projects. I’m sure there will be programming in my future because I have a talent for it, and knowing an audience has been swept up by poetry in a lasting way matters to me. But new leadership can be galvanizing, and I know the PSA will find someone great for this position.
There are a number of organizations in New York City that support poetry, such as the Academy of American Poets and Poets House. What has distinguished the PSA?
I think the PSA has always had a special focus on enlightening people about the power of poetry and the special space it can have in your life—how if you encounter it alone or by surprise in a public place, you can be affected and reminded of actually how powerfully you are able to receive the wisdom and force of poetry. Our programs build on that and send a message that poetry is not too difficult or that it belongs to only one moment in college or to a fervid moment when you were a child.
PSA events also seem to be very interdisplinary, right?
We’ve emphasized a lot of multi-arts programming—we have to think of programs where we can partner. Is there a great show at the International Center of Photography [ICP] of Lewis Carroll’s photographs? Then I know just the person who can recite “Jabberwocky.” Or is ICP showing the work of the great environmental photographer Sebastião Salgado? Let’s bring down Jorie Graham and poets who really care about [the environment] to read. When we had a tribute to Philip Larkin to coincide with Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s publication of a new complete collection of his poems edited by Archie Burnett, I thought we should include jazz because Larkin loved jazz. So I called [PSA board president] Kimiko Hahn, who teaches at Queens College, and said, “Doesn’t Queens College have a jazz band?” And so they came, and we had young students playing jazz at the event. And that’s how you do it—that’s why programming is fun. You can bring people in from various other worlds, and it animates and it proves poetry is part of the cultural scene.
The PSA has allowed me to celebrate and hold aloft the poetry of the past that I love so much and at the same time welcome new work and configure multi-arts programs that are relaxing and illuminating and not tendentious or rote in any way—just a fresh way of looking at poetry and integrating it into your life. And it’s meant a lot to me to pay tribute to the poets that I love—it makes me realize how long I’ve been living with the work of many of these people. I’ve been reading poetry for a long time. I used to go into the Gotham Book Mart [in New York City] and stand there at the little table, read for two or three hours, and walk out with two books. At the Grolier up in Boston—I was a waitress at the time and would go during my lunch break in my waitressing uniform—I would be leaving with my little stack of books, and the founder would say, “Alice, you know, it’s absolutely remarkable, but all these are on sale today for two dollars.” And that’s poetry! People who love poetry want to press it upon other people.
In a Q&A for this magazine in 2008, you said poetry had gotten “swervier.” Do you think it has continued to get swervier?
I think poetry has gotten more traditional as well as swervier. There’s a lot of white space. There are many more sequences that hearken back to traditional poetry. There’s a lot of going back and rediscovering and recontextualizing and learning from moments when the voice in literature sounded different and the use of argument was more profound. Argument matters in poetry. There’s also much more excitement and openness about the field, and it just keeps getting better and better.
We’re in a really interesting moment—Cave Canem has become so significant, as has CantoMundo, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. We’re way into a second and third generation of inclusivity in our world. And these poets are doing what T. S. Eliot said poets do in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The really true poets join the poetic and artistic tradition and alter it kind of chiropractically. They alter the spine of it; they alter the future of it.
What have you loved about your job?
I’ve loved the independence and the teamwork. If I meet someone at a dinner party or a lecture, and we start conversing and spontaneously come up with an idea for an event, I can just run with it, and wonderful Brett Fletcher Lauer, our deputy director, has been with me all these years. With Madeline Weinfield and Azzuré Alexander, we are a lean, very effective team, and that’s been exhilarating.
Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Alice Quinn (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: Alice Quinn’s Poetic Providence
Last November Alice Quinn stepped down as poetry editor of the New Yorker after twenty years in the position. She was succeeded by Paul Muldoon. Quinn came to the magazine as a fiction editor in January 1987, and took on the role of poetry editor after Howard Moss passed away in September of that year. Over the past two decades, she has published the work of some of the country’s most celebrated poets.
In 2001, Quinn scaled back her work at the magazine in order to assume the directorship of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a position previously held by Elise Paschen. In announcing her decision to leave the New Yorker, Quinn said she plans to devote more time to the nonprofit organization (which will celebrate its centennial in 2010), and to her job as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She is also editing a collection of Elizabeth Bishop's journals and notebooks, a project that follows Quinn's collection of the late poet's unpublished writings, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
On one of her final days at the magazine, Quinn spoke about her job there and her prospects as a poetry editor.
How did you feel about the appointment of Paul Muldoon as poetry editor?
It was really my dream to have him succeed me. David [Remnick] asked, "What would you think about Paul Muldoon?" and honestly, I almost did a jig. You lay a foundation and then you see that somebody you adore and admire is going to come and shore it up and further it, and that's great.
Who do you perceive to be the audience for the New Yorker's poems?
I feel that New Yorker readers are people who were profoundly connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The New Yorker gives poets access to an international audience of literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.
What changes have you noticed in poetry?
Poetry's a little swervier now. There are a lot of leaps being made, and an enjoyment of humor, playfulness, mystery—a certain ebullient spontaneity. I feel that in the work of the younger poets, and I love it. Of course, I'm still a great believer in Robert Frost's dictum that a good poem should be like a piece of ice on a hot stove; it should ride on its own melting. I feel there's more openness to the work that Jean Valentine and Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe are doing, and some of that derives from the enjoyment that the poets in their twenties and thirties take in that work. They don't enshrine it in a totally academic and fierce and somewhat defensive, even belligerent, way. They don't feel they have to argue for it; they just enjoy it.
Where will poetry take you next?
First I would like to produce a very good book of Bishop's journals. I will have time in which to go to the Houghton Library in Boston and to the archives at Vassar, and St. Louis, where they have the May Swenson–Elizabeth Bishop correspondence, and to really get in a little bit of that dreamy investigative time that you get when you're at a rare-book library. Will I pursue other book projects or will I want to become an editor-at-large at a poetry house I admire? I'm not sure. For the time being, I really see PSA as an important focus of my devotion. But I can't pretend that it is in any way easy to leave the New Yorker. There's nothing that's going to take the place of people in [my] apartment building and people in London saying, "I loved that poem in the New Yorker last week." The New Yorker is a magical place.
Jean Hartig is the editorial assistant of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Poets House and PSA Branch Out
Aided by a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Poets House and the Poetry Society of America (PSA), two nonprofit literary organizations based in New York City, recently partnered to establish Branching Out: Poetry in the Twentieth Century. The new initiative will bring distinguished poets to public libraries in Fresno, Houston, Milwaukee, New Orleans, and Kansas City, Missouri, over the next two years, to give informal talks on contemporary and classic poets.
Launched during April’s National Poetry Month, Branching Out continues this month with Eavan Boland, visiting Fresno on May 17 to talk about W.B. Yeats, followed by Eamon Grennan discussing Emily Dickinson in Kansas City on May 21. On June 1, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky will talk about Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams in New Orleans. Other participating poets include Paul Muldoon, Susan Stewart, Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Salter, and Adam Zagajewski.
Branching Out is an extension of Poets House’s Poetry in the Branches, a program that began in 1994 and offers resources, training, and consulting to librarians in order to integrate poetry into New York public libraries. PSA’s contribution to Branching Out has been to expand a program of its own: Poetry in Motion, which was launched in 1992 and places posters featuring poems in the spaces usually reserved for advertisements in subway cars and buses in over a dozen cities across the country. For Branching Out, PSA will install posters with poems by both the participating poet and the subject, along with information about the event, in the participating cities.
PSA also designed a Web site for Branching Out, while both organizations have contributed content. Visitors can find schedule information as well as biographical material about the poets involved. The result, says Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House, is a “much more integrated poetry experience” for the host cities.
“Much of our programming has a natural kinship,” says PSA executive director Alice Quinn of the partnership. “We just separately felt that both organizations are interested in education but don’t specialize in that, and so the avenues we had—libraries, buses—could be combined.”
So far the partnership has worked well for both organizations. “They seem to be working pretty seamlessly together,” says poet Vijay Seshadri, who kicked off the program on April 4 with a talk on Elizabeth Bishop in Fresno. “I don’t sense two organizations here, but one, probably because of the competence and unfussiness of everyone involved.” Like all of the presentations, Seshadri’s talk on Bishop was tailored for a general audience and focused on the poet’s “visionary quality,” using her biography and ambitions as starting points.
Edward Hirsh, who talked about Federico García Lorca in Houston on April 13 and will travel to Fresno for another presentation on the Spanish poet this summer, says the nonacademic format is an important element of the program. “My talk will have to be accurate in a scholarly way, but it is not for scholars. There’s a passionate immediacy that only a poet can bring,” he says.
Founded in 1985, Poets House is a literary center and poetry archive that sponsors various events in New York City. PSA is a 95-year-old membership organization that sponsors a series of national awards. For more information about Branching Out, visit the Web site at www.poetrybranchingout.org.
Daniel Nester is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, both published by Soft Skull Press. He also edits Unpleasant Event Schedule.
Q&A: Briccetti’s Big Move Downtown
By the time Poets House, the country’s largest library devoted to poetry, moves from SoHo—the New York City neighborhood where it has been located for the past sixteen years—to the planned community of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, its ever-expanding archive of poetry books and literary journals will likely exceed fifty thousand volumes. (And that's not counting its extensive collection of multimedia materials.) The relocation, scheduled to take place this summer, follows a successful $6.5 million fund-raising campaign led by the nonprofit literary organization's board and staff, including executive director Lee Briccetti.
Some of that money will be used to design and build the new space—two floors in excess of ten thousand square feet—and fund the organization's annual schedule of more than fifty public programs, including readings, seminars, and workshops. One thing the money will not be used for is rent: In October 2004, Battery Park City Authority, the state public corporation that oversees the ninety-two-acre neighborhood and seeks to ensure the diversity of its community, granted Poets House a free lease through the year 2069—a savings of about $60 million.
Poet Stanley Kunitz and arts administrator Elizabeth Kray founded Poets House in 1985 with the mission of nurturing poets and creating a space that would offer greater access to poetry, as well as build visibility for the genre. Kunitz, who published more than ten books, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize, and who twice served as the poet laureate of the United States, died last year just a few months short of his 101st birthday. According to Briccetti, Kunitz, an avid gardener, was moved when he heard that the new site for Poets House would include a garden. "Stanley was very excited and felt that he had lived to see the permanent home. He kept threatening to live to be 102 so he could see the final product."
A little over half a year before its scheduled grand opening, Briccetti spoke about the expansion and relocation of Poets House.
How does the rent-free space affect the goals you've set for the organization?
It's great because we’re going to be putting all of that money—I don’t even want to say how much we were paying [in SoHo] but it was a lot, a lot—into the library and into the programs.
How did this move come to be?
We were working together for almost five years, telling everyone our story and seeing if we could find a solution. We met with the head of the New York State Council on the Arts—we had already been considered one of their important groups—and he said, "I’m going to help you." He started calling people for us. We made the right connection down at Battery Park City—not that we didn't work for it; it was a long courtship—and they asked to see a business plan. We really hustled and put together a plan that they said was the best business plan they'd ever seen. We hired a consultant; we did this all very quickly.
What has Stanley Kunitz left behind with Poets House?
Stanley said at one of his last meetings with me that he felt that the community building he left stands with his oeuvre. He really lived a life as a builder of others and a builder of community. He said on more than one occasion that when he did not find the community he needed, he felt compelled to make it.
Timothy Schaffert is the author of three novels. His latest, Devils in the Sugar Shop, is forthcoming from Unbridled Books in June. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is the director of the Downtown Omaha Lit Fest.
Poetry Society Celebrates Centennial
In the winter of 1910, at New York City's Ansonia Hotel, a group of poets, editors, and artists gathered for the first planning meeting of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a fledgling organization that would be "a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry." On that evening a hundred years ago, the founders, including poet Edwin Markham, painter Leon Dabo, and Current Literature editor Edward J. Wheeler, argued, naturally, over words—would they be a society or a club?—but ultimately chose to follow the model of the Poetry Society of England, which had been founded a year earlier.
The PSA didn't immediately gain respect from the public—it was even mocked by reporters as "the Poets' Union." As inaugural secretary Jessie Belle Rittenhouse recalled in her 1934 memoir, My House of Life, "This was still the period when one had to be apologetic about poetry, when the poet was considered a variant from the normal, while there was still a subconscious feeling in the public mind that he was a weakling." Within the PSA's first few years, however, as more famous poets attended meetings (Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats among them) the organization began to win more respect, and more members—growing from forty poets in 1910 to more than twelve hundred today. Now thriving, it is the oldest poetry organization in the country, with a popular awards series, a full schedule of forty to fifty readings and other events each year, and other programming.
Under the direction of Alice Quinn, and with the help of staff members Rob Casper and Brett Fletcher Lauer, the PSA is marking its centennial this year with a number of special events that are being held across the country. Among them are four regional celebrations—Poets of the American Midwest, in Minneapolis on May 14; Poets of New England, in Boston on September 23; Poets of the American South, in Atlanta on October 7; and Poets of the American West, in Los Angeles on November 30—that will feature all-star lineups. For more information about the PSA's centennial events, visit the Web site at www.poetrysociety.org.
Rebecca Keith is a Brooklyn, New York–based writer and the cofounder of Mixer Reading and Music Series.
O’Rourke to Edit the Yale Review
In July poet and critic Meghan O’Rourke will take over as the editor of the Yale Review, Yale University’s quarterly of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. O’Rourke, who has been an editor at the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Slate, succeeds acting editor Harold Augenbraum, who stepped in when the publication’s editor since 1991, the late poet J. D. McClatchy, retired in June 2017. A few months before her official start date, O’Rourke discussed her plans for the review and her approach to editing. In addition to numerous pieces of criticism, O’Rourke has published three poetry collections, most recently Sun in Days (Norton, 2017), and one memoir, The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011).
When will your first issue come out?
October. It coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of the review, which is a wonderful occasion for me to start as editor. It’s fun to begin with a beginning and celebrate a very long period of time at the same time.
Does a two-hundred-year legacy feel overwhelming?
It’s so overwhelming that it’s freeing. Seventy-five years might be more overwhelming, but two hundred years is so capacious and broad, it reminds you that a magazine is a made thing that reflects the passions and currents and ideas of its time and is shaped by the people who work there. There’s a kind of permission in that two hundred years. So the expectation I bring is not so much to maintain a particular identity but to make the journal be to its time what it has been to its time at some of its highest moments. Also, although the magazine is not oriented toward Yale, it is incubated at Yale; I want the magazine to be to its world what Yale is to its world, which is a place of rigorous, creative inquiry that holds itself to the highest standards.
What do you think is a journal’s ideal relationship to its time?
The answer is different for different journals. But the Yale Review is uniquely situated to be a space for the best creative and literary writing to be side by side with passionate, personal, and political criticism—the review has always had a robust back-of-the-book, where the critics’ section is housed. The relationship between the creative enterprise and the critical enterprise is exciting because they are two almost antithetical modes of inquiry. Poems and stories can offset the tendency of the polemicizing, op-ed culture we have around us—not that we’re going to be running op-eds. But there’s something wonderful about modes that coexist in the same journal as oil and water to each other; there’s something exciting about that tension between those modalities because it can add up to a larger world of exploration.
When you’re putting together an issue, will you take that literally? Will you, for example, publish a poem that addresses a topic and a review of a book about that same topic? Or how might the creative and the critical speak to one another in the review?
Less literal than that. We will have theme issues where we use a word—almost the way a poet might—to riff editorially in our thinking. For example, I’m thinking about an issue focused on documents and documentation. Right now, because of the news, we’re all thinking about what it means to be undocumented in America in a specific way. It’s led me to think about literature as document: What does literature document? What goes undocumented? What does it mean to try to document not only what we know about ourselves and our time, but what we can’t know about ourselves and our time? And how does a journal situate itself in that space? It’s also this moment where both fiction and poetry have this fascination with the claims of nonfiction—I’m thinking of Knausgård, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, and the current of autofiction. Novelists are saying, “I’ve gotten tired of making things up.” We also have poets who are using found documents and exploring docupoetics, so it seems like a moment to think through the relationship between imaginative literature and literal documents.
The great challenge of editing a literary journal—or a political and literary journal, which I hope the Yale Review will be—is to figure out how to publish an assortment of really good pieces that add up to something more than a slightly incidental aesthetic. That point to aspects of our cultural experience that we know but maybe haven’t named or aspects of the discourse that are hypocritical or unrigorously explored.
Having many different modes of considering that same question will hopefully lead to a richer understanding, yes?
Yes, and complicate an understanding we might have. As the culture editor at Slate in the early 2000s, where I essentially ran half a magazine and helped build that section and what it meant to be writing cultural criticism on the web, that was still a new question—what are the cultural phenomena we think we understand but don’t look at very closely or have only looked at a little? That’s also what interests me as a writer and led me to write about grief in The Long Goodbye. Grieving had radically changed in American culture, and while we had this idea of grieving, no one had fully unpacked it. Scholars had, but it hadn’t been fully looked at in cultural criticism. And suddenly there was a wave of us all saying, “Hey, this is really strange. Let’s look at how we grieve.” So I’m interested in the journal being a space where that looking a second time can happen.
What other topics besides documentation do you want to cover in the journal?
I’m starting to figure that out. Another thing on my mind is the word antisocial—what does that even mean?We live in a moment where we are bombarded by the social. And there’s been a lot of discussion about Facebook’s role in the last election. So is antisocial an interesting word from which to begin thinking about modes of literature? And in my own work I’ve been writing about chronic illness, so I’m interested in intersections between the medical world and the world of literature, as well as medicine as a culture in itself. I expect that interest will find its way into the review somehow and not just because I’m interested in it—all these people are writing books about the experience of having a poorly understood illness, as well as the social context of medicine and what it means to be a woman and/or person of color searching for answers in a system that comes with a lot of unconscious bias. That narrative is emerging in the culture.
One of the great pleasures of editing a journal like the Yale Review, which comes out four times a year, is that there’s not a pressure to be timely like at Slate where I was publishing daily. I have this wonderful opportunity to take the long view as an editor. But it’s important, as I was saying before, that we’re not merely collecting good pieces that come together in an incidental way, but finding a way to curate them so that there’s some sense of the urgency of the moment, but not in a way that feels merely timely. Hopefully it could also feel timeless. How do we collect the artifacts of our moment and also assign and encourage and facilitate the writing of pieces that will speak to us deeply about what’s happening right now in the world we live in? Sometimes pieces of poetry or fiction do that by not seeming to speak at all to the world we live in—so we’re not going to publish poems that have an expiration date of 2019 or 2020. I hope we’ll publish lasting poems and lasting fiction that somehow reflect something about us in our moment.
Are you planning other changes to the format or coverage of the print review?
I’m planning to revamp the back of the book. Right now it’s a wonderful group of reviews of poetry, music, books, and film, but I want to shake it up a little and publish an idea in review, where we’ll talk about something like the antisocial or culpability—there was a lot of discussion about culpability last fall around Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing: How do we think about culpability? Who is culpable and when? So maybe we’ll have a few different people write about this theme, and let those pieces not respond, but resonate with one another. And I want these pieces to touch down in actual lived cultural and political experiences. So there will be real texts under review, but it might be a text like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings alongside a novel, alongside Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, alongside Jericho Brown’s The Tradition. It is important that we put together the pieces of our experience that are often left separate.
What tone do you want the journal to strike?
I think of the journal as a house I’m building into which I’m inviting a very dynamic, creative, playful, whimsical, argumentative group of people who are all going to be having a conversation. And the journal has the tone of that party. A tone of voluble and passionate conversation.
What are you planning to do on the digital side of the review?
We are planning to launch a new website by early 2020, which will publish original content alongside work from the journal. More broadly we are rethinking how the Yale Review can use different platforms for the delivery of ideas, criticism, and dialogue. To that end we will be developing new columns and podcasts for the website, albeit in a highly curated way, since we’re a small staff. To me the digital review will be as important as the print journal, and it offers a fresh and exciting set of possibilities, precisely because it is a medium different from print. But it serves the same mission: A twentieth-century journal, if you think about it, was just a technology for the delivery and dissemination of passionate, excellent criticism and literature. The question is, What does the web allow us to do better and differently?
What writers or trends in writing are you excited about?
Now is a true moment of fertility in American literature, partly because the nature of gatekeeping has changed. That change allows for a much greater diversity of voices that desperately needs to be there and also brings a great diversity of style and stance and position from which to make formal aesthetic exploration. Sometimes the media can talk a little too reductively about diversity; one of the things that gets overlooked is that diversity of people brings diversity of aesthetics and diversity of approaches. What more could one want? Right now is a wonderful moment to be an editor.
Do you think the editors of a journal should be backstage, or should they be out in front? How open and transparent do you want to be as an editor to your readers?
Because the Yale Review and its readers form a kind of imagined community, especially as we move ever more online, I’d like our readers to know the people behind this enterprise—to get to know our staff, who, I hope, will be doing interviews and editing and writing too. I will sometimes write an editor’s letter to frame issues and share our goals and the questions raised for us, say, in assembling a special issue. In terms of transparency, which I take to refer to questions of how we select what we select, or why we publish what we publish, I’d just say that, of course, there are certain issues where transparency is especially called for. In general, finding ways of representing different points of view is really important to me—far too many literary journals and general interest magazines still have lopsided representation, to put it mildly—and that includes being clear about our mission of engaged dialogue and our hope of discovering valuable new voices.
When you’re editing a piece—this is probably very different for a piece of criticism versus a poem or story—are there a certain set of questions you ask?
In criticism it’s important to have a certain muscularity and flexibility of thought. As a reader and writer of criticism, I want to know that even if one is writing in a passionate, argumentative way, everything has been considered. That I’m not writing or reading a piece that has been written only reflexively. I say that carefully because we live in a moment where we all feel a fair amount of outrage. We all see a certain amount of passionate engagement from all directions about the political moment, and the Internet is a place where we can indulge in that. I’m not saying that’s not important, but if we want to bring that level of passionate outrage to written criticism, there has to be a sense of consideration too. It’s the job of the editor to be an interlocutor for the critic and make sure the critic is saying what they mean as precisely as possible. When you edit criticism, you’re trying to make the argument as clear and sound as possible. There’s always a moment of arguing with yourself as a critic, which doesn’t necessarily need to be on the page but probably needs to happen to write the piece.
When editing fiction and poetry, it’s more about trying to help the writer make a persuasive aesthetic object from nothing. As an editor, my role is not to be an interlocutor, but a mirror. To say, “This is a moment in the poem where I feel the poet making it instead of the object that has been made. The mystery disappears and the effort shows through.” Or, “The tone slips mysteriously,” or, “This section is actually unclear.”
When I started working as an editor at the New Yorker, I would always pretend like I understood everything. It took me a long time to realize as an editor it’s okay to be—in fact, you have to be—an honest reader. You have to say, “I really don’t understand this,” or, “I’m really bored on page four, and I kind of fell asleep there for a little bit.” You have to do it with the humility of your own personhood—it could just be you—but you’re trying to reflect back to the writer as honestly as possible something about your experience. You’re also trying to think as you read it, “Is this an experience others might have while reading this text? Am I identifying something that is getting in the way of it as a persuasive aesthetic object, or is this my own predilection?” Because those are two different things. We can never fully disentangle them, but we can try.
I’m curious about your use of the word “persuasive” in “persuasive aesthetic object”—persuasive of what?
Of its own madeness. I have this sort of spiritual relationship with poems and fiction—I think about Emily Dickinson saying, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I don’t mean that a piece makes an argument that I agree with and I’ve been bullied into submission as a reader, but that it gives me that feeling. It’s that chill; it’s that sense of encountering a vision of the world that uncovers things you knew were there but never named before. I’m thinking of Taeko Kono’s Toddler Hunting and Other Stories,a fascinating book of short stories published in translation by New Directions. Many of the stories feature narrators that have deeply disturbing relationships with young children, and there’s something about the book and the way these women experience loneliness in the world that feels like it’s opening an aspect of experience that I knew was there, but I never had a name for. I don’t have the same sort of relationships that these characters do, but when I read it, I’m totally persuaded of its reality. That’s the kind of persuasion I mean. And that the poem or story has to be the way it is. Original literature is strange, and it often makes choices that another piece couldn’t make.
I love that as a description for how you feel when you read a great poem or story, but how do you feel when you read a really great piece of criticism?
There are different ways I feel. There’s the kind of criticism where you think, “Ah, I agree with every single thing here—thank you. You have named something and provided a structural framework for an intuition, a feeling, or argument I’ve been making but not as well.” Then there’s the piece that slightly changes your mind as you read it. Criticism is important because it gives us language for change, and it gives us language for reevaluation of long-held positions, which is crucial in the moment we’re living in. Especially as you get older, you have some reflexive positions, and good criticism can make you rethink something you’ve long believed, maybe without a lot of critical interrogation. Good criticism can be very uncomfortable to read. But you know it’s good if there’s a soundness to its own structure, its own architecture. And then there’s a kind of criticism that proceeds more associatively and is exciting in how it finds formal freedom in a genre that can be very conservative. There are some critics who can turn a piece of criticism almost into a work of literature. I love reading all these kinds of criticism—criticism that’s formally radical as well as criticism that’s not.
What do you find satisfying or exciting about editing?
As a writer and an editor, I’ve toggled between periods of more solitary writing and periods of more outward-oriented editing. There can be something very lonely and solipsistic and deranged about being a writer alone at your desk all day—the minute can become major, and the major can become minute. It’s like being a candle that burns itself up. So it’s satisfying to use my passion and knowledge and experience of having spent so much time with words on behalf of other people.
A big thread in my nonfiction work is a resistance to a culture of individuality—I believe in a culture of care and community. It’s something we struggle with as Americans: how to figure out the relationship between individual ambition and the humanist mode of actually caring about one another. So I like the humanistic aspect of editing: being there for somebody and helping them because I have a knowledge base of thinking about this stuff for so long.
What kinds of editors inspire you?
Those who make a space for writers to be the best versions of themselves. I also learned a huge amount from Bill Buford, who was my boss at the New Yorker when I started. We’re very different temperamentally, but he cared so deeply about the pieces he worked on. Sometimes as an editor you’re tired, and it can be easy to read a piece and think, “This is great.” And sometimes that’s not the fidelity that the piece needs—sometimes it needs you to enter it and read it more deeply. And that can be exhausting. As a writer, my best editors have made me better but not changed me, which is a kind of magic. I aspire to that—not to impose my aesthetic, but to illuminate what’s there. Make you a better writer and thinker on the page.
Is there anything from J. D. McClatchy’s approach or practice you hope to adopt yourself?
He was a wonderful champion to writers. I think Sandy published my first published piece, so I feel a wonderful sense of gratitude toward him. He believed in young writers and gave them a chance to write serious criticism and publish their poems and fiction. He believed passionately that the review needed to exist and continue existing, and he came on at a moment when there were some doubts about the review’s future. So every day I think about him in that sense—I don’t think it would be here without him. And I feel a similar passionate conviction already that the review should exist and continue existing for many years.
Do you think literary journals are in trouble? I’m thinking, for example, of Tin House announcing it will no longer publish a print quarterly. Is it getting harder for literary journals to sustain themselves?
I don’t know about “harder” or “in trouble,” but any literary journal in 2019 has to think deeply about what it is and what it is in relationship to the culture. The advent of the Internet as a technological change is probably similar to the printing press. We’re looking at a really massive, really fast, wide-scale change in communication. It has to affect literary journals. It would be foolish to say it didn’t. But it affects them in all kinds of ways. Publishing online is not the same thing as publishing in print; [both modes] have brought with them different kinds of conversation and communication.
To give an example: When I starting working as an assistant at the New Yorker in 1997, if someone wanted to write a response to a piece, we chose whose words got published. We reflected back to the world what the world thought of a piece we ran. We reflected what the world thought of the New Yorker. That is not true anymore. Right now I could write a response to anything. Anyone could write anything in response to anything published. And though there’s not totally equal access because of things like search engine optimization, it is much easier for many voices to be heard. That’s a great thing, but the question then becomes: Now that so many voices can come into the conversation, how do we have that conversation in a way where we’re not all yelling at one another? We have to think about this as editors—what does it mean if we’re in a much more democratic space? What are the opportunities there? For the Yale Review, I’m thinking about how to build in a space for conversation and response. So are magazines in trouble? It’s hard in ways that it wasn’t before, and it’s important to think about what kind of editorial reckoning has to happen around this shift. It’s challenging but also exciting.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Meghan O’Rourke (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: The New Editor of the Paris Review
In April, Emily Nemens, then the coeditor of the Southern Review in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was named the new editor of the Paris Review. Nemens started the new position at the Paris Review’s New York City office in June and succeeds Lorin Stein, who resigned in December 2017 amid allegations of sexual misconduct toward female staffers and writers. Nemens takes over a storied publication that is much more than a print quarterly—the magazine regularly runs online content, produces videos and a podcast, hosts events, and publishes books through Paris Review Editions. A few weeks before the Fall 2018 issue, her first, came out, Nemens spoke about her plans for the Paris Review and her approach to editing.
Are there any new series or forms of coverage for the print quarterly in the works?
The guest poetry editor program is really exciting. The Winter Issue, which comes out in December, will be with Shane McCrae picking the poetry. I’m really excited to work with him. I think the magazine does so much really well, and I don’t want to close the door on that—I really just want to support it. So I think there will be incremental growth across all the sections of the magazine. I’d really like to reengage with the essay, which wasn’t always in the magazine, so making a point to reconnect with that form is a priority. I have a visual arts background, so I’d like to collaborate with the arts community to not just figure out striking covers, but to really engage with what’s going on in the art world. For fiction, I’m trying to broaden the kinds of stories that are featured and the emotional motivation and narrative arcs of the stories. There’s a lot going on in fiction now, and the magazine of course reflects my taste and my staff’s taste, but it’s exciting to broaden the kinds of stories told.
How do you want to broaden the review’s fiction?
I think there are different kinds of motivations for stories. Reading the archive, I felt like we hit on the same notes too often in terms of what motivated characters to set out on their journeys. I want to think more about different emotional needs and motivations. There is definitely a theme of loneliness in some of the stories [in the Fall 2018 issue], which I think might be the cultural moment. I read a lot of stories about social media and isolation—to the point where I actually had two really good stories that revolved around the same thing, so one will be in [the Winter 2018 issue]—but I want to think about different inspirations and aspirations for characters in different forms. My personal taste is towards a very long and complicated short story—something in the lines of a Deborah Eisenberg or Adam Johnson story where there’s an entire world—but the Fall issue also features an eight-hundred-word story and a four-hundred-word story. So I’m really thinking about the mechanics of the form and how they can be stretched or compressed and what happens when you do that.
What notes do you think were hit too often in the fiction archive?
There are so many good stories in the archive, and I don’t want to discount that. I do think that there were a lot of New York stories, and there were a lot of romantic attainment stories about finding a partner. That pursuit is a huge part of life, but it’s not the only part of life. There’s also family, there’s also career, there’s also travel, there’s also adventure, there’s also physical attainment in terms of mountain climbing, or whatever it is. There are a lot more things than winding up in the sack, to put it a little too crassly. So I was just reading with that in mind.
How many stories did you read for the Fall 2018 issue?
A few hundred, I’d say. Which is pretty normal. When I was at the Southern Review, I put eyes on every story. And it was about 1 or 2 percent acceptance, so right along those lines.
The Southern Review and the Paris Review publish writers from all over the country and the world, but both seem like journals very tied to a region—the Southern Review to the South and the Paris Review to New York City.
The Paris Review is a real New York institution and that’s really exciting, but I don’t think it needs to be exclusively that. I think it can maintain its ties and relationships to the engine of New York but also bring more people into the fold.
From working at both these journals, do you think the region where a journal’s office is located affects the aesthetic of the journal?
I don’t think it has to. I think it’s really in the perspective of the editors. In certain times of the Southern Review’s history, it was run by Southern scholars who every five years—more often that that—would edit special issues that were just on the state of literature in the South. And that was great and important for the magazine at the time and did a lot to establish it as a powerhouse in regional literature. But when I was there, for the five years I was editing the magazine, my focus was really more on the short story and finding the best short stories and featuring them and celebrating the form. So I wasn’t distancing myself from the legacy, but I wasn’t emphasizing it. So I think the same can happen here, where I don’t want to distance myself from the city and the literature here and everything that’s happening culturally in the city—but know that we can do something else too. And we’ll still exist in this universe. We’ll still be doing programming in the city, but I think we’ll bring the magazine to other events. I’m going to be at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Portland and doing some public programming in Philadelphia and out in California. I don’t want to turn my back in New York and all the wonderful things happening here, but I think having lived and worked in a place where there aren’t as many cultural opportunities makes me want to spread the wealth.
When you were at the Southern Review, you were coeditor with Jessica Faust, and it seemed like the two of you had a really great collaborative process from start to finish. What is it like adjusting to being more on your own?
I’m at the top of the masthead, but I’m still working with a really talented group of colleagues. The buck stops with me, and the editorial selection stops with me, but my editorial assistant, for example, shared a story that ended up in the Fall issue, and my associate editor did, as well. It’s different. It’s definitely reorienting. I love the coeditor structure just in terms of my personal approach to hierarchy—so I’m bringing some of that collaborative spirit and collegiality to the magazine, which feels really good, and I think is refreshing here.
After Lorin Stein resigned in December, the journal’s board members released a statement saying that they had “revised [the Paris Review’s] code of conduct and anti-harassment policies.” How do you hope to build on that?
The board did a lot of good and important work before I ever got here. I was brought up to speed on all of those new policies, and there was great workplace sensitivity training and a lot of other resources brought in this spring. So I feel like a lot of the hard work was done before I arrived. But understanding really what it means to be in a safe and collaborative and collegial work environment and emphasizing that every day—that’s where I come in.
How do you think you can achieve that?
It starts and ends with respecting everyone in the office no matter what their role is or how long they’ve been here. I think it’s being sensitive and empathetic to people’s work, but also to their lives outside of work without prying. And understanding that we’re all colleagues, but we’re also people, and just having that be my baseline as a boss. I’ve been trying to systematically work my way around the office and figure out with people what they’re working on, what they want to be working on, and what their short- and long-term goals are. I think starting with that and making sure we’re having regular check-ins sets a precedent for this as a dynamic and caring place.
Emily Nemens (Credit: Murray Greenfield )
What does a good relationship between a writer and an editor look like to you?
I approach relationships with my writers with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity. I’m a pretty—I’m not going to say tough—but I’m a pretty engaged editor, and I do a lot of edits. I think the only way for those to go over well is if you deliver them with kindness. And usually that works—it doesn’t always work—but usually that works. I also bring that sort of relationship on the page to conversations and relationships [in person]. And even if I don’t connect with a writer on a particular piece, I try to support the work and the person making the work. I spend a lot of time saying, “No, but please keep in touch,” and, “No, I’m not going to publish this, but I care about your work, and I’m excited about it, so let me keep reading it.”
What do you think is the most helpful thing you can give a writer?
The platform of the magazine is huge, and I know that, and I’m so excited about that. We just lost Philip Roth, and we published him at twenty-five, which really made his career or started it. So I’ll acknowledge that. But on a personal level, I really love taking a story that is amazing and that I love and spending some time with it and making it just a smidge better. And showing the writer ways they can grow and improve. I was recently at the Sewanee conference, and a writer I’d published five or six years ago said, “You know, the way you line-edited made me think about the way I write, and I’ve written differently ever since that interaction.” And that melted this editor’s heart. But giving people a new platform or encouraging people to keep going even if they’re not quite there—that’s an easy grab for me, to just be honest and enthusiastic about people’s work. And I don’t know that the writing community always has that generosity.
How would you describe your editing style? It sounds like you’re a really close line-editor.
I am. If I see a really big structural issue I’ll generally ask about it and send more general notes. I always want to test the water if I want to do an overhaul—someone might feel that their story is perfect the way it is, and that’s fine—but if they’re up for it, I’ll send notes broadly. I don’t have time to do that with every story, of course, so I have to be kind of judicious about developmental edits. Usually it’s just one story an issue, or if I see two or three things that [have] developmental issues, I might space them out across a few issues. And then when a story feels close, that’s when I get in there and really think about each line and the pacing of every scene. I learned how to edit from Jessica Faust, a poet and a poetry editor. She was my mentor when I was in graduate school, and we then became colleagues. When you’re editing poetry you’re really considering every piece of punctuation, so I brought that over to editing fiction and interviews and everything else. It’s tedious, but I love it.
It’s hard to think about the Paris Review and not think about George Plimpton. Is there anything from his vision or editing style that you hope to adopt or carry on?
He looms so large. This is Sarah Dudley Plimpton’s rug [points to rug beneath her desk]. This was at the Plimpton home. I feel like I have a strong feeling of his work, but I’m still really learning the details of his legacy. One of my favorite things about this past Spring, and after my appointment, was hearing all the Plimpton stories from all the writers who had encountered him and whose careers he’d helped. That was so much fun to get these stories. I feel like I’m still gathering those and talking with other editors who worked closely with him and getting to know more of his leadership style. That’s an ongoing project. I read his book Paper Lion years ago, and as a person who likes literature but is writing about sports, he was a guiding light for me before the Paris Review was on the radar as a place I could work. So I feel really fortunate to be carrying on that tradition of writing. But that’s secondary to learning how he ran this magazine and how he built this magazine from a really ambitious place. I feel like the journal has been able to carry that ambition and thrive.
Speaking of yourself as a writer, you recently signed a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux for your book about spring training, The Cactus League. As an editor, writer, and visual artist, do you find that the roles complicate or complement one other?
I’m an editor first. I spend most of my time doing that, so when I have the opportunity to write or draw I’m sort of a snake and I just gobble—I have a really big meal and get a lot of work done. Because I’m not one of those writers who sits down and writes every morning. I wish I was, but I edit every morning! And that feels really good. But the thing is, working with language makes your language better. Working on other people’s stories—of course it takes away in terms of number of hours from my writing practice—but I feel like every time I do sit down to write I have a bigger tool kit. So I’m really grateful for that interplay. And the visual arts practice that I love—it will always be part of my life, but it’s sort of tertiary right now. And that’s fine.
At Poets & Writers we have a database of literary journals, and right now it lists almost 1,300 journals, which to me seems like a very daunting number to both writers and editors. Does that number surprise you or seem too high?
That is a really big number, but I think it’s fine. Every journal is run by people who want to make a thing and put it out in the world, and I don’t think there’s any reason to stop that or hinder that progress. Obviously that’s more than I can read in a year. But I think with elbow grease, some strategy, and the right mix of editorial leadership and resources, those journals will find the right audiences—and if they can’t find those audiences, maybe there will be 1,250 next year. I don’t mean that in a glib way; I think that every experiment is worth it. Having seen a lot of great journals close for reasons of resources or lack thereof, I’m really excited that the Internet and other means have reinvigorated the form.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Q&A: Baker Seeks Multiplicity of Voices
In August Atria Books will release Everyday People: The Color of Life, an anthology of short stories by emerging and established writers of color and indigenous people. Edited by Jennifer Baker, a writer and longtime advocate for minority representation in literature—she has worked for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books and hosts the podcast Minorities in Publishing—the collection features work by more than a dozen writers, including Courttia Newland, Yiyun Li, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Nelly Rosario. Baker took on the project after Brook Stephenson, the writer and bookseller who conceived of the anthology, died in 2015. While Stephenson planned for the anthology to feature only Black voices, Baker expanded the project’s focus and began soliciting other people of color and indigenous writers for stories shortly after the 2016 presidential election. The result is a collection of stories that depict the modern lives of people of color as they struggle with contemporary social, political, familial, and personal issues. Just before the book’s release, Baker discussed her work on the anthology and her connection to its mission as a writer and editor of color.
Everyday People highlights the universality of human experience while also mostly adhering to contemporary social realism. When you were soliciting stories for the book, did you intend for this?
It was difficult for me to ask writers of color and indigenous writers to contribute to Everyday People so soon after the presidential election. It was and is a bad time, especially for marginalized people. The contributors are writers I contacted because their work contains a multiplicity of voices and topics. The fact that, in an increasingly tumultuous moment in history, people who are directly affected can create a high level of work in a finite amount of time that continually reflects our humanity speaks to their talent and professionalism. I gave no firm parameters to the writers for their stories, which may have helped them in the end to write broadly or tap into subjects that really speak to them.
Do you think social realism will continue to dominate the future of the short story?
That depends on the author. In Everyday People, Courttia Newland’s and Allison Mills’s stories have speculative and fantastical elements rooted in culture and place that are political, personal, and real. To me those stories also encapsulate our society today by focusing on elections or sudden loss and how to get through loss. They may not be what publishing defines as “contemporary” or “true life,” yet they are identifiable, especially to a person of color or indigenous person.
The 2017 VIDA Count shows that in most of the U.S. literary magazines surveyed more than two-thirds of women and nonbinary contributors were white. Within this landscape, what do you see as the future of multiethnic American short fiction?
The lack of representation in the industry prevents more marginalized stories from being seen by a wider audience. It wouldn’t, I hope, curtail the fact that marginalized folks are constantly creating and finding new routes for this. That said, unless we see some paramount change from the top down and from the bottom up in all areas of the industry, we won’t see a real change.
In the wake of #MeToo controversies within the literary community, Junot Díaz’s story was dropped from the book. How did you come to this decision?
Editors have a responsibility, in any and all capacity, to do what’s morally right and also what is right for the work they’re editing. As editors we have a hand in the titles we publish, and I quite literally have my name on this product. This is also an anthology; I’m not acting out of self-interest but for all those whose work is tied to this book. Hearing other women of color speak out about assault is not something I take lightly or something anyone should readily dismiss. As I told Atria when I made my decision, “This isn’t a PR move. It’s a moral one.” A friend suggested I replace this story with a list of writers of color, namely women, which I expanded as much as I could with nonbinary and transgender writers of color. It seemed the best course of action to not remedy a problem but to make use of the space in a book to further highlight writers of color and indigenous writers. It serves as a resource that reflects as many people as I could find—and while I know I missed so many wonderful artists in my scramble to create this list in two weeks, I hope it’s at least an indicator of how we can further uplift those who don’t have the platform.
What were some of the biggest joys and challenges in compiling an anthology like Everyday People?
The biggest joy was finishing it. Once contributors’ stories were finalized, I mapped out where the stories would go. Seeing first-pass proofs was rewarding because then the final contributors saw the entirety of the book and how it came together. Receiving positive reviews for Everyday People has also been incredibly heartening. The challenges were constant problem solving and also feeling the weight placed on Black women both personally but also nationwide during this time. Yet another challenge was when I experienced misogyny or hesitation to recognize privilege or when I recognized I should’ve done things earlier like utilize sensitivity readers for stories because something felt off to me.
How does wearing the editorial hat impact your own creative writing?
That I’m a very precise person makes me a strong editor and a slowwriter. The inner workings of the editorial mind can be [preoccupied with]: “What does it all mean?” And in the framework of a story that doesn’t mean a narrative gets tied together with a bow, but that it culminates in an experience that seems honest for the work. So, in a way, my work as an editor complements my writing because it means I come to the page with purpose and am aware of when things aren’t working. At times it can impede upon my process because I may continually wonder: “Well, is that good enough?”
Namrata Poddar is the interviews editor for Kweli, where she curates a series called “Race, Power and Storytelling.” Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, VIDA Review, the Progressive, and elsewhere. Her debut story collection, Ladies Special, Homebound, was a finalist for Feminist Press’s 2018 Louise Meriwether First Book Award and is forthcoming from Speaking Tiger Books.
Jennifer Baker (Credit: Murray Greenfield )
Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds
Having run her eponymous literary agency since 2005, in February Gillian MacKenzie joined forces with Kirsten Wolf, a publishing lawyer and the president of Wolf Literary Services, an agency providing legal consultation to other agencies, publishers, and independent artists. The merger resulted in MacKenzie Wolf, which offers all the services of a traditional literary agency plus legal and strategic advising that can be uniquely important for authors, who often face questions ranging from copyright disputes to television and film rights. MacKenzie Wolf, which is currently open to queries, boasts clients such as novelists Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Patty Yumi Cottrell, as well as nonfiction writers Michael J. Casey, Virginia Morell, and Henry Fountain. Shortly after the merger was complete, MacKenzie discussed the partnership, the state of the publishing industry, and the challenges of reaching readers today.
Why did you decide to team up with Kirsten Wolf in this new venture?
Kirsten and I worked in the same office while I was working in film development and production at Jane Startz Productions, before I founded Gillian MacKenzie Agency. Since she started Wolf Literary Services ten years ago, a literary agency and consultancy for other agencies, she and I have shared an office and assistant, with whom I’d sometimes coagent projects. Our merging officially into MacKenzie Wolf was a natural extension of how we’ve always worked, and it has allowed us to more officially and effectively grow the agency arm of the company.
Why pair an agent with a lawyer?
It is surprising how often an attorney’s perspective is useful beyond negotiating the contract. Questions come up about writing partnerships, disputes with publishers, the legal implications of including particular content in a book, various subsidiary rights and how they can be exploited in new ways, and so on. While Kirsten isn’t representing any of our clients—in intricate legal matters, an author should have his or her own attorney—her expertise helps guide decision-making greatly.
How is an agent’s job changing?
The consolidation of publishing houses has reduced submission opportunities. And on the publishing side, it is harder to get a reader’s attention. With fewer physical bookstores, how does a reader come across a book? There is so much noise out there, and what once might have compelled a person to purchase a book—a stellar review, an interesting op-ed by the author—doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome anymore. The sort of quirky, fascinating midlist books I love seem more challenging to get published these days as well.
So how do readers discover and read books now?
That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Of course, big traditional media coverage still helps. Stellar review attention and awards still can help. And to state the obvious, social media seems to matter much more. Today publishers hope to have “influencers”—prominent names with large and active social media followings—push the book; even better, for the authors themselves to have those sorts of followings. However, it is still not entirely clear to me what sort of mention of what kind of book and by whom and where actually pushes someone to go out and make a purchase. I think it is important we all keep thinking of creative ways to help people discover books and authors.
What are some ways you help your writers reach more readers?
We explore avenues that our authors and illustrators may not have originally considered. We are starting to pitch more of our illustration clients for animated commercial work. More and more we encourage our adult-nonfiction writers with suitable material to think about adapting their work for a younger audience. Our agency is also handling more of our clients’ speaking engagements, because not all clients garner fees large enough to attract traditional speaking bureaus, and yet their talks help sell books and generate word of mouth.
Who are you trying to reach with these tactics?
People find themselves so busy and so distracted these days, and even those who were once avid readers have trouble finding the time and bandwidth to read full-length books. I am convinced that if we can compel lapsed readers to take the time to be still for a spell and to read a book from cover to cover, they will be reminded of the addictive and transformative power of books. Yes, there will be other modes of “content delivery” that cater to one’s scattered attention span, but nothing will be able to replace that inimitably rich experience one gets from reading a book. In this way, good books are perhaps the best promotion for other good books.
Have you seen any bright spots?
I am heartened that quality books on not-overtly-commercial topics that matter still do find their way to the shelves. For example, in April my client Alisa Roth had her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness come out—a book about not one but two difficult themes that Basic Books smartly saw important enough to publish. And one of the biggest titles on my list, The Path by Harvard professor Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, is a book about ancient Chinese philosophy and how it informs our lives today—again a book on a serious topic one might not immediately expect to be best-selling and yet has been translated into more than twenty-five different languages and counting.
What kinds of work are you looking to represent?
I am fairly catholic in my tastes: By nature I can find myself excited by stale toast if it’s presented in a certain way. I guess I gravitate toward things that surprise me by coming at an idea through a new perspective, a multi-disciplinary prism, a surprising voice, an unusual format, etc. I want to work on material that I think matters, that might make the world a better place, or at the very least, that will offer readers an entertaining diversion. I’m always interested in seeing book ideas about intriguing discoveries or ways of seeing the world backed by science, journalistic exploration, or personal experience, coupled with the right person behind them. I also have a soft spot for illustrated works and think there are opportunities out there for unusual and winning visual books. Recent projects range widely, from humorous illustrated middle-grade books to books about the blockchain to mountain climbing to dog intelligence to loose nukes. I also gravitate towards strong narrative nonfiction, business, sports, current affairs, and memoir.
What do you love to see in a query from a writer?
I have a full slate; fairly or unfairly, many of my clients of late have come through referrals. But I do read the queries that come in to me, and occasionally one will grab me. One of my favorite slush pile discoveries, for instance, is the talented Cat Warren, whose cover letter started, “My name is Cat, and this is a book about my dog.” As I kept reading, it was immediately clear that her story and talent backed up her compelling letter. Her book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, ended up being longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is a best-seller for Touchstone, under the guidance of editor extraordinaire Michelle Howry. Cat is now working on a middle-grade adaptation of the book, which we recently sold to Krista Vitola at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. My colleague Kate Johnson, who primarily represents fiction, recently discovered Patty Yumi Cottrell from the slush pile. Patty’s stunning debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—everyone must read it!—went on to win a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in fiction.
What advice do you have for writers?
My advice is to do your research on who might be a good fit for your kind of writing, and when you make contact, let that person know why you have chosen specifically to reach out. And don’t give up!
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2019.
Q&A: Kulka Curates America’s Library
In November the Library of America (LOA), the nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, named John Kulka its new editorial director. Succeeding longtime editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien, who retired at the end of 2017, Kulka previously worked at Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, and Basic Books. In his new role at the LOA, Kulka oversees all of the publisher’s titles, including the Library of America standard series, which comprises more than three hundred volumes of classic and historical literature and scholarship and has been called the “de facto canon of American literature” by the New York Times. A few months into his new position, Kulka discussed editing the series and what’s ahead for LOA’s editorial program.
What are your responsibilities at the LOA?
The LOA has always been a special publisher with a special mission. Our broader, nonprofit mission is to reconnect readers through education programs and community outreach. I’m responsible for guiding the editorial program: the Library of America standard series, which issues essential American writing in authoritative editions, and our special non-series books, like David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, String Theory. The LOA publishes reliable editions. They are uncluttered. The mission is to build the national library of American writings—canonical, neglected literature, historical writings. It’s one of the most important undertakings in the history of American publishing.
How do you choose what to publish?
How we publish any given author is always a tricky calculus. Looking at a writer with a voluminous body of work, are we better off being selective or comprehensive? It varies from author to author. Sometimes it’s not an issue. Flannery O’Connor, for example: The stories, novels, and all the nonfiction—if we exclude the letters—fit neatly into a single volume. But I’m thinking now about publishing an edition of Constance Fenimore Woolson, wrongly neglected, whom Henry James saw as a significant nineteenth-century writer. Woolson is a revelation to me: I had always known who she was because of James, but do yourself a favor and look at her short fiction. Is the LOA better off publishing one volume, two volumes, or everything we have of hers? That’s a question I’m faced with. Though a larger selection might be of interest to scholars, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do in presenting her work to a general audience.
How does the LOA remain relevant today?
This is a weird time we’re living in. The proliferation of fake news, inequality, a presentist disregard for the past—in such times, we need the LOA more than ever. Our history and literature still have much to teach us. We ignore it only at our peril. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe that. Here’s an example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing Hamilton, it was the LOA’s edition of Hamilton’s writings that Miranda used as a resource. The musical in turn brought readers back to Hamilton. We published a brief paperback, The Essential Hamilton, in 2017 that we then put gratis into the hands of educators around the country.
What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about LOA since you arrived?
I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the amount of research and scholarship that sometimes goes into these volumes. Literally at my feet right now are three or four oversized cardboard boxes that represent the outtakes from the American Poetry Anthology—and just the two volumes devoted to the twentieth century. There’s so much research and scholarship that goes into production. It’s kind of a humbling thing.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Lana Turner, Prelude, and elsewhere.
(Credit: Murray Greenfield )
Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
Sarah Browning (Credit: Kristin Adair)
Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large. (Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)
Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press?
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too.
How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.
Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list?
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.
Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app.
We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion?
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Kaya Thomas (Credit: Faith Rotich)
Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem
Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture.
How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry.
What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”
So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly.
Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Nicole Sealey (Credit: Murray Greenfield )
Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers
In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.
What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge?
We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.
What are you planning next?
Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.
What else is involved in the national ambassador position?
It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.
Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them?
There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.
Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid?
As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.
Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats?
Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.
Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening?
I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.
What draws you to working with and writing for young people?
I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint
In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.
There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now?
It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.
Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter?
We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.
You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project?
We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.
What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny?
Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.
How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish?
It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.
How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions?
Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.
Will you be editing the books yourself?
We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.
You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works?
We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We'd love to add that element to our list.
You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own?
Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)Q&A: Sherrod Celebrates Amistad Press
Founded in 1986 by Charles F. Harris, Amistad Press is one of the country’s leading publishers of multicultural voices. Originally established to publish anthologies of African American writing, Amistad has since grown into a prominent literary fiction and nonfiction imprint of HarperCollins, having published novels by Edward P. Jones, Yvvette Edwards, and Jacqueline Woodson, as well as books of nonfiction by cultural icons such as Steve Harvey and Venus Williams. As Amistad celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, Tracy Sherrod, who has served as the editorial director since 2013, talks about the press’s history and the challenges it faces today.
How has Amistad changed or grown in the past thirty years?
It’s grown in the number of titles, it’s grown in prominence, it’s grown in respectability, it’s grown in creativity. The foundation is the same, which is to publish multicultural voices and to let them express themselves freely. At the time when Charles F. Harris started Amistad, you didn’t feel that the publishing industry could fully see black culture. When Susan L. Taylor’s essay collection In the Spirit came—Taylor was the editor in chief of Essence—people in the publishing industry didn’t recognize how popular she was, so she was rejected all over town. But Malaika Adero, who came to Amistad as its first official editor outside of Charles Harris, acquired that book and it sold in best-seller numbers. And then they followed it up a few years later with a book by John Johnson, who founded Ebony and Jet. These people were praised in our community and celebrated—we all knew their names, we all wanted to know their stories—and Amistad published them. That’s how Amistad has impacted publishing: by helping the industry recognize how important and profitable these voices are.
What are the challenges for Amistad now?
Nowadays, people in the industry recognize how important African American voices are in contributing to literature. The authors can be published by any imprint they choose, so that makes it more competitive on my part. It’s always been competitive, but not this competitive. I’m glad to see it. There should be huge demand for those voices.
Do you find authors are reluctant to join Amistad as opposed to an imprint that doesn’t have a multicultural focus?
I find both. I find authors who prefer the focus, who have been published elsewhere and have maybe felt “culturally assaulted” by their editors—that’s one way a writer described what happened to her in the editorial process. And there are authors who are perfectly happy where they are and are published brilliantly where they are. Some writers are reluctant and ask me to publish their book on the broader Harper list. But we have the same marketing and publicity team, so I don’t think the logo on the book makes much of a difference.
Do you think publishers run the risk of pigeonholing or sequestering writers by creating multicultural imprints?
No, I don’t think there’s a risk of doing that. It’s been proved that when Random House closed down One World/Ballantine and Harlem Moon, the company as a whole published less work by multicultural voices. So I don’t think that they’re sequestered—it’s an opportunity. Some people see it as ghettoized. But that’s not the case at all—these books are published with great care, they’re given the same marketing and publicity opportunities, we offer the same competitive advances.
Amistad publishes both literary and commercial titles—how do you balance the two?
I go with my taste. I think every editor acquires to her personality, and I have a broad range of interest. I’m really trying to do books that address the community’s needs—depression and emotional issues are heavy on people’s minds these days with the economy. We published Darryl McDaniel’s book, Ten Ways Not To Commit Suicide. Since it’s by someone who’s rich and obviously successful—but who also suffers with depression from time to time—it might make the layperson feel more comfortable coming forth and talking about these issues. We also published this book The Mother by Yvvette Edwards and it’s delicious, let me tell you, but delicious in the sense that it’s rich in the pain the mother feels after her son is killed by another child. And I think that’s an issue in our community. That’s what I mean by publishing to the issues—things that are very particular to us. Not too particular to us, but something we’re dealing with in overabundance.
Can you speak more to what issues are important now?
Financial issues, the economy. I’ve published several books that allow people to inspire their creativity to become entrepreneurs. Like Miko Branch’s Miss Jessie’s: Creating a Successful Business From Scratch—Naturally. And some of our memoirs have practical elements that you can take away, like The Book of Luke: My Fight for Truth, Justice, and Liberty City by Luther Campbell. In his book, he writes about how he made a financially successful life for himself, ran all the way to the Supreme Court to fight injustice against the first amendment, and won. I think that’s pretty incredible. He shares with people that you need to stand for something and you need to work hard. And a lot of the memoirs we publish have that theme running through them: entrepreneurship, hard work, and the use of your God-given talents.
What as an editor do you find most challenging?
There comes moments in one’s publishing career—or in one’s publishing day, week, month—where a book will come along and you’ll feel like you need to acquire it, because it’s going to be extremely popular and sell really well. It’s only once in a while that you’re going to say, “This one is the one. This one is going to work.” And a lot of times if the people around you don’t know that person’s name in the same way that they didn’t know Susan Taylor’s name, the same way they didn’t know Zane’s name, they’ll say, “Oh no, we can’t do that book. We’re not going to invest much of an advance in that book.” Those moments are painful, because I know—sometimes you know—you’re not guessing, you’re not estimating. Once in a while you know. And I need to work better at conveying when I know, so that those books don’t end up with another publisher.
How do you know when a title is one of those books?
For nonfiction, it’s straight-up practical reasons—the community has been waiting for a book from this person forever, so things are all lined up. There are so many people behind it that it doesn’t really matter what it is that they do, but chances are that they’re doing something smart and it will work. For fiction, it feels like a warmth that overwhelms you—it’s a sensation. When there are so many elements to a story that embrace where you come from that you know it’s going to work. Like Edwards’s The Mother and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn.
Are there more specific challenges you encounter as an editor of color?
The number one thing is that I think most of the publishing industry looks at African American editors as one and the same. They believe that our tastes are going to be the same, that we’re going to want the same books, that we’re building identical publishing programs—but that’s not really true. We all have very different tastes. Some are more literary than others; some are more interested in books that have historical relevance; some only want to do books that will make a difference. And it goes across the board. Everybody has different tastes. And we’re friends—even though we sometimes compete against one another, we’re friends and support one another and recognize more than anything that if one book fails, it could jeopardize all the books. We face more pressure because we can only acquire a few books. So if you pay a lot for one and it tanks hugely, there’s no telling what might happen. So we’re all very careful and very smart and think of publishing multicultural books as a whole, not about our careers. It has nothing to do with our individual careers. And I think this was shown when Chris Jackson was given the opportunity to start his own imprint, and he decided to resurrect One World [at Random House] instead, which shows that he was concerned about the multicultural publishing community.
Do you sense that the publishing industry has adopted the view that black readers have diverse interests and read across racial and cultural lines?
I don’t think it’s adopted by the industry as a whole. Someone once said to me, “Are all of your books about race?” And I said, “No!” Multicultural writers write about various aspects of their lives. Even though racism has shaped all of us, unfortunately, and I’m not sure it has shaped us to be our best selves. I do believe that something special is going on right now, where all of us are questioning our biases and racism in a more serious way. I also believe there’s another segment of the population that is embracing their hostility towards other races, and they are really speaking loudly. So those of us who are trying to do better and [create] a more beloved society need to speak louder. And perhaps show some love to the other people who are really having a challenging time, and maybe then we can make America great again.
It’s a scary time, right?
It is, it is. But I think it’s going to be a productive time. I remember back in 2008 and 2009, there was a drought in multicultural literature. There were great books, but there were very few in terms of the number of books that were coming out. I remember telling a friend in publishing, “Believe it or not, this is a really good time, because I know that people are in their homes writing and creating and in the next few years, it’s going to be an explosion of just amazing, amazing literature.” And I think that is happening now.
What are your plans for Amistad’s future, and how do you hope to grow the list?
We plan to grow the staff, to find someone who specializes in marketing and publicity. As for the list, I’ve learned from the success of Edward P. Jones winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World, the reception of Another Brooklyn, the reception of The Mother, that literary fiction is the route for Amistad. As for nonfiction, [we’ll be looking to publish fewer] celebrities and more serious narrative nonfiction. That’s how we’ll grow the list. We have some really great books coming that reflect that. We’re doing Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd, and Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, which is a memoir by a young man, Brandon Harris, about gentrification. And we have a book called The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor that’s a history from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Jim Crow era of the really wealthy class of black people and their philosophies and ways of life.
Does Amistad have a target audience?
I definitely want our books to reach people of color in addition to everyone else. I think it’s the same hope that we have for every book: We want our books to reach everyone. So my goal is that I’m publishing for people of color, but I hope that everyone is interested.
What would you like to see in the industry in terms of increasing diversity?
I would like for the industry to see that it’s wonderful when all the cultures come together and do things together. There’s so much joy, there’s so much pleasure, there’s so much excitement to be found there. And I think that we should try to achieve that more often—because it’s a beautiful experience, and we all learn so much, and what we learn provides joy.
In what way would we be brought together?
In making books! And not thinking that books are for a particular audience, or that when we go to market that only women or only whatever the “only” is buys books. Don’t think of it that way. Because we’re sharing a story that we’re all a part of. This is supposed to be some melting pot, so let’s see what’s in the pot! I’d like for us to see that bringing things together is joyful and not work. Inclusion is not work. I think living in isolation is work.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers
In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too.
How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.
Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list?
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.
Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app.
We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion?
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Kaya Thomas (Credit: Faith Rotich)
Q&A: Lena Dunham’s Lenny Imprint
In 2015, Lena Dunham, along with her producing partner, Jenni Konner, created an online newsletter that would provide “a platform for young female voices to discuss feminist issues.” In its first six months Lenny Letter, also known as Lenny, attracted an impressive 400,000 subscribers. Building on that success, last year Random House, publisher of Dunham’s 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” announced that Lenny would be the basis of a new imprint, overseen by vice president and editor in chief Andy Ward. The imprint’s first title, Sour Heart, the debut story collection by poet Jenny Zhang, is out now. In the months leading up to its publication, Dunham spoke about her vision for Lenny Books.
There can never be too many platforms for new and emerging literary voices, but still: Why Lenny Books and why now?
It was essential to Jenni and me that we use the gift of our platform to give voice to a diverse group of women who need to be heard. It has never been more important that we hear from every kind of woman and understand the specificities of her experience—and that happens to be the goal of Lenny.
Will the imprint be fueled by the same ethos as the newsletter?
We want the imprint’s logo to be a symbol that lets you know you’re about to read something that plays with the feminine in a fascinating new way. We want you to see the spine and think, “Oh, thank the Lord, I know what will thrill me tonight.” We want our readers to trust that our imprint is selecting books that will enrich them and make them laugh. Books allow for a deeper, more sustained exploration that the newsletter doesn’t—and that, too, is thrilling.
You and Jenni are already successfully publishing new voices in your newsletter, so what is it about print books in general, and Random House in particular, that led you to this new project?
We are book nerds. We read to learn. We read to relax. We read to get inspired. It’s honestly selfish: We want a hand in helping produce the kinds of books we want to read, and we want to get first crack at reading fantastic authors and groundbreaking feminist works. So far, it’s been wildly fun. It’s interesting and inspiring that our partner in crime is Andy Ward, a man who understands our mission. So we aren’t for girls only, even if we are always thinking of our reader as a busy woman who needs to be able to trust that a Lenny book means her precious time is not being wasted.
What made Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart a good choice for the first title from Lenny?
Jenny is a writer of uncompromising honesty, complete originality, massive wit, and real skill. Her stories show us a part of the world, a part of the human experience, which most of us have never encountered. She’s enigmatic and compelling as a person—there is no one who more clearly represents our mission.
How will you and Jenni work together to make decisions about whose books to publish?
It’s all instinct. Along with Andy, we try to fill our slate slowly but enthusiastically with writers we admire. Ultimately, we want the Lenny list to be an exciting kind of “collect ‘em all” where our books as a whole tell a story about what it feels like to be female now.
How closely will you work with Random House? Do you have autonomy in terms of editorial decisions?
Andy was my editor on my first book, and we are currently at work on my second. He is my creative collaborator on a deep and abiding level. So we don’t just accept his thoughts, we demand them. And we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t have such a special relationship with Random House. My literary agent Kim Witherspoon is also a remarkable force who has helped authors like Anthony Bourdain build their own imprints, and her business instincts are impeccable. It really takes a village, and Jenni and I are happy to admit what we don’t know.
Will you be editing the books yourself?
We know that editing is a specific and challenging job and one that people work their whole lives to get great at. So we read everything and give our notes but we really trust that editors should edit.
You’ve published poetry issues of Lenny. Any chance you and Random House have a poetry imprint in the works?
We would love to publish poetry and not relegate it to some musty back room. We just need to find the right poet who we think will spark with readers who may be new to the pleasures of poetry. Jenni and I are both liberal arts grad poetry nerds who find the form completely enthralling. We'd love to add that element to our list.
You’ve written a book, Not That Kind of Girl, so do you have any advice for writers who are working on their own?
Work. Work. Work. There’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and getting it done.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
(Photo: Stephanie Keenan.)Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press?
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem
Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture.
How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry.
What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”
So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly.
Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Nicole Sealey (Credit: Murray Greenfield )
Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large. (Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)
Q&A: Wilson Leads the Feminist Press
In July writer, activist, and media commentator Jamia Wilson was named the new executive director and publisher of the Feminist Press (FP), a forty-seven-year-old nonprofit known for highlighting feminist perspectives and prose. Located at the City University of New York, the press has published books by writers such as Shahrnush Parsipur and Ama Ata Aidoo and public figures such as Anita Hill and Justin Vivian Bond. Wilson previously worked as the executive director of Women, Action, and the Media, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Elle, Bust, and many other publications. As she becomes the youngest person and first woman of color to direct the Feminist Press, Wilson discusses her aims to advance the press’s mission.
How has your experience helped you prepare for this new role, and what do you hope to bring to the Feminist Press?
I grew up reading FP books that I borrowed from my mother’s shelf, like I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader and But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. These books taught me about my literary and activist lineage and helped provide a road map for the present and the future. I’m honored to work with FP’s intergenerational team to both enliven and deepen our intersectional vision of publishing unapologetic, accessible texts and multiplatform content that inspire action, teach empathy, build community, and shift culture. FP will continue to deepen our engagement with communities of color, indigenous folks, the LGBTQ community, and the disability community. Representation matters, but it must be coupled with systemic change. We will elevate and amplify the voices of the most marginalized members of our community because we know that none of us are free unless we all are.
How do you plan to apply your knowledge and experience in the social justice field to the job of executive director and publisher?
My engagement as a movement maker and media commentator brings FP closer to our community. It helps us connect with new readers because we’re involved in conversations out in the world and contributing to the cultural narrative via social media; TV; at conferences, panels, and marches; and in movement spaces. Until more gatekeepers do the work to disrupt habits and practices of patriarchy, economic injustice, and white supremacy in the publishing industry, we won’t transform our cultural narrative. My goal is to help contribute to the movement to put these values into active practice at all levels of our organization and work overall.
In this political and social climate, what kinds of books are pushing this conversation forward and promoting action?
This has been a consistent part of FP’s mission, and that’s why we’re prepared to speak truth to power through our books and voices in the midst of attacks on free expression and the rise of authoritarianism, misogyny, and racial violence. We publish books other publishers deem “too risky,” “controversial,” or “radical.” We’ve made efforts to lift up queer voices with our Amethyst Editions imprint and women and nonbinary folks of color with our Louise Meriwether Prize. Our nonfiction books are mainly activist-based. We resist the reinforcement of respectability politics, as well as the promotion of narratives that appear to promote social progress but only in a way that’s palatable or validating to oppressive power structures—and only at the price of continuing to marginalize communities that are often silenced, invisible, or undermined. Some of our recent titles include Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down, a novel about growing up gay in 1980s Alabama, and Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson’s forthcoming How Mamas Love Their Babies, a picture book that shows how diverse mothers work in different ways to take care of their children, from domestic labor to sex work.
What kinds of books have been most influential to you personally?
The books I’m most enamored with have moved my heart in both personal and political ways. As my feminist foremothers taught us, “The personal is political.” I’m both an activist and a writer, and these identities have affixed themselves upon my soul. I love fiction, especially dystopian fiction, but I’m mostly a reader of nonfiction, historical fiction, legal history, and memoir. Although I tend to lean towards writing grounded in “truth,” I’m finding I’m even more drawn to this genre in the “post-truth” era.
There has been an increase in online-only feminist publications. Do you foresee potential partnerships to bring further visibility to FP’s work?
We reach out to writers or artists who have gotten their start online if we’re interested in creating a book with them, like with Makeda Lewis’s Avie’s Dreams: An Afro-Feminist Coloring Book and The Crunk Feminist Collection. Many of the feminist writers and artists we work with have robust online communities and serve as natural ambassadors for their labor and wisdom. We have other upcoming collaborations with the Well-Read Black Girl Festival, Soul Camp, the Together Live tour, the SisterSong conference, Howard University, and the March for Black Women. We want to be a part of feminist conversations on- and offline and to lift up remarkable and stunning storytelling.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a contributing editor at Electric Literature, and the social media director and a writing instructor for the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
Sarah Browning (Credit: Kristin Adair)
Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large. (Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)
Q&A: Kulka Curates America’s Library
In November the Library of America (LOA), the nonprofit publisher of classic American literature, named John Kulka its new editorial director. Succeeding longtime editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien, who retired at the end of 2017, Kulka previously worked at Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, and Basic Books. In his new role at the LOA, Kulka oversees all of the publisher’s titles, including the Library of America standard series, which comprises more than three hundred volumes of classic and historical literature and scholarship and has been called the “de facto canon of American literature” by the New York Times. A few months into his new position, Kulka discussed editing the series and what’s ahead for LOA’s editorial program.
What are your responsibilities at the LOA?
The LOA has always been a special publisher with a special mission. Our broader, nonprofit mission is to reconnect readers through education programs and community outreach. I’m responsible for guiding the editorial program: the Library of America standard series, which issues essential American writing in authoritative editions, and our special non-series books, like David Foster Wallace’s tennis essays, String Theory. The LOA publishes reliable editions. They are uncluttered. The mission is to build the national library of American writings—canonical, neglected literature, historical writings. It’s one of the most important undertakings in the history of American publishing.
How do you choose what to publish?
How we publish any given author is always a tricky calculus. Looking at a writer with a voluminous body of work, are we better off being selective or comprehensive? It varies from author to author. Sometimes it’s not an issue. Flannery O’Connor, for example: The stories, novels, and all the nonfiction—if we exclude the letters—fit neatly into a single volume. But I’m thinking now about publishing an edition of Constance Fenimore Woolson, wrongly neglected, whom Henry James saw as a significant nineteenth-century writer. Woolson is a revelation to me: I had always known who she was because of James, but do yourself a favor and look at her short fiction. Is the LOA better off publishing one volume, two volumes, or everything we have of hers? That’s a question I’m faced with. Though a larger selection might be of interest to scholars, I’m not entirely sure that it’s the right thing to do in presenting her work to a general audience.
How does the LOA remain relevant today?
This is a weird time we’re living in. The proliferation of fake news, inequality, a presentist disregard for the past—in such times, we need the LOA more than ever. Our history and literature still have much to teach us. We ignore it only at our peril. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I believe that. Here’s an example: When Lin-Manuel Miranda was writing Hamilton, it was the LOA’s edition of Hamilton’s writings that Miranda used as a resource. The musical in turn brought readers back to Hamilton. We published a brief paperback, The Essential Hamilton, in 2017 that we then put gratis into the hands of educators around the country.
What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about LOA since you arrived?
I’ve been repeatedly impressed by the amount of research and scholarship that sometimes goes into these volumes. Literally at my feet right now are three or four oversized cardboard boxes that represent the outtakes from the American Poetry Anthology—and just the two volumes devoted to the twentieth century. There’s so much research and scholarship that goes into production. It’s kind of a humbling thing.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Lana Turner, Prelude, and elsewhere.
(Credit: Murray Greenfield )
Q&A: Sarah Browning Splits This Rock
Ten years ago, Sarah Browning and a group of fellow poets founded Split This Rock, a literary nonprofit that works at the intersection of poetry and political activism and hosts the biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, D.C. Browning recently announced that she will step down from her role as executive director of the organization at the end of the year, and that the search for her replacement will begin after this year’s festival, which will be held from April 19 to April 21. With her final year at the organization underway, Browning discussed her past decade at Split This Rock, the continued need to consider poetry a form of social engagement, and the upcoming festival.
What changes have you seen in the literary world since starting Split This Rock?
When we started this organization, there were very few literary organizations engaging in activism. I went to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in 2003, three weeks before the United States invaded Iraq, and I could find only two sessions that engaged political questions at all. We were actively being told not to write political work fifteen years ago. That’s why we started D.C. Poets Against the War [a movement in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq] and then Split This Rock, which emerged from that movement. Split This Rock brought the activism piece into the picture. Now, of course, everybody is focused on making change with their poetry and doing so more explicitly. But I’m telling you, ten years ago, there was no home for it. And that’s why we built it.
The name “Split This Rock” comes from a poem, doesn’t it?
It does, from a Langston Hughes poem called “Big Buddy.” It ends with, “When I split this rock, / Stand by my side.” So it’s about splitting the rock of injustice but also the solidarity that’s needed—that need for community.
How does Split This Rock make poetry and activism accessible?
We try to bring poetry into as many spaces as possible and encourage everyone to write. We host community writing workshops twice a month in D.C. They’re free, drop-in; all you have to do is show up. The room is physically accessible, with transcription service for people with disabilities. You don’t have to have an MFA or any educational experience or introduction to poetry. We believe that, as Roque Dalton wrote in a poem, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” And our programs prove it. People are hungry for the imaginative language of poetry and for the authentic voice of one another, the heart-language, because so much of our experience is mediated now by propaganda, by commerce, by social media. We’re being sold to all the time. So we’re hungry for more authentic experience, and that’s what poetry is: It’s idiosyncratic language; it’s weirdness and wildness.
What would you say to those who might suggest that poetry and activism are incompatible?
Writers have always engaged the world around them. And as a writer you have to write what’s pounding up inside you. And if what’s pounding up inside you is injustice—if there’s a mother who has to work two jobs just to get food on the table, or if you are that mother, and you’re writing late at night and hoping there’ll be enough food to get you through the end of the week to the next paycheck—then that’s what you’re writing. That’s the poem. That’s what’s going to have power: What is the fire in your belly?
Nobody should tell anybody else what to write. I’m not telling anybody what to write. These poems were always being written; they just weren’t finding a wide audience because journals weren’t publishing them. The guidelines were saying, “No causes.” The contests weren’t awarding these poets the awards. The universities weren’t giving these poets the jobs. Because of racism, and because of conservatism. And homophobia and sexism. Split This Rock was founded to help these poets, like myself, feel less lonely and be more effective as poet-citizens, so that we could join together when we wanted to do activism—but also to amplify our voices and to create our own platforms.
Split This Rock cites Federico García Lorca’s concept of duende as one of its core values, which is described on your website as “recognizing the potential imaginative power of fear and embracing poets and activists who grapple with difficult issues and take risks in their writing and public work.” Why are fear and risk both necessary to move things forward?
It ain’t easy. None of it. We’re not going to make change if we stick to platitudes and simplicity, either in our poetry or in our social justice work. So we have to go to dark places, difficult places, in ourselves and in our relationships with one another and in our society. And that’s hard. I think it certainly helps us to sometimes be patient with one another. Split This Rock is one of the few places in the literary world, but really anywhere, where folks who are twenty-one and folks who are seventy-six are hanging out in the same room, having conversations. And maybe they have radically different cultural references and life experiences. So duende informs that because it’s scary to say, “You know, I don’t actually know anything about what you’ve just said.”
I’ve never studied poetry formally, so even when I’m with a bunch of academics and they use terms that I don’t know, I have to say to them, “Guess what, I don’t know what you’re saying!” [Laughs.] Which is a scary thing for me to say. I try to face my fear. But it’s at all levels, and we have to do it at all levels: personal, creative, collective, national. I’m the descendant of slave owners. I write about that in my work and I’m trying to push that, hard. I don’t know how my extended family’s going to feel about it, let alone other white people from the South. I wasn’t raised in the South, only half my family is from the South, so I’m going to be treated as an outsider, but that’s an issue where I feel like we have to face our fears as white Americans.
What guests and panels are you excited to feature in this year’s Split This Rock Poetry Festival?
Sharon Olds has been added to the lineup, which is really great news. She was supposed to feature at our very first festival in 2008 but was unable to come. Likewise, Sonia Sanchez kicked off our first festival and she will be back to mark this tenth anniversary. But also we have young poets like Paul Tran and Terisa Siagatonu. We always try to honor voices of all ages and in all places in their writing lives.
This being the first festival under the new political regime, we are particularly interested in how poetry is being used in resistance and in how poets are taking care of themselves and one another. We’re all feeling a lot of despair, I think, and we heard that in the proposals we received. There are a lot of sessions about using sadness, about using rage—in our poetry, but also in our community building—and acknowledging these things as real. Crying. Holding one another in celebration and in support.
What’s next for you—writing?
Yes. I don’t do well without structure, even this late in my life. I’m thinking about grad school. But at the very least, I would like to have more time for my own poetry and creative nonfiction. My second book just came out, but it was ten years between books. It would be nice not to have ten years till the next one.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
Sarah Browning (Credit: Kristin Adair)
Q&A: A Merger of Literary, Legal Minds
Having run her eponymous literary agency since 2005, in February Gillian MacKenzie joined forces with Kirsten Wolf, a publishing lawyer and the president of Wolf Literary Services, an agency providing legal consultation to other agencies, publishers, and independent artists. The merger resulted in MacKenzie Wolf, which offers all the services of a traditional literary agency plus legal and strategic advising that can be uniquely important for authors, who often face questions ranging from copyright disputes to television and film rights. MacKenzie Wolf, which is currently open to queries, boasts clients such as novelists Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and Patty Yumi Cottrell, as well as nonfiction writers Michael J. Casey, Virginia Morell, and Henry Fountain. Shortly after the merger was complete, MacKenzie discussed the partnership, the state of the publishing industry, and the challenges of reaching readers today.
Why did you decide to team up with Kirsten Wolf in this new venture?
Kirsten and I worked in the same office while I was working in film development and production at Jane Startz Productions, before I founded Gillian MacKenzie Agency. Since she started Wolf Literary Services ten years ago, a literary agency and consultancy for other agencies, she and I have shared an office and assistant, with whom I’d sometimes coagent projects. Our merging officially into MacKenzie Wolf was a natural extension of how we’ve always worked, and it has allowed us to more officially and effectively grow the agency arm of the company.
Why pair an agent with a lawyer?
It is surprising how often an attorney’s perspective is useful beyond negotiating the contract. Questions come up about writing partnerships, disputes with publishers, the legal implications of including particular content in a book, various subsidiary rights and how they can be exploited in new ways, and so on. While Kirsten isn’t representing any of our clients—in intricate legal matters, an author should have his or her own attorney—her expertise helps guide decision-making greatly.
How is an agent’s job changing?
The consolidation of publishing houses has reduced submission opportunities. And on the publishing side, it is harder to get a reader’s attention. With fewer physical bookstores, how does a reader come across a book? There is so much noise out there, and what once might have compelled a person to purchase a book—a stellar review, an interesting op-ed by the author—doesn’t necessarily lead to that outcome anymore. The sort of quirky, fascinating midlist books I love seem more challenging to get published these days as well.
So how do readers discover and read books now?
That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Of course, big traditional media coverage still helps. Stellar review attention and awards still can help. And to state the obvious, social media seems to matter much more. Today publishers hope to have “influencers”—prominent names with large and active social media followings—push the book; even better, for the authors themselves to have those sorts of followings. However, it is still not entirely clear to me what sort of mention of what kind of book and by whom and where actually pushes someone to go out and make a purchase. I think it is important we all keep thinking of creative ways to help people discover books and authors.
What are some ways you help your writers reach more readers?
We explore avenues that our authors and illustrators may not have originally considered. We are starting to pitch more of our illustration clients for animated commercial work. More and more we encourage our adult-nonfiction writers with suitable material to think about adapting their work for a younger audience. Our agency is also handling more of our clients’ speaking engagements, because not all clients garner fees large enough to attract traditional speaking bureaus, and yet their talks help sell books and generate word of mouth.
Who are you trying to reach with these tactics?
People find themselves so busy and so distracted these days, and even those who were once avid readers have trouble finding the time and bandwidth to read full-length books. I am convinced that if we can compel lapsed readers to take the time to be still for a spell and to read a book from cover to cover, they will be reminded of the addictive and transformative power of books. Yes, there will be other modes of “content delivery” that cater to one’s scattered attention span, but nothing will be able to replace that inimitably rich experience one gets from reading a book. In this way, good books are perhaps the best promotion for other good books.
Have you seen any bright spots?
I am heartened that quality books on not-overtly-commercial topics that matter still do find their way to the shelves. For example, in April my client Alisa Roth had her book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness come out—a book about not one but two difficult themes that Basic Books smartly saw important enough to publish. And one of the biggest titles on my list, The Path by Harvard professor Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, is a book about ancient Chinese philosophy and how it informs our lives today—again a book on a serious topic one might not immediately expect to be best-selling and yet has been translated into more than twenty-five different languages and counting.
What kinds of work are you looking to represent?
I am fairly catholic in my tastes: By nature I can find myself excited by stale toast if it’s presented in a certain way. I guess I gravitate toward things that surprise me by coming at an idea through a new perspective, a multi-disciplinary prism, a surprising voice, an unusual format, etc. I want to work on material that I think matters, that might make the world a better place, or at the very least, that will offer readers an entertaining diversion. I’m always interested in seeing book ideas about intriguing discoveries or ways of seeing the world backed by science, journalistic exploration, or personal experience, coupled with the right person behind them. I also have a soft spot for illustrated works and think there are opportunities out there for unusual and winning visual books. Recent projects range widely, from humorous illustrated middle-grade books to books about the blockchain to mountain climbing to dog intelligence to loose nukes. I also gravitate towards strong narrative nonfiction, business, sports, current affairs, and memoir.
What do you love to see in a query from a writer?
I have a full slate; fairly or unfairly, many of my clients of late have come through referrals. But I do read the queries that come in to me, and occasionally one will grab me. One of my favorite slush pile discoveries, for instance, is the talented Cat Warren, whose cover letter started, “My name is Cat, and this is a book about my dog.” As I kept reading, it was immediately clear that her story and talent backed up her compelling letter. Her book, What the Dog Knows: Scent, Science, and the Amazing Ways Dogs Perceive the World, ended up being longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is a best-seller for Touchstone, under the guidance of editor extraordinaire Michelle Howry. Cat is now working on a middle-grade adaptation of the book, which we recently sold to Krista Vitola at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. My colleague Kate Johnson, who primarily represents fiction, recently discovered Patty Yumi Cottrell from the slush pile. Patty’s stunning debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace—everyone must read it!—went on to win a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and the 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Award in fiction.
What advice do you have for writers?
My advice is to do your research on who might be a good fit for your kind of writing, and when you make contact, let that person know why you have chosen specifically to reach out. And don’t give up!
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in 2019.
Q&A: Sokolowski’s Inspiring Word Work
As the editor-at-large of Merriam-Webster, Peter Sokolowski contributes to the dictionary’s print and online content, which, in addition to word definitions, includes podcasts, videos, and blogs. In August Sokolowski and his fellow editors rolled out Time Traveler, a tool that organizes words according to when they were first used in English. He recently discussed Merriam-Webster’s newest features, the changing ways in which people use the dictionary, and the Word of the Year, feminism, which the editors announced today.
How does Time Traveler work? How does it affect the way we think about language?
With Time Traveler, by organizing [words] a different way—that is, rather than alphabetically, chronologically—you get a three-dimensional experience with the dictionary. I do think it’s profound to think of language chronologically. Alphabetically, the ordering is arbitrary. Chronologically, it’s not. Time Traveler shows layers of cultures as they are expressed in the language when they come into the language. English is such a peculiar language in this way. French, for example, is almost entirely derived from Latin. The French Academy founded the language with an ethos of contraction. But English is a mongrel language, with an ethos of expansion. This ethos of expansion has a political component, too. England is establishing colonies all over the world. So, due to exploration, India is a very rich source of words. We first put dates into the dictionary in 1983, with the release of the Collegiate ninth edition. Dictionary entries have always been organized in chronological order: The first sense was always the oldest sense, and the last definition was, chronologically, the most recent. The thing is, that’s a little counterintuitive. By adding dates to entries, we felt we were giving more specific info about when each word entered the language. And now, collectively, because of organizing principles of the Internet, we can connect these words by date. Time Traveler allows imagination to combine with history. It gives a poetic sense of what the dictionary really is—a new and different kind of way of organizing our language.
How might people use Time Traveler?
Here’s one banal example: There’s a wonderful linguist, Ben Schmidt, who rates the language of Downton Abbey, illustrating how many of the words [used on the show are] anachronistic. Contact, for example, was not a verb in 1912. Another example is when Lord Grantham says “You’ll have to step on it” in 1912. You just have to think: This guy had probably never driven a car, so why would he use this very slangy idiom? The idea of speeding didn’t even exist yet.
What does the online version of the dictionary do that print can’t, and vice versa?
When Samuel Johnson, in 1755, wrote his dictionary, a woman came up to him and said, “I’m so pleased that you have omitted the naughty words.” “Madam,” Johnson replied, “I find that you have been looking them up.” Before the dictionary went online, the people who wrote dictionaries never knew which words were looked up. We’re learning enormous amounts about what drives people to a dictionary and what people are looking for from a dictionary. The dictionary is not just used for novel and arcane words—it’s mostly used for words that are a little abstract. There are cyclical things: Love is always at the top of the list in February. There are back-to-school terms: cultures, diversity, plagiarism. And there are the evergreens: integrity, ubiquitous, affect versus effect. Whatever sends us to the dictionary is a private moment. Looking up a word in the dictionary is an intimate act, something between ourselves and our language. The dictionary is this little intermediary—it orchestrates and organizes that relationship. That’s what it’s for. When people are looking up love in February, they’re not looking for spelling—they’re looking for philosophy.
In 1996 we started offering the dictionary online for free, and in 1997 we started following word trends. What had become a static list became dynamic, and we could see what people were looking up in real time. So, for example, in 1997, Princess Di dies; paparazzi is a very natural word to look up. During 9/11, first there were concrete words—rubber, triage—then more philosophical words, such as surreal, succumb, spontaneous. Surreal is always looked up after tragedies. In 2009 I started putting these things on Twitter. We’re often criticized for being political, but we’re responding to the data. We’re good at reading data—we’re not good at reading minds.
Why keep the print edition around at all?
The dictionary we search online is a different experience than the book. The print dictionary is a great piece of technology: It’s really fast, and it really works. And the print way of organizing information means that you always see certain things together. That’s no longer really the case online. The big thing online is, there’s space. Almost every decision for print dictionaries had to be made by the tyranny of space. We are no longer bound by that. What had been tyranny of lack of space is now tyranny of too much space. I always tell people, keep your old dictionaries. The old ones have different information that might be interesting. There is no spreadsheet for when definitions change. You just have to take the book down and look it up and see. For the first time last week, I looked up the word dictionary in Webster’s unabridged second edition, from 1934. I was fascinated. It’s an article on the history of the dictionary. That’s the kind of material that would be dropped in print today, but that’s some of the reason you go to a dictionary. We’re trying to answer those questions that might be asked when you’re looking up a word in the dictionary: Does a Cobb salad have chicken or turkey? The online dictionary is a contemporary magazine of language—let’s be the one-stop word website.
How do you choose the Word of the Year?
The Word of the Year goes back to 2003, and it was always based on the data. However, there’s an asterisk. If we went by raw tonnage, we would have boring words, abstract words that adults feel responsible for. We’re looking for what words spiked this year, not last year. That tells us something about the language today. We also look at what words were looked up in far greater numbers this year than last year, which we call year-over-year numbers. We look at that figure, and then we see a list of words that are typically much more apposite to the year we just experienced. In other words, it tells us something about this year that we’ve lived through, as opposed to words that tell us something about the general curiosity about the English language.
What do you think 2017’s Word of the Year tells us about the world in this moment?
The word of the year is feminism, which is pretty striking given the news. On the one hand, you might say that this is a fairly common word, one that is not really the subject of the news. In point of fact, this is a word that has been rising for the past several years to the point that it’s almost in our top twenty of overall lookups in the history of our website. We saw a 70 percent increase in lookups in 2017, and then we saw these spikes throughout this year. In January we saw a spike after the Women’s March on Washington and the other marches all over the country and the world, which got a huge amount of attention and were historic in various ways. The word feminism was used in particular regarding questions of whether or not the March was feminist or what kind of feminism the organizers and the attendees represented.
In February we saw another huge spike—and this one is in some ways more pointed and more dictionary-oriented—when Kellyanne Conway gave an onstage interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference and said she didn’t consider herself a feminist in the “classic sense.” She explained that she thinks being feminist, in her words, seems to be very “anti-male” and very “pro-abortion.” She was using the word in a very specific way, and that kind of specific use sends people to the dictionary for the definition, because the definition of the word itself was put into question, was itself the subject of the news story. Which is also true with the word fact, when Kellyanne Conway, also in the earlier part of the year, used that term “alternative facts.”
Later in the year we saw two entertainment reasons for the word’s popularity: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Hulu TV adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel, which got not only a huge amount of positive reviews, but also a huge amount of think pieces using that series as a point of departure and a contemporaneous cultural critique; and the film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot in the title role, who was viewed as a feminist character in a feminist film with a female director, Patty Jenkins.
And recently of course, subsequent to the accusations made against Harvey Weinstein and a long list of others, the word feminist has been in the news a lot. Just today I happened to click on the New York Times story about Lena Dunham and her warnings to the Clinton campaign about being too close to Harvey Weinstein. The word feminist was not only used several times in the article, but there’s also a quote from Dunham where she says she wears underwear that has the word feminist on it. That’s not necessarily the kind of use that will send people to the dictionary, but it shows you that this word is part of the national conversation—to the extent that there is such a thing as a national conversation. I think it’s sometimes too facile to say that there’s a national conversation; I sometimes think that’s shorthand for people who don’t want to be very specific about context. However, if there is such a thing as a national conversation—and there surely is right now regarding, for example, sexual harassment in the workplace and presidential politics—Merriam-Webster has a front-row seat because we see the words that are being looked up as the stories progress. That’s a fascinating thing that I’ve been watching for years and that we present on our home page and on Twitter, in a feature we call Trend Watch, which is simply the words that are most looked up at a given moment. And that word right now is feminism.
Have you recently changed or tweaked the definition of feminism, or has it been consistent for the past several years?
The first English language dictionary to ever include this word was Noah Webster’s dictionary in 1841, which was the last time Webster revised the dictionary before he died. He added the word feminism with the definition, “the qualities of females.” Clearly what he meant was femininity or femaleness; there was no political connotation to the word. This was a word that appeared to him somewhere, but we can’t actually find what he was looking at; we don’t know where he got it. In the 1864 edition, after Webster died and the Merriams had taken over, they dropped the word entirely because it was not used very frequently. It was not included in the next edition, published in 1890. And then in 1909 it was added with two definitions—one, “feminine character or characteristics,” and two, the medical definition, “female characteristics present in males.” So this medical definition precedes the political one. Finally, in the famous unabridged second edition of Webster’s from 1934, the political sense was added: “the theory of those who advocate such legal and social changes as will establish political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” That’s pretty much the way we define it today. The important word here is equality—equality of the sexes could almost stand as the definition. It’s interesting that we’ve dropped both the medical sense and the femininity sense, which is archaic at this point. The political sense we associate with the word basically begins around 1895, and that’s exactly when the suffragette movement was beginning. So the term feminism is more closely associated in political terms to the fight to get the vote, which makes perfect sense.
Also notable is that it’s a very modern word for English—we have a lot of words that are over a thousand years old, and this one is just over a hundred. That’s a very short time in the history of the English language. It seems to me that feminism is a word that has shifted over time. I think it was taken to be more aggressive in the past and is maybe taken much more positively today. Just like a lot of ideas, it’s a word that has shifted in meaning as the times have changed. That’s as it should be.
What were the runners-up for Word of the Year?
The nine runners-up tend to represent individual spikes that were very striking. The first one is complicit. That came from Ivanka Trump who said in an interview with Gayle King, “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” When you are a newsmaker and you say “I don’t know what x means” on live television, you better believe it sends people to the dictionary. What sends people to the dictionary even more is when people are having a lot of fun with it, and Saturday Night Live made a skit based on that interview, which kept it going. So that word really had a lot of hits, and it’s a fascinating word. The word is two parts, com and plicare or plek—the com means “together” or “with” in Latin, and the plek means “fold,” so it means “folded together.” It’s the same etymon of two other words that are much more common, complicated and complex.
The next one is the word recuse. Those lookups are all attached to Jeff Sessions. There was a recusal to look into Hillary Clinton; there was a recusal to look into the Trump campaign; there was a recusal involving the Russians. The word recused kept bobbing up and it was always connected to Jeff Sessions. Recused is a classic legal term, and he’s the attorney general, so it makes perfect sense that a legal term would be associated with him.
The next word is one that we don’t associate with a particular story; it just simply went way up in lookups, and we’re not really sure why. It’s the word empathy. Part of it was attached to the #MeToo campaign, with people talking about empathy towards women. And of course there was a lot of criticism of the Republican Party, Trump in particular, for lacking empathy. So this word is being used in both positive and negative ways. It was also in the news January when Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian film director who won two Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, said he wouldn’t come to the Oscars because of Trump’s proposed travel ban, and that he was making a call for empathy between us and others, “an empathy which we need today more than ever.” And then in July at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan was highly quoted using the word when he said, “Real social progress is always a widening circle of concern and protection. It’s respect and empathy overtaking blindness and indifference.” When newsmakers utter the word, it does tend to send people to the dictionary. But we can’t say any one of those stories is the simple reason it makes our list.
Here’s the one that’s interesting from a percentage point of view: dotard. It’s a very unusual word. It was the word used by the Korean Central News Agency as a translation of Kim Jong Un’s statement where he referred to Donald Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” Because it’s such an unusual word—it’s essentially an obsolete word—we saw a 35,000 percent increase in lookups from 2016. We have 250,000 pages of words in the dictionary and some of those pages are looked up a thousand times an hour, others only a few times a year. Dotard was a word that was probably never looked up last year. It comes from the same word as dotage, which means a state or period of senile decay. So dotard originally meant imbecile, or stupid person, but now it just means an older person who is losing mental acuity. And this is a great thing about what the dictionary does—it gives a vocabulary lesson to the country when words like this are in the news. It’s also notable that this word is in the news probably because the Korean translators must be using very old bilingual dictionaries, because no contemporary speaker of English would use this word.
The next word is a science word from the solar eclipse, syzygy, which means the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse. The solar eclipse was an international story, and it cut straight through the United States and was a big teaching moment for a lot of people.
The next word is one that is looked up for pronunciation. We know that some words are looked up for their phonetics; typically they’re foreign words like schadenfreude or niche. This year the word was gyro. This was because of one simple event—Jimmy Fallon did a sketch on The Tonight Show with Luke Bryan, the country singer, and it showed them out on the streets of New York City getting a gyro. They ask each other, “How do you pronounce this?” and they turned it into this big musical number. It turns out there are three pronunciations for the word.
Federalism spiked because of the Congressional debate about the Affordable Care Act. Lindsey Graham said, “Here’s the choice for America: socialism or federalism when it comes to your health care.” What’s interesting to me about this is that socialism, as well as fascism and capitalism, are some of the most looked-up words in the dictionary. The problem with federalism, is that in America, we very unusually call our national government the federal government; however, the word federalism refers very explicitly to state rights. So the word itself is very confusing. You can see why it would send people to the dictionary.
The next two words are very simple, news-related words: hurricane—we had Harvey, Irma, José, and Maria—all these hurricanes that affected the Caribbean and the southeastern United States. Storm words always looked up when there’s a big storm, and we’ll usually see an echo—if hurricane is looked up, we’ll also see spikes in cyclone and tornado, because people are comparing them like recipes, the definitions all specify wind speed and geography. These are words where you can really learn something about the world, not just the language.
Finally, the last of the runner-up words goes all the way back to the Oscars in February—the word gaffe, which of course refers to the mistake of the wrong envelope that was opened for the Best Picture announcement. All the crew and cast of La La Land came up on stage, and while they were thanking their mothers, it was revealed that in fact Moonlight was the winner for Best Picture. Gaffe is an interesting word because it’s one of these journalistic words, it’s a word that’s used much more in headlines than in conversation. It’s a word that sends people to the dictionary quite regularly, since I’m sure when people see a headline that uses the word gaffe, they wonder if there’s something very specific about this kind of mistake, as opposed to just the word mistake. But of course headline writers like it because it’s short. And English has that kind of flexibility.
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large. (Credit: Joanne Watson, Merriam-Webster)
Q&A: MacDowell’s Young Set to Retire
Update: February 20, 2019. The MacDowell Colony has announced that Philip Himberg, the former artistic director for the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, will succeed Cheryl A. Young as the organization’s executive director, effective June 1.
This spring, after twenty-two years as the executive director of the MacDowell Colony, one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs for writers and artists, Cheryl A. Young will retire. Having joined the nonprofit arts colony in 1988 as its director of development, Young was named its leader in 1997 and oversaw MacDowell through a time of notable growth. During her time at the colony, the organization’s net assets increased from $5 million to $44 million, and the number of annual residencies at the colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, rose by 35 percent. Last July the organization opened a new office and gallery space in New York City to showcase the work of past residents and expand its reach. With the search for her successor underway, Young spoke about her tenure at MacDowell and the future of the colony.
What are you most proud of achieving during your tenure at MacDowell?
I’m really pleased with the number of people we’ve been able to help. We expanded into other disciplines more robustly, so film and theater are now a much bigger part of the program. I’m also really proud of the journalism initiative [that funds residencies for journalists], since we started working on that before this era of, let’s say, less respect for journalists. That work will make a huge difference, because their work will reach millions of people—and that can change policy. We’ve also been able to increase our financial aid and the number of residencies—we are able to take people whose work is not as present in the art world as it should be. About a third of the fellowships are for artists of color.
What is ahead for MacDowell?
Most of the ideas that are floating around have to do with removing barriers so people can participate in the arts and with making sure that people understand what happens at residencies. Nationally, MacDowell would like to be more visible as a supporter of the arts and to make sure that people understand that they’re welcome. So there’s a lot of work to do with people who don’t know about residency programs because they either don’t have artists in the family or didn’t go to graduate school. When the colony was starting in 1907, schoolchildren knew who Edward MacDowell—who founded the colony with his wife, Marian MacDowell—was as a composer, because music was part of schools’ curriculums. There were children’s books about him. And then Mrs. MacDowell took over the colony and went across the country raising funds through women’s groups and music clubs, and it was a more grassroots effort. I think that grassroots aspect, which starts in the schools and goes up through the first dozen years of what kids learn about the arts, is kind of critical. So it’s a challenge now. People who are participating in the arts understand [the importance of residencies], but there are a lot of people who are not participating in the arts. There’s definitely a diversity gap in terms of who participates, which means that if your family didn’t have trips to the library or go to live performances of music or go to museums, it really is all a mystery as to why and how to become an artist. There’s a lot of work to do that way. Our mission is written very broadly, and there are some things we can do visibility-wise that have to do with just saying: Living artists need support. So we’ve always been out front with that. That’s how the colony was built. We didn’t have an endowment. Mrs. MacDowell just went out and raised funds. And did it by going basically door-to-door, saying, America needs a place for its artists.
Has the MacDowell residency model changed much since its inception?
We try to support all different disciplines—that’s a core value, because artists have something to say to one another regardless of how they’re making—and we try to [maintain] the retreat aspect, which is: Remove all interruptions and let a person—without pressure from the marketplace—sit down and do something without anyone saying no. Not their agent, not their spouse or partner—just all yes. It’s all about yes. That hasn’t changed at all. The big difference that I see is that the residency field has grown enormously. When I started there were about eighteen programs and very few international ones, most of them run by American foundations. Now there are thousands all over the world. There are also more artists than ever before—in some ways it’s the best of times. But if you look at the U.S. census, there are around a million creative artists, and there are less than ten thousand residencies, so that means one out of a hundred is going to able to go to a residency. Artists are some of the most highly trained people, but the support for them is not commensurate with their skill level. You need residencies. There’s no way to support the arts economy without them. And everyone would be a lot worse off if we didn’t have residencies helping to support artists. Half the people who go to MacDowell make less than twenty thousand dollars a year; they’re right at the poverty line.
What is your idea of a healthy arts culture?
In order for artists to thrive and an arts culture to thrive, you need a society that values art. That can only happen if art becomes part of people’s lives and value systems early on. And then you need leadership that reinforces it. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is incredibly important [in that respect]; when it was created the whole point was that the country deserves great art, and we should set an example by supporting it and directing people’s gaze toward art that’s new and wonderful and part of our history. And the third thing you need is the opportunity for everybody to participate and develop their talents and contribute—that comes from encouragement and scholarships, removing barriers, and making sure people value and respect artists, so that people will want to become artists.
Will people still want to become journalists if they think they’re all muckrakers? We’ve been through this before—if you study journalism history, there was a time when people were writing junk, and then we cleaned up the journalism that was out there and set standards and ethics. People really [started to] respect journalists. But because the leadership has changed, there’s a real danger that we’ll lose that. And I think that’s true of art, too. During the period when the NEA was told it was supporting blasphemous work and artists couldn’t possibly be contributing to society, we retreated from our education and arts funding. We survived it, the NEA survived it, but we’re definitely feeling the effects of it in how people view art. And now it’s starting to come back a little bit with this generation and the creative economy and all the conversations about what makes the quality of life better and how art plays into that. I think that opportunity is really important at this point because kids aren’t getting enough education about art in schools. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to retrofit that.
How do we encourage a respect for art in kids?
They need to have some happy memories—even if it isn’t from their parents. If you read about Baldwin, he didn’t have that much support at home, but he went into the library every day and read every book in the library. He did have some support, but it wasn’t like he had a role model specifically telling him he was going to be a great writer. And I think that can happen with so many people. I informally ask our artists in residency, “Were your parents artists?” Or “How did you decide to do this?” Because this is not an easy life. I get all different answers. Some say, “My uncle was a writer,” or “My grandfather was an architect.” Sometimes there’s a role model there. But sometimes there isn’t—in my family there was no role model whatsoever and my parents said, Are you kidding? How are you going to support yourself unless you marry someone? Nowadays that’s an unlikely answer—you wouldn’t expect someone to answer that they’re going to support themselves by getting married—but you still wouldn’t necessarily be able to give a better answer about [how you’ll make money]. That hasn’t changed. It’s still not good. In the sixties we posted a survey in the Saturday Evening Post about what it was like to be an artist, and we recently did the same survey, and it’s not changed. The number of hours artists spend on their art and their income—it’s not really changed, except maybe that student debt has increased.
What is next for you?
I am going to rest and truly retire for a few years—I have no burning desire to start a new career. What I’d like to do is volunteer my time to the same kinds of things I’ve been doing at MacDowell—work to help artists, work on equity—and do some traveling and other things one normally does when unfettered and alive. The parts I’ll miss are all the wonderful people here and the artists. I’m just hoping I can stay connected in other ways—being in the audience or writing notes to artists after I see something wonderful that they’ve done. I’ve always loved that part.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Cheryl A. Young (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP
In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.
What is CLMP’s most important role?
Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives.
What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves.
Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon?
I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play.
Do you have any big plans for CLMP?
I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can.
Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.
Mary Gannon (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: Mary Gannon Leads CLMP
In November, Mary Gannon, formerly the associate director and director of content for the Academy of American Poets, became the new executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). She succeeds Jeffrey Lependorf as the head of the organization, which since its founding in 1967 has provided literary presses and magazines across the United States with direct technical assistance, guidance on everything from audience building to fund-raising, and a platform through which publishers can connect with readers, writers, and one another. Prior to her tenure at the Academy of American Poets, Gannon was the editorial director of Poets & Writers (she is also married to Poets & Writers’ editor in chief, Kevin Larimer). As she prepared to step into her new position, Gannon spoke about CLMP’s potential, its place in the literary landscape, and the impact of independent publishing.
What is CLMP’s most important role?
Our main role is to help raise the organizational capacity of literary magazines and presses and to support them in whatever way that they need. But there is also a harder-to-define area of support that comes from creating the time and space for them to work together, have conversations, and discover the questions and problems that they, because they’re such a hardworking group, haven’t had time to think about. Intentional communication is a really valuable thing to help facilitate. We want to continue to make those spaces on a national level for members to collaborate, leverage one another’s strengths, and work toward this higher goal of making sure that literature thrives.
What are the most significant needs of small presses and literary magazines right now? Distribution is a challenge, so figuring out how CLMP can help literary publishers get their work out is important. How can we make sure that their magazines and books are being sold in bookstores and seen in major online bookselling venues, so that all the good work they’re doing is actually getting out there and connecting with people? I think the other challenge will be the fund-raising aspect of it—trying to make sure that CLMP has the resources it needs to provide the resources for the network that it serves.
Are there other challenges that you see on the horizon?
I think it is undeniable, especially with younger generations, that attention is shifting, and the way people learn and read is shifting, so making sure that publishers and producers of literary art are contending with that in a way that works for everybody is a challenge. I’m not really sure what that looks like yet, but it’s very interesting to me. Having said that, it’s also a really exciting time for independent and small publishing, because in the wake of the conglomeration of big publishers, it has created space for innovative, dedicated people to put together these projects that connect writers with audiences and make sure that literature is inclusive. Not to say that the big publishers aren’t also putting beautiful books and magazines into the world, but for a healthy ecosystem you need diversity. And I think that’s where the smaller publishers come into play.
Do you have any big plans for CLMP?
I have a few ideas, but one of the things I need to do first is make sure I am totally up to speed on what members’ needs are. Running a small press or literary magazine is really hard work, and people are driven to it because they’re passionate about it, and they have a serious commitment to and love of the art form. Because of them we have access to all these stories that transform our lives, help us contend with what it means to be human, and make us better citizens. That’s a beautiful thing, and they deserve to be supported in every way they can.
Cat Richardson is the editor in chief of Bodega. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Tin House, and elsewhere.
Mary Gannon (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: MacDowell’s Young Set to Retire
Update: February 20, 2019. The MacDowell Colony has announced that Philip Himberg, the former artistic director for the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program, will succeed Cheryl A. Young as the organization’s executive director, effective June 1.
This spring, after twenty-two years as the executive director of the MacDowell Colony, one of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs for writers and artists, Cheryl A. Young will retire. Having joined the nonprofit arts colony in 1988 as its director of development, Young was named its leader in 1997 and oversaw MacDowell through a time of notable growth. During her time at the colony, the organization’s net assets increased from $5 million to $44 million, and the number of annual residencies at the colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire, rose by 35 percent. Last July the organization opened a new office and gallery space in New York City to showcase the work of past residents and expand its reach. With the search for her successor underway, Young spoke about her tenure at MacDowell and the future of the colony.
What are you most proud of achieving during your tenure at MacDowell?
I’m really pleased with the number of people we’ve been able to help. We expanded into other disciplines more robustly, so film and theater are now a much bigger part of the program. I’m also really proud of the journalism initiative [that funds residencies for journalists], since we started working on that before this era of, let’s say, less respect for journalists. That work will make a huge difference, because their work will reach millions of people—and that can change policy. We’ve also been able to increase our financial aid and the number of residencies—we are able to take people whose work is not as present in the art world as it should be. About a third of the fellowships are for artists of color.
What is ahead for MacDowell?
Most of the ideas that are floating around have to do with removing barriers so people can participate in the arts and with making sure that people understand what happens at residencies. Nationally, MacDowell would like to be more visible as a supporter of the arts and to make sure that people understand that they’re welcome. So there’s a lot of work to do with people who don’t know about residency programs because they either don’t have artists in the family or didn’t go to graduate school. When the colony was starting in 1907, schoolchildren knew who Edward MacDowell—who founded the colony with his wife, Marian MacDowell—was as a composer, because music was part of schools’ curriculums. There were children’s books about him. And then Mrs. MacDowell took over the colony and went across the country raising funds through women’s groups and music clubs, and it was a more grassroots effort. I think that grassroots aspect, which starts in the schools and goes up through the first dozen years of what kids learn about the arts, is kind of critical. So it’s a challenge now. People who are participating in the arts understand [the importance of residencies], but there are a lot of people who are not participating in the arts. There’s definitely a diversity gap in terms of who participates, which means that if your family didn’t have trips to the library or go to live performances of music or go to museums, it really is all a mystery as to why and how to become an artist. There’s a lot of work to do that way. Our mission is written very broadly, and there are some things we can do visibility-wise that have to do with just saying: Living artists need support. So we’ve always been out front with that. That’s how the colony was built. We didn’t have an endowment. Mrs. MacDowell just went out and raised funds. And did it by going basically door-to-door, saying, America needs a place for its artists.
Has the MacDowell residency model changed much since its inception?
We try to support all different disciplines—that’s a core value, because artists have something to say to one another regardless of how they’re making—and we try to [maintain] the retreat aspect, which is: Remove all interruptions and let a person—without pressure from the marketplace—sit down and do something without anyone saying no. Not their agent, not their spouse or partner—just all yes. It’s all about yes. That hasn’t changed at all. The big difference that I see is that the residency field has grown enormously. When I started there were about eighteen programs and very few international ones, most of them run by American foundations. Now there are thousands all over the world. There are also more artists than ever before—in some ways it’s the best of times. But if you look at the U.S. census, there are around a million creative artists, and there are less than ten thousand residencies, so that means one out of a hundred is going to able to go to a residency. Artists are some of the most highly trained people, but the support for them is not commensurate with their skill level. You need residencies. There’s no way to support the arts economy without them. And everyone would be a lot worse off if we didn’t have residencies helping to support artists. Half the people who go to MacDowell make less than twenty thousand dollars a year; they’re right at the poverty line.
What is your idea of a healthy arts culture?
In order for artists to thrive and an arts culture to thrive, you need a society that values art. That can only happen if art becomes part of people’s lives and value systems early on. And then you need leadership that reinforces it. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is incredibly important [in that respect]; when it was created the whole point was that the country deserves great art, and we should set an example by supporting it and directing people’s gaze toward art that’s new and wonderful and part of our history. And the third thing you need is the opportunity for everybody to participate and develop their talents and contribute—that comes from encouragement and scholarships, removing barriers, and making sure people value and respect artists, so that people will want to become artists.
Will people still want to become journalists if they think they’re all muckrakers? We’ve been through this before—if you study journalism history, there was a time when people were writing junk, and then we cleaned up the journalism that was out there and set standards and ethics. People really [started to] respect journalists. But because the leadership has changed, there’s a real danger that we’ll lose that. And I think that’s true of art, too. During the period when the NEA was told it was supporting blasphemous work and artists couldn’t possibly be contributing to society, we retreated from our education and arts funding. We survived it, the NEA survived it, but we’re definitely feeling the effects of it in how people view art. And now it’s starting to come back a little bit with this generation and the creative economy and all the conversations about what makes the quality of life better and how art plays into that. I think that opportunity is really important at this point because kids aren’t getting enough education about art in schools. So we’re going to have to figure out a way to retrofit that.
How do we encourage a respect for art in kids?
They need to have some happy memories—even if it isn’t from their parents. If you read about Baldwin, he didn’t have that much support at home, but he went into the library every day and read every book in the library. He did have some support, but it wasn’t like he had a role model specifically telling him he was going to be a great writer. And I think that can happen with so many people. I informally ask our artists in residency, “Were your parents artists?” Or “How did you decide to do this?” Because this is not an easy life. I get all different answers. Some say, “My uncle was a writer,” or “My grandfather was an architect.” Sometimes there’s a role model there. But sometimes there isn’t—in my family there was no role model whatsoever and my parents said, Are you kidding? How are you going to support yourself unless you marry someone? Nowadays that’s an unlikely answer—you wouldn’t expect someone to answer that they’re going to support themselves by getting married—but you still wouldn’t necessarily be able to give a better answer about [how you’ll make money]. That hasn’t changed. It’s still not good. In the sixties we posted a survey in the Saturday Evening Post about what it was like to be an artist, and we recently did the same survey, and it’s not changed. The number of hours artists spend on their art and their income—it’s not really changed, except maybe that student debt has increased.
What is next for you?
I am going to rest and truly retire for a few years—I have no burning desire to start a new career. What I’d like to do is volunteer my time to the same kinds of things I’ve been doing at MacDowell—work to help artists, work on equity—and do some traveling and other things one normally does when unfettered and alive. The parts I’ll miss are all the wonderful people here and the artists. I’m just hoping I can stay connected in other ways—being in the audience or writing notes to artists after I see something wonderful that they’ve done. I’ve always loved that part.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Cheryl A. Young (Credit: Tony Gale)
Q&A: Alice Quinn’s Poetic Providence
Last November Alice Quinn stepped down as poetry editor of the New Yorker after twenty years in the position. She was succeeded by Paul Muldoon. Quinn came to the magazine as a fiction editor in January 1987, and took on the role of poetry editor after Howard Moss passed away in September of that year. Over the past two decades, she has published the work of some of the country’s most celebrated poets.
In 2001, Quinn scaled back her work at the magazine in order to assume the directorship of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a position previously held by Elise Paschen. In announcing her decision to leave the New Yorker, Quinn said she plans to devote more time to the nonprofit organization (which will celebrate its centennial in 2010), and to her job as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. She is also editing a collection of Elizabeth Bishop's journals and notebooks, a project that follows Quinn's collection of the late poet's unpublished writings, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
On one of her final days at the magazine, Quinn spoke about her job there and her prospects as a poetry editor.
How did you feel about the appointment of Paul Muldoon as poetry editor?
It was really my dream to have him succeed me. David [Remnick] asked, "What would you think about Paul Muldoon?" and honestly, I almost did a jig. You lay a foundation and then you see that somebody you adore and admire is going to come and shore it up and further it, and that's great.
Who do you perceive to be the audience for the New Yorker's poems?
I feel that New Yorker readers are people who were profoundly connected to poetry in childhood, adolescence, or college, who want to touch base with it and want to feel that they still can read poetry. The New Yorker gives poets access to an international audience of literarily eager people who are sampling poetry.
What changes have you noticed in poetry?
Poetry's a little swervier now. There are a lot of leaps being made, and an enjoyment of humor, playfulness, mystery—a certain ebullient spontaneity. I feel that in the work of the younger poets, and I love it. Of course, I'm still a great believer in Robert Frost's dictum that a good poem should be like a piece of ice on a hot stove; it should ride on its own melting. I feel there's more openness to the work that Jean Valentine and Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe are doing, and some of that derives from the enjoyment that the poets in their twenties and thirties take in that work. They don't enshrine it in a totally academic and fierce and somewhat defensive, even belligerent, way. They don't feel they have to argue for it; they just enjoy it.
Where will poetry take you next?
First I would like to produce a very good book of Bishop's journals. I will have time in which to go to the Houghton Library in Boston and to the archives at Vassar, and St. Louis, where they have the May Swenson–Elizabeth Bishop correspondence, and to really get in a little bit of that dreamy investigative time that you get when you're at a rare-book library. Will I pursue other book projects or will I want to become an editor-at-large at a poetry house I admire? I'm not sure. For the time being, I really see PSA as an important focus of my devotion. But I can't pretend that it is in any way easy to leave the New Yorker. There's nothing that's going to take the place of people in [my] apartment building and people in London saying, "I loved that poem in the New Yorker last week." The New Yorker is a magical place.
Jean Hartig is the editorial assistant of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Poetry Society Celebrates Centennial
In the winter of 1910, at New York City's Ansonia Hotel, a group of poets, editors, and artists gathered for the first planning meeting of the Poetry Society of America (PSA), a fledgling organization that would be "a public forum for the advancement, enjoyment, and understanding of poetry." On that evening a hundred years ago, the founders, including poet Edwin Markham, painter Leon Dabo, and Current Literature editor Edward J. Wheeler, argued, naturally, over words—would they be a society or a club?—but ultimately chose to follow the model of the Poetry Society of England, which had been founded a year earlier.
The PSA didn't immediately gain respect from the public—it was even mocked by reporters as "the Poets' Union." As inaugural secretary Jessie Belle Rittenhouse recalled in her 1934 memoir, My House of Life, "This was still the period when one had to be apologetic about poetry, when the poet was considered a variant from the normal, while there was still a subconscious feeling in the public mind that he was a weakling." Within the PSA's first few years, however, as more famous poets attended meetings (Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats among them) the organization began to win more respect, and more members—growing from forty poets in 1910 to more than twelve hundred today. Now thriving, it is the oldest poetry organization in the country, with a popular awards series, a full schedule of forty to fifty readings and other events each year, and other programming.
Under the direction of Alice Quinn, and with the help of staff members Rob Casper and Brett Fletcher Lauer, the PSA is marking its centennial this year with a number of special events that are being held across the country. Among them are four regional celebrations—Poets of the American Midwest, in Minneapolis on May 14; Poets of New England, in Boston on September 23; Poets of the American South, in Atlanta on October 7; and Poets of the American West, in Los Angeles on November 30—that will feature all-star lineups. For more information about the PSA's centennial events, visit the Web site at www.poetrysociety.org.
Rebecca Keith is a Brooklyn, New York–based writer and the cofounder of Mixer Reading and Music Series.
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Franny Choi
“If I’m stuck, it usually means one of two things: either I need to travel further into myself, or I’ve gone too far and need to be pulled out. If I sit down to write and can feel that everything I’m making is relying on the old tricks, just bobbing at the surface, then I know I haven’t dug a deep enough well. On the other hand, if writing feels painful or laborious, or if it’s been a long time since I wrote anything because the thought makes me sick, it usually means I’ve dug too deep a well! Often, the best cure for this ailment is a great poetry reading—a particularly hype youth poetry slam is ideal, or a living room with friends where we’re reading each other our newest poems. Something that helps jolt me back into remembering what a poem can do to the body, how a great poem can make me spring to my feet or throw my hands up in praise. Sometimes, I need to go back and touch the electricity that brought me to poetry in the first place. When I do that, writing becomes less theoretical. And I remember who I’m writing for: my students, my friends, my past and future selves.”
—Franny Choi, author of Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019)
Writer Photo:
Writer Photo Credit:
Qurissy Lopez
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Poets on How They Got Started
“When I did begin to make connections with poets, everything opened up for me,” says the late Holly Prado in this Poetry.LA video interviewing noted Southern California poets, including William Archila, Chiwan Choi, Marcia de la O, and Douglas Kearney, on how they got started in their writing careers. Prado died at the age of eighty-one on June 14, 2019.
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Gay Boys and the Bridges Who Love Them
“It is not what drove your body here like a stolen car. / why you abandoned it on this unreasonable ledge....” This Button Poetry video features sam sax’s poem “Gay Boys & the Bridges Who Love Them” from his second collection, Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and is directed by Seth Moore and Cole Smothers with choreography by Matthew Bovee and Sarah Adam.
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Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead?
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.
5. What are you reading right now?
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say?
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Student loan debt.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.
Ten Questions for Catherine Chung
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and SanFranciscoChronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.
Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. (Credit: David Noles)
Ten Questions for Mona Awad
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you.
Mona Awad, author of Bunny.
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Namwali Serpell
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Namwali Serpell, whose novel The Old Drift is out today from Hogarth. Blending historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction, The Old Drift tells a sweeping tale of Zambia, a small African country, as it comes into being, following the trials and tribulations of its people, whose stories are told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. In the words of Chinelo Okparanta, it is a “dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishingly historical and futuristic feat.” Namwali Serpell teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “The Sack.” She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to indentify the best African writers under the age of forty. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
1. How long did it take you to write The Old Drift?
I’ve been writing it off and on since the year 2000. I worked on it in between getting my PhD; publishing my first work of literary criticism, a dozen stories, and a few essays and reviews; getting tenure; and writing a novel that went in a drawer. I concentrated exclusively on The Old Drift after I sold it based on a partial manuscript—about a third—in 2015. I finished in 2017.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Fact-checking. The novel is rife with speculative fiction—fairy tale, magical realism, science fiction—but I was anxious to get historical, scientific, and cultural details right, that the notes didn’t sound off. Because the novel is so sprawling, it was hard to verify everything. I’m grateful for my informants—family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and the blessed internet.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m too nomadic, or “movious” as we say in Zambia, to limit myself to a particular desk in a specific nook with a certain slant of light. I write from late morning to late afternoon, when most people are hungry or sleepy—I seem to find both states conducive to “flow,” as they call it. My writing frequency varies by genre. I can write nonfiction or scholarly prose for about five hours at a time, and as many days in a row as needed. I can write fiction for about three hours at a time, and it improves distinctly if I write every other day. My best work, regardless of genre, often happens in one big burst—an eight hour stretch, say, like a fugue. But I can’t prime my schedule or prepare myself for those eruptions. They come as they wish. I am left spent and grateful.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The chasm between writing the book and marketing the book. It’s a rift in one’s psychology but also in logistics (who does what), and most shockingly, in value. There is simply no calculable relation between these two value systems: the literary and the financial, the good and the goods.
5. What are you reading right now?
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow. I’m excited because it draws on a longstanding preoccupation of mine: the recurrent fantasy of racial transformation in sci-fi.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
María Luisa Bombal.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Blurbs. They tap into our most craven, gratuitous, and back-patting tendencies. End them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The problem of money, of course.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Being able to recognize how things will best coincide—opportunities, ideas, words, people—and not forcing them, but setting up the space for them to do so. It goes by various names: “finger on the pulse,” “a sense of the zeitgest,” “savvy.” I think of it as a feel for kismet.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Amitav Ghosh once visited a graduate course I was taking. And he said of a writer (who shall remain nameless): “If everything is a jewel, nothing shines.”
Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift. (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
First Fiction 2017
For our seventeenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2017 issue of the magazine for interviews between Zinzi Clemmons and Danzy Senna, Hala Alyan and Mira Jacob, Jess Arndt and Maggie Nelson, Lisa Ko and Emily Raboteau, and Diksha Basu and Gary Shteyngart. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
What We Lose (Viking, July) by Zinzi Clemmons
Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May) by Hala Alyan
Large Animals (Catapult, May) by Jess Arndt
The Leavers (Algonquin Books, May) by Lisa Ko
The Windfall(Crown, June) by Diksha Basu
What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons
My parents’ bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was. The big mahogany dresser sits opposite the bed, the doily still in place on the vanity. My mother’s little ring holders and perfume bottles still stand there. On top of all these old feminine relics, my father has set up his home office. His old IBM laptop sits atop the doily, a tangle of cords choking my mother’s silver makeup tray. His books are scattered around the tables, his clothes draped carelessly over the antique wing chair that my mother found on a trip to Quebec.
In the kitchen, my father switches on a small flat-screen TV that he’s installed on the wall opposite the stove. My mother never allowed TV in the kitchen, to encourage bonding during family dinners and focus during homework time. As a matter of fact, we never had more than one television while I was growing up—an old wood-paneled set that lived in the cold basement, carefully hidden from me and visitors in the main living areas of the house.
We order Chinese from the place around the corner, the same order that we’ve made for years: sesame chicken, vegetable fried rice, shrimp lo mein. As soon as they hear my father’s voice on the line, they put in the order; he doesn’t even have to ask for it. When he picks the order up, they ask after me. When my mother died, they started giving us extra sodas with our order, and he returns with two cans of pineapple soda, my favorite.
My father tells me that he’s been organizing at work, now that he’s the only black faculty member in the upper ranks of the administration.
I notice that he has started cutting his hair differently. It is shorter on the sides and disappearing in patches around the crown of his skull. He pulls himself up in his chair with noticeable effort. He had barely aged in the past twenty years, and suddenly, in the past year, he has inched closer to looking like his father, a stooped, lean, yellow-skinned man I’ve only seen in pictures.
“How have you been, Dad?” I say as we sit at the table.
The thought of losing my father lurks constantly in my mind now, shadowy, inexpressible, but bursting to the surface when, like now, I perceive the limits of his body. Something catches in my throat and I clench my jaw.
My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.
“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.
He asks about Peter.
“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.
“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”
He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork. “Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.
I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.
“Are you all right?”
All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.
From What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, published in July by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Zinzi Clemmons.
(Photo: Nina Subin)Salt Houses
by Hala Alyan
On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favorite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.
Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carrying guns. It seems impossible.
The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.
Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.
“My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.
“You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”
Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Married to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was suggesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fobbing her off on a friend in pity.
“Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.
“You could marry me.”
Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the darkest, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen. Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.
But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if woken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled triumphantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.
From Salt Houses by Hala Alyan. Copyright © 2017 by Hala Alyan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
(Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)Large Animals
by Jess Arndt
In my sleep I was plagued by large animals—teams of grizzlies, timber wolves, gorillas even came in and out of the mist. Once the now extinct northern white rhino also stopped by. But none of them came as often or with such a ferocious sexual charge as what I, mangling Latin and English as usual, called the Walri. Lying there, I faced them as you would the inevitable. They were massive, tube-shaped, sometimes the feeling was only flesh and I couldn’t see the top of the cylinder that masqueraded as a head or tusks or eyes. Nonetheless I knew I was in their presence intuitively. There was no mistaking their skin; their smell was unmistakable too, as was their awful weight.
During these nights (the days seemed to disappear before they even started) I was living two miles from a military testing site. In the early morning and throughout the day the soft, dense sound of bombs filled the valley. It was comforting somehow. Otherwise I was entirely alone.
This seemed a precondition for the Walri—that I should be theirs and theirs only. on the rare occasion that I had an overnight visitor to my desert bungalow the Walri were never around. Then the bears would return in force, maybe even a large local animal like a mountain lion or goat, but no form’s density came close to walrusness. So I became wary and stopped inviting anyone out to visit at all.
The days, unmemorable, had a kind of habitual slide. I would wake up with the sun and begin cleaning the house. No matter how tightly I’d kept the doors shut the day before, dust and sand and even large pieces of mineral rock seemed to shove their way inside. I swept these into piles. Then the dishes that I barely remembered dirtying—some mornings it was as if the whole artillery of pots and pans had been used in the night by someone else—then the trash (again always full), then some coffee. Eight o’clock.
This work done, I sat in various chairs in the house following the bright but pale blades of light. I was drying out. oh, an LA friend said somewhat knowingly, from the booze? But I had alcohol with me, plenty of it. It wasn’t that. I moved as if preprogrammed. only later did I realize that my sleep was so soggy that it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me and since it was the middle of winter and the beams were perforce slanted, I’d take all of it I could find.
For lunch I got in my car and drove into town, to the empty parking lot of Las Palmas. There were many Mexican joints along the highway that also functioned as Main Street. I hadn’t bothered to try them out. Las Palmas, with its vacant booths, dusty cacti, and combination platter lunch special for $11.99 including $4 house margarita, was fine.
A waitress named Tamara worked there. She seemed like the only one. She wasn’t my type—so tall she bent over herself and a bona fide chain-smoker. Sometimes to order you’d have to exit your booth and find her puffing outside. A friend who had borrowed the bungalow before I did told me about Tamara and so if I had a crush at all it was an inherited one that even came with inherited guilt—from having taken her on once he could no longer visit her. Regardless, we barely spoke.
I had things I was supposed to be doing, more work than I could accomplish even if I
duct-taped my fists to my laptop, but none of it seemed relevant to my current state. In the afternoons I drove back home slowly, always stopping for six-packs of beer at the Circle K. I enjoyed the task. The beer evaporated once I stuck it in my fridge—it was there and then, it was gone.
My sleeping area was simple: a bed on a plywood platform. A wooden dresser. Built-in closets and a cement floor. At first I would wake up in the night from the sheer flattening silence of the desert. It was impossible that the world still existed elsewhere. After that initial jolt, relief.
Don’t you miss it? my same friend said during our weekly telephone chats. But I couldn’t explain the euphoria of walking up and down the chilly aisles of Stater Bros. In week-old sweatpants if I wanted, uncounted by life. Would I buy refried or whole beans? This brand or that? It didn’t matter, no one cared.
It was in these conditions that the Walri arrived.
* * *
I’d slept as usual for the first few hours, heavily, in a kind of coma state. Then had woken, I thought to pee. But lying there with the gritty sheets braided around me, the violet light that was created from the fly zapper, the desert cold that was entering through the gaps and cracks in the fire’s absence—I felt a new form of suffocation.
It wasn’t supernatural. I’d also had that. The sense of someone’s vast weight sitting on the bed with you or patting your body with ghostly hands. This breathless feeling was larger, as if I was uniformly surrounded by mammoth flesh.
Dream parts snagged at me. Slapping sounds and hose-like alien respiration. I felt I was wrestling within inches of what must be—since I couldn’t breathe—the end of my life. Now the lens of my dream panned backward and I saw my opponent in his entirety.
He lay (if that’s what you could call it) on my bed, thick and wrinkled, the creases in his hide so deep I could stick my arms between them. His teeth were yellow and as long as my legs.
“I’m sexually dormant,” I said aloud to him. “But I want to put my balls in someone’s face.”
Then somehow light was peeling everything back for dawn.
From Large Animals. Used with permission of Catapult. Copyright 2017 by Jess Arndt.
(Photo: Johanna Breiding)The Leavers
by Lisa Ko
The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school. A navy blue hat sat low on her forehead, scarf around her neck like a big brown snake. “What are you waiting for, Kid? It’s cold out.”
He stood in the doorway of P.S. 33 as she zipped his coat so hard the collar pinched. “Did you get off work early?” It was four thirty, already dark, but she didn’t usually leave the nail salon until six.
They spoke, as always, in Fuzhounese. “Short shift. Michael said you had to stay late to get help on an assignment.” Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and he couldn’t tell if she bought it or not. Teachers didn’t call your mom when you got detention, only gave a form you had to return with a signature, which he forged. Michael, who never got detention, had left after eighth period, and Deming wanted to get back home with him, in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down.
Snow fell like clots of wet laundry. Deming and his mother walked up Jerome Avenue. In the back of a concrete courtyard three older boys were passing a blunt, coats unzipped, wearing neither backpacks nor hats, sweet smoke and slow laughter warming the thin February air. “I don’t want you to be like that,” she said. “I don’t want you to be like me. I didn’t even finish eighth grade.”
What a sweet idea, not finishing eighth grade. He could barely finish fifth. His teachers said it was an issue of focus, of not applying himself. Yet when he tripped Travis Bhopa in math class Deming had been as shocked as Travis was. “I’ll come to your school tomorrow,” his mother said, “talk to your teacher about that assignment.” He kept his arm against his mother’s, loved the scratchy sound of their jackets rubbing together. She wasn’t one of those TV moms, always hugging their kids or watching them with bemused smiles, but insisted on holding his hand when they crossed a busy street. Inside her gloves her hands were red and scraped, the skin angry and peeling, and every night before she went to sleep she rubbed a thick lotion onto her fingers and winced. Once he asked if it made them hurt less. She said only for a little while, and he wished there was a special lotion that could make new skin grow, a pair of superpower gloves.
Short and blocky, she wore loose jeans—never had he seen her in a dress—and her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound than when she slapped her knees and cackled at something silly. She laughed at things that weren’t meant to be funny, like TV dramas and the swollen orchestral soundtracks that accompanied them, or, better yet, at things Deming said, like when he nailed the way their neighbor Tommie always went, “Not bad-not bad-not bad” when they passed him in the stairwell, an automatic response to a “Hello-how-are-you” that hadn’t yet been issued. Or the time she’d asked, flipping through TV stations, “Dancing with the Stars isn’t on?” and he had excavated Michael’s old paper mobile of the solar system and waltzed with it through the living room as she clapped. It was almost as good as getting cheered on by his friends.
When he had lived in Minjiang with his grandfather, Deming’s mother had explored New York by herself. There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Who wants to go for a walk?” she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. “Sit down? We’ve been sitting all day!” Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn’t say no to her and they’d go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside—a family named Smith, five kids, father dead, mother addicted to bagels, he speculated the day they went to the Upper East Side. “To bagels?” she said. “What flavor bagel?” “Everything bagels,” he said, which made her giggle harder, until they were both bent over on Madison Avenue, laughing so hard no sounds were coming out, and his stomach hurt but he couldn’t stop laughing, old white people giving them stink eye for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt.
A bus lumbered past, spraying slush. The walk sign flashed on. “You know what I did today?” his mother said. “One lady, she had a callus the size of your nose on her heel. I had to scrape all that dead skin off. It took forever. And her tip was shit. You’ll never do that, if you’re careful.”
He dreaded this familiar refrain. His mother could curse, but the one time he’d let motherfucker bounce out in front of her, loving the way the syllables got meatbally in his mouth, she had slapped his arm and said he was better than that. Now he silently said the word to himself as he walked, one syllable per footstep.
“Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I’m going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger’s toe? That was not my plan.”
Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago, a cashier at the one around the corner had smirked at her lousy English. It was lousy, Deming agreed.
From The Leavers. Printed by permission of Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Ko.
(Photo: Bartosz Potocki)page_5:
The Windfall
by Diksha Basu
The following week, on an unusually overcast September day, Mr. Jha pulled into the quiet lane of his new Gurgaon home. He had never been here by himself, he realized. Mrs. Jha was usually with him, and this summer Rupak had come with them a few times, and there were all the contractors and painters and builders buzzing around, working. He had never really appreciated the silence and the greenery before. Gurgaon felt still while the rest of Delhi throbbed.
The air was heavy with heat and the promise of rain. On the radio, a Bon Jovi song played. “It’s been raining since you left me,” the lyrics said. How funny, Mr. Jha thought. An Indian song would have to say, “It hasn’t rained since you left me.” Unless, of course, you were happy that they left you.
An electronic shoe-polishing machine in a large box was on the passenger seat of his Mercedes. He had strapped it in with the seat belt. It was beautiful. And it was expensive. It was not a planned purchase. This morning he had a breakfast meeting with two young men who were launching a website that would help you find handymen around Delhi, and they asked him to join their team as a consultant. He declined. He did not have time to take on any new work until they were done moving homes. And then they had to visit Rupak, so he was not going to have any free time until November or December. And then it would be the holiday season, so really it was best if he took the rest of the year off work.
The meeting was over breakfast at the luxurious Teresa’s Hotel in Connaught Place in central Delhi, and after filling himself up with mini croissants, fruit tarts, sliced cheeses, salami, coffee, and orange juice, Mr. Jha went for a stroll through the lobby and the other restaurants in the hotel. All the five-star hotels in the center of town were little oases of calm and cool. Mr. Jha was walking by the large windows that overlooked the swimming pool that was for guests only when he thought he would book a two-night stay here. He knew his wife loved the indulgence of nice hotels and he had recently read about what youngsters were calling a staycation—a vacation where you don’t leave the city or the home you usually live in, but you give yourself a few days to take a holiday. Of course, since he didn’t work much anymore, most days, weeks, months were a staycation, but how wonderful it would be to check into a hotel and have a lazy few days. Having room service—or, like they were called at Teresa’s, butlers—was a different sort of pleasure than having servants bringing you food and cleaning your home. Butlers showed that you had made the progression from servants to expensive appliances to uniformed men who ran the expensive appliances.
From The Windfall, published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in June. Copyright © 2017 by Diksha Basu.
(Photo: Mikey McCleary)First Fiction 2016
For our sixteenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2016 issue of the magazine for interviews between Yaa Gyasi and Angela Flournoy, Masande Ntshanga and Naomi Jackson, Rumaan Alam and Emma Straub, Maryse Meijer and Lindsay Hunter, and Imbolo Mbue and Christina Baker Kline. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
Homegoing (Knopf, June) by Yaa Gyasi
The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio, June) by Masande Ntshanga
Rich and Pretty (Ecco, June) by Rumaan Alam
Heartbreaker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July) by Maryse Meijer
Behold the Dreamers (Random House, August) by Imbolo Mbue
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.
Effia’s father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss as a blow to his own family. He knew then that the memory of the fire that burned, then fled, would haunt him, his children, and his children’s children for as long as the line continued. When he came back into Baaba’s hut to find Effia, the child of the night’s fire, shrieking into the air, he looked at his wife and said, “We will never again speak of what happened today."
The villagers began to say that the baby was born of the fire, that this was the reason Baaba had no milk. Effia was nursed by Cobbe’s second wife, who had just given birth to a son three months before. Effia would not latch on, and when she did, her sharp gums would tear at the flesh around the woman’s nipples until she became afraid to feed the baby. Because of this, Effia grew thinner, skin on small bird- like bones, with a large black hole of a mouth that expelled a hungry crywhich could be heard throughout the village, even on the days Baaba did her best to smother it, covering the baby’s lips with the rough palm of her left hand.
“Love her,” Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past one’s lips. At night, Baaba dreamed of leaving the baby in the dark forest so that the god Nyame could do with her as he pleased.
Effia grew older. The summer after her third birthday, Baaba had her first son. The boy’s name was Fiifi, and he was so fat that some- times, when Baaba wasn’t looking, Effia would roll him along the ground like a ball. The first day that Baaba let Effia hold him, she accidentally dropped him. The baby bounced on his buttocks, landed on his stomach, and looked up at everyone in the room, confused as to whether or not he should cry. He decided against it, but Baaba, who had been stirring banku, lifted her stirring stick and beat Effia across her bare back. Each time the stick lifted off the girl’s body, it would leave behind hot, sticky pieces of banku that burned into her flesh. By the time Baaba had finished, Effia was covered with sores, screaming and crying. From the floor, rolling this way and that on his belly, Fiifi looked at Effia with his saucer eyes but made no noise.
Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Effia’s wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Effia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched its branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.
And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the other toes. For each scar on Effia’s body, there was a companion scar on Baaba’ s, but that didn’t stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.
Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning woman- hood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.
Excerpted from HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi. Copyright © 2016 by Yaa Gyasi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Reactive
By Masande Ntshanga
The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.
In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.
Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.
It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.
I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.
In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.
When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.
That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.
The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.
Excerpted from The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga. Copyright © 2016 by Masande Ntshanga. Excerpted by permission of Two Dollar Radio. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rich and Pretty
By Rumaan Alam
Lauren’s office is freezing. You could keep butter on the desk. You could perform surgery. Every woman in the office—they’re all women—keeps a cashmere sweater on the back of her chair. They sit, hands outstretched over computer keyboards like a bum’s over a flaming garbage can. The usual office noises: typing, telephones, people using indoor voices, the double ding of an elevator going down. For some reason, the double ding of the elevator going down is louder than the single ding of the elevator going up. There’s a metaphor in there, waiting to be untangled. They make cookbooks, these women. There’s no food, just stacks of paper and editorial assistants in glasses. She’s worked here for four years. It’s fine.
Today is different because today there’s a guy, an actual dude, in the office with them, not a photographer or stylist popping by for a meeting, as does happen: He’s
a temp, because Kristen is having a baby and her doctor put her on bed rest. Lauren isn’t totally clear on what Kristen does, but now there’s a dude doing it. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, and loafers, not sneakers, which implies a certain maturity. Lauren’s been trying to get him to notice her all day. She’s the second-prettiest woman in the office, so it isn’t hard. Hannah, the prettiest, has a vacant quality about her. She’s not stupid, exactly—in fact, she’s very competent—but she doesn’t have spark. She’s not interesting, just thin and blond, with heavy eyeglasses and a photograph of her French bulldog on her computer screen.
Lauren has it all planned out. She’ll walk past his desk a couple of times, which isn’t suspicious because his desk isn’t far from the kitchen, and the kitchen is where the coffee is, and by the third time, he’ll follow her in there, and she’ll make a wisecrack about the coffee, and he’ll say it’s not so bad, and they’ll talk, and exchange phone numbers, e-mail addresses, whatever, and then later they’ll leave the office at the same time, ride down together in the elevator and not talk because they both understand that the social contract dictates that sane people do not talk in elevators, and then he’ll let her go through the revolving door first, even though she’s pretty sure that etiquette has it that men precede women through revolving doors, and then they’ll both be standing on Broadway, and there will be traffic and that vague smell of charred, ethnic meat from the guy with the lunch cart on the corner, and he’ll suggest they get a drink, and she’ll say sure, and they’ll go to the Irish pub on Fifty-Fifth Street, because there’s nowhere else to go, and after two drinks they’ll be starving, and he’ll suggest they get dinner, but there’s nowhere to eat in this part of town, so they’ll take the train to Union Square and realize there’s nowhere to eat there either, and they’ll walk down into the East Village and find something, maybe ramen, or that Moroccan-y place that she always forgets she likes, and they’ll eat, and they’ll start touching each other, casually but deliberately, carefully, and the check will come and she’ll say let’s split it, and he’ll say no let me, even though he’s a temp and can’t make that much money, right? Then they’ll be drunk, so taking a cab seems wise and they’ll make out in the backseat, but just a little bit, and kind of laugh about it, too: stop to check their phones, or admire the view, or so he can explain that he lives with a roommate or a dog, or so she can tell him some stupid story about work that won’t mean anything to him anyway because it’s only his first day and he doesn’t know anyone’s name, let alone their personality quirks and the complexities of the office’s political and social ecosystem.
Then he’ll pay the driver, because they’ll go to his place—she doesn’t want to bring the temp back to her place—and it’ll be nice, or fine, or ugly, and he’ll open beers because all he has are beers, and she’ll pretend to drink hers even though she’s had enough, and he’ll excuse himself for a minute to go to the bathroom, but really it’s to brush his teeth, piss, maybe rub some wet toilet paper around his ass and under his balls. This is something Gabe had told her, years ago, that men do this, or at least, that he did. Unerotic, but somehow touching. Then the temp will come sit next to her on the couch, please let it be a couch and not a futon, and he’ll play with her hair a little before he kisses her, his mouth minty, hers beery. He’ll be out of his shirt, then, and he’s hard and hairy, but also a little soft at the belly, which she likes. She once slept with this guy Sean, whose torso, hairless and lean, freaked her out. It was like having sex with a female mannequin. The temp will push or pull her into his bedroom, just the right balance of aggression and respect, and the room will be fine, or ugly, and the bedsheets will be navy, as men’s bedsheets always are, and there will be venetian blinds, and lots of books on the nightstand because he’s temping at a publishing company so he must love to read. She’ll tug her shirt over her head, and he’ll pull at her bra, and they’ll be naked, and he’ll fumble around for a condom, and his dick will be long but not, crucially, thick, and it will be good, and then it will be over. They’ll laugh about how this whole thing is against the company’s sexual harassment policy. She’ll try to cover herself with the sheet, and he’ll do the same, suddenly embarrassed by his smaller, slightly sticky dick. When he’s out of the room, to get a beer, to piss, whatever, she’ll get dressed. He’ll call her a car service, because there are no yellow cabs wherever he lives. They’ll both spend the part of the night right before they fall asleep trying to figure out how to act around each other in the office tomorrow.
Or maybe not that. Maybe she’ll find a way to go up to him and say, what, exactly, Hey, do you like parties? Do you want to goto a party . . . tonight? No, the jeans and tie are fine. It’s not fancy. Aparty. A good party. Good open bar, for sure. Probably canapés, what are canapés exactly, whatever they are, there will probably be some. Last party, there were these balls of cornbread and shrimp, like deep fried, holy shit they were great. That was last year, I think. Anyway, there might be celebrities there. There will definitely be celebrities there. I once saw Bill Clinton at one of these parties. He’s skinnier than you’d think. Anyway, think about it, it’ll be a time, and by the way, I’m Lauren, I’m an associate editor here and you are? She can picturehis conversation, the words coming to her so easily, as they do in fantasy but never in reality. They call it meeting cute, in movies, but it only happens in movies.
From Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam. Copyright© 2016 by Rumaan Alam. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Heartbreaker
By Maryse Meijer
Daddy comes over on Thursdays. My husband and son are out watching movies where people blow each other up. They have burgers afterward and buf- falo wings and milkshakes and they talk about TV shows and girls and the latest bloody video game. At least that’s what I imagine they do. No way do they imagine what I am doing, sitting here at the kitchen table doing my math homework as Daddy microwaves the mac and cheese he brought over. We have three hours together and in these three hours I am twelve years old and my daddy is the most wonderful man in the world.
On craigslist I post the photo from my work website, the one with my hair scraped back in a ponytail, expos- ing my shiny forehead, my thin lips, my arms bursting from the sleeves of my blue blouse. Daughter seeks Father is all I write as a caption. In response I receive an avalanche of cell-phone numbers, chat invitations, and penis pics lifted from porn sites.
I delete all the emails except for Richard’s: Sweetheart, please call home. I sit for a moment hunched in my cubicle, sweating, before lifting the receiver and dialing his number.
Daddy? I whisper, hand up to cover my mouth so no one walking by can see it moving.
He doesn’t skip a beat. Sweetheart! he says. Did you see the photo? I ask.
Of course, he says.
I’m not better in person, I warn. You’re perfect, he assures me.
I’m married, I tell him. I have a kid. No problem, he insists.
I chew the inside of my cheek. There’s not going to be any sex, I say.
Absolutely not! he agrees.
I wait for him to say something creepy or disgusting, but he doesn’t. We make arrangements to meet at McDonald’s for dinner on Thursday.
Don’t kill me, I say, and he laughs.
Oh sweetheart, he says. What on earth?
I’m early. I don’t know what Daddy looks like and every time the door swings open my head jerks like a ball on a string. I convince myself I’m going to be stood up and that it will be better anyway if I am. But at seven on the dot he enters and he looks straight at me and waves.
Our usual, sweetheart? he says, loud enough for other people to hear, and I nod. He brings a tray of chicken nugget combos to my table. He kisses my cheek. The food steams in our hands as we look at each other; he seems about twenty, twenty-two, with chinos frayed at the bottoms and red hair and glasses and biceps as skinny as my wrist. Maybe someday he will be good- looking.
Extra barbecue sauce, just the way you like, he says, gesturing to my nuggets. I smile and take a bite. He asks me about school and I ask him about work and he is as interested in how I’m doing in gym class as I am in the stocks he’s trading at the office; we slip into our new roles as easily as knives into butter.
I almost forgot, he says. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a CD with a Christmas bow stuck on it. Just a little something, he adds, and hands it to me. I unstick the bow and turn the CD over in my hands: Britney Spears. I bounce, once, and my left butt cheek, which doesn’t quite fit on the plastic chair, bangs on the edge of the seat.
Oh Daddy, I say, touched because I k now he went into a store and asked what would be the right thing to get for his little girl, and he paid for it with his own money and put it in his pocket and found the gaudy bow to go with it and then brought it all the way here, to me, because he k new he would like me and already wanted to give me something, and this makes me want to give everything I have to him in return.
Apart from Thursday nights—and it’s always Thurs- days, always nights—we don’t communicate, except by email. Sometimes he’ll send me a note just to say, Have a great day!! or he’ll tell me what plans he has for dinner: Working late need a treat pizza sound good??? or he’ll hint at imagined happenings in my little-girl life: Don’t forget dentist today xoxoxoxo!! and Good luck on the history quiz I know you’ll do awesome!!!! I write back in equally breathless terms to report the results of the history quiz or the number of cavities rotting my teeth or to squeal over the impending pizza feast. These exchanges give me a high so intense my chest muscles spasm and when my boss calls and says to bring her such-and-such adocument I hit print and out comes an email from Daddy, not the work document, and I giggle into my hand and hit print again.
He always arrives exactly fifteen minutes after my hus- band and son leave. I sit on the couch with the televi- sion on while he fumbles with the keys and the empty banged-up briefcase he always brings. Sweetheart! he says when he enters, and I yelp Daddy! and if I was maybe ten or twenty or, okay, thirty pounds lighter, I might run toward him, but as it is I wait on the couch for him to come over and k iss my hair. I’ll pour him a soda on the rocks and he’ll pour me some milk and we touch glasses and smile. If my husband calls I stand by the back door with my head down and say Uh-huh, yes, fine, all right, see you soon, no, nothing for me, thanks, I’m enjoying the leftovers, have fun, love you.
Excerpted from Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer. Copyright © Maryse Meijer, 2016. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue
He’d never been asked to wear a suit to a job interview. Never been told to bring along a copy of his résumé. He hadn’t even owned a résumé until the previous week when he’d gone to the library on Thirty-fourth and Madison and a volunteer career counselor had written one for him, detailed his work history to suggest he was a man of grand accomplishments: farmer responsible for tilling land and growing healthy crops; street cleaner responsible for making sure the town of Limbe looked beautiful and pristine; dishwasher in Manhattan restaurant, in charge of ensuring patrons ate from clean and germ-free plates; livery cabdriver in the Bronx, responsible for taking passengers safely from place to place.
He’d never had to worry about whether his experience would be appropriate, whether his English would be perfect, whether he would succeed in coming across as intelligent enough. But today, dressed in the green double-breasted pinstripe suit he’d worn the day he entered America, his ability to impress a man he’d never met was all he could think about. Try as he might, he could do nothing but think about the questions he might be asked, the answers he would need to give, the way he would have to walk and talk and sit, the times he would need to speak or listen and nod, the things he would have to say or not say, the response he would need to give if asked about his legal status in the country. His throat went dry. His palms moistened. Unable to reach for his handkerchief in the packed downtown subway, he wiped both palms on his pants.
“Good morning, please,” he said to the security guard in the lobby when he arrived at Lehman Brothers. “My name is Jende Jonga. I am here for Mr. Edwards. Mr. Clark Edwards.”
The guard, goateed and freckled, asked for his ID, which he quickly pulled out of his brown bifold wallet. The man took it, examined it front and back, looked up at his face, looked down at his suit, smiled, and asked if he was trying to become a stockbroker or something.
Jende shook his head. “No,” he replied without smiling back. “A chauffeur.”
“Right on,” the guard said as he handed him a visitor pass. “Good luck with that.”
This time Jende smiled. “Thank you, my brother,” he said. “I really need all that good luck today.”
Alone in the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, he inspected his fingernails (no dirt, thankfully). He adjusted his clip-on tie using the security mirror above his head; reexamined his teeth and found no visible remnants of the fried ripe plantains and beans he’d eaten for breakfast. He cleared his throat and wiped off whatever saliva had crusted on the sides of his lips. When the doors opened he straightened his shoulders and introduced himself to the receptionist, who, after responding with a nod and a display of extraordinarily white teeth, made a phone call and asked him to follow her. They walked through an open space where young men in blue shirts sat in cubicles with multiple screens, down a corridor, past another open space of cluttered cubicles and into a sunny office with a four-paneled glass window running from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the thousand autumn-drenched trees and proud towers of Manhattan standing outside. For a second his mouth fell open, at the view outside—the likes of which he’d never seen—and the exquisiteness inside. There was a lounging section (black leather sofa, two black leather chairs, glass coffee table) to his right, an executive desk (oval, cherry, black leather reclining chair for the executive, two green leather armchairs for visitors) in the center, and a wall unit (cherry, glass doors, white folders in neat rows) to his left, in front of which Clark Edwards, in a dark suit, was standing and feeding sheets of paper into a pullout shredder.
“Please, sir, good morning,” Jende said, turning toward him and half-bowing.
“Have a seat,” Clark said without lifting his eyes from the shredder.
Jende hurried to the armchair on the left. He pulled a résumé from his folder and placed it in front of Clark’s seat, careful not to disturb the layers of white papers and Wall Street Journals strewn across the desk in a jumble. One of the Journal pages, peeking from beneath sheets of numbers and graphs, had the headline: “Whites’ Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-blind America.” Jende leaned forward to read the story, fascinated as he was by the young ambitious senator, but immediately sat upright when he remembered where he was, why he was there, what was about to happen.
“Do you have any outstanding tickets you need to resolve?” Clark asked as he sat down.
“No, sir,” Jende replied.
“And you haven’t been in any serious accidents, right?”
“No, Mr. Edwards.”
Clark picked up the résumé from his desk, wrinkled and moist like the man whose history it held. His eyes remained on it for several seconds while Jende’s darted back and forth, from the Central Park treetops far beyond the window to the office walls lined with abstract paintings and portraits of white men wearing bow ties. He could feel beads of sweat rising out of his forehead.
“Well, Jende,” Clark said, putting the résumé down and leaning back in his chair. “Tell me about yourself.”
Excerpted from Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Copyright © 2016 by Imbolo Mbue. Reprinted with permission of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Fiction 2016: Nine More Notable Debuts
As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa Gyasi, Masande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.
Remarkable (BOA Editions, May) by Dinah Cox
Set primarily in Oklahoma, the remarkable (that’s right, remarkable) stories in Cox’s award-winning collection spotlight characters whose wit, resilience, and pathos are as vast as the Great Plains landscape they inhabit.
Anatomy of a Soldier (Knopf, May) by Harry Parker
A former officer in the British Army who lost his legs in Afghanistan in 2009, Parker delivers a riveting, provocative novel that captures his wartime experience in an unconventional way. Forty-five inanimate objects—including a helmet, boots, and weapons—act as narrators, together offering the reader a powerful new perspective on war.
Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove, June) by Anna Noyes
With language both sensuous and precise, these interconnected stories immerse us in the lives of women and girls in coastal Maine as they navigate familial intimacy, sexual awakening, and love’s indiscretions.
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers(Graywolf, June) by Max Porter
In the wake of his wife’s sudden death, a man is visited by Crow, a “sentimental bird” that settles into the man’s life and the lives of his children in an attempt to heal the wounded family. A nuanced meditation that not only breaks open the boundaries of what constitutes a novel, but also demonstrates through its fragmentary form the unique challenge of writing about grief.
A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Viking, June) by Bob Proehl
Valerie and her son embark on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles to reunite the nine-year-old with his estranged father, attending comic-book conventions along the way. Proehl weaves the comic-con worlds of monsters and superheroes into a complex family saga, a tribute to a mother’s love and the way we tell stories that shape our lives.
Lily and the Octopus (Simon & Schuster, June)
by Steven Rowley
Rowley’s novel centers on narrator Ted Flask and his aging companion—a dachshund named Lily—but readers who mistake this as a simple “boy and his dog” story are in for a profound and pleasant surprise. This powerful debut is a touching exploration of friendship and grief.
Pond (Riverhead Books, July)
by Claire-Louise Bennett
In this compelling, innovative debut, the interior reality of an unnamed narrator—a solitary young woman living on the outskirts of a small coastal village—is revealed through the details of everyday life, some rendered in long stretches of narrative and others in poetic fragments. Bennett’s unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut.
Champion of the World (Putnam, July) by Chad Dundas
Gangsters, bootlegging, and fixed competitions converge in the tumultuous world of 1920s American wrestling, which disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean and his wife, Moira, must navigate in order to create the life they want. With crisp, muscular prose, this 470-page historical novel illuminates a time of rapid change in America.
Problems (Emily Books, July) by Jade Sharma
Raw, unrepentant, and biting with dark humor, Problems turns the addiction-redemption narrative inside out, as Sharma follows heroin hobbyist Maya through her increasingly chaotic life after the end of both her marriage and an affair.
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Elisa Gabbert
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection The Word Pretty is just out from Black Ocean. Part of the press’s new Undercurrents series of literary nonfiction, the book combines personal essay, criticism, meditation, and craft to offer lyric and often humorous observations on a wide range of topics related to writing, reading, and life—from emojis and aphorisms to front matter, tangents, and Twitter. Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections The French Exit and L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; and a previous collection of essays, The Self Unstable. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, A Public Space, the Paris Review, Guernica, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications, and she writes an advice column for writers, The Blunt Instrument, at Electric Literature. She lives in Denver.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I just turned in a manuscript, another collection of essays, and the way I wrote that was very specific: For between one and three months, depending on my time constraints, I’d surround myself with, or submerse myself in, material on a topic—for example nuclear disasters, or “hysteria,” or memory—and read and watch films and think and take tons of notes. Then after a while the essay would start to take shape in my mind. I’d outline a structure, and then block off time to write it. As this process got systematized, I became more efficient; for the last essay I finished, I wrote most of it, about 5,000 words, in a single day. It was pretty much my ideal writing day: I got up relatively early on a Saturday morning and wrote until dark. Then I poured a drink and read over what I’d written. Of course I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t give myself plenty of processing time. I can write 5,000 good words in a day, but I can only do that maybe once a month. I did most of the work for this book, the note-taking and the actual writing, sitting at the end of our dining room table. I try not to write at the same desk where I do my day job.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Yes. With prose, all I need is time to think and I can generate it pretty easily; a lot of my thoughts are already in prose. Poetry is harder. I feel like I have less material, and I can’t waste it, so it’s this delicate, concentrated operation not to screw it up. It feels like there’s some required resource I deplete. And I have to change my process entirely every three or four years if I’m going to write poems at all. Basically I come up with a form and then find a way to “translate” my thoughts into the form. It wasn’t always like that, but that’s the way it is now. I used to think in lines.
3. How long did it take you to write The Word Pretty?
I hadn’t set out to write a book, per se; I was just writing little essays until eventually they started to feel like a collection. But I think I wrote all of them between 2015 and 2017.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I hope this doesn’t sound like faux humility, but I am surprised by the number of people who have bought it and read it already. I thought this was one for, like, eight to ten of my super-fans. We didn’t have a lot of time or money (read: any money) to promote it. What doesn’t surprise me is everyone commenting on how pretty it is. Black Ocean makes beautiful books.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
One thing? I’d like to change a lot, but I wish both were less beholden to trends and the winner-take-all tendencies of hype and attention.
6. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely cover to cover—I’d only read parts of it before—which got me thinking about the indirect, out-of-sequence nature of influence. My second book, The Self Unstable, looks the way it does (i.e. little chunks of essayistic, aphoristic, sometimes personal prose) in part because I’d just read a few collections of prose poetry I really liked. One was a chapbook by my friend Sam Starkweather, who was always talking about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This was years ago, before Claudia Rankine was a household name. I finally read the whole book and thought, “Oh! This was an influence on me!” Next I am planning to reread The Bell Jar, which I last read in high school, in preparation to write about the new Sylvia Plath story that is being published in January. I have an early copy of the story as a PDF, but I haven’t even opened the file yet. I’m terrified of it.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I didn’t invent Elizabeth Bowen but I just read her for the first time this year and she blew my mind. I’m always telling people to read this hilarious novella about Po Biz called Lucinella by Lore Segal, and Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet I love who doesn’t have a book yet. Also, some people will find this gauche, but my husband, John Cotter, writes beautiful essays that don’t get enough attention.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not being independently wealthy, I guess? I have a job, so I can only work on writing stuff at night and on the weekends.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It would be nice to win some kind of major award—but that would really go against my brand, which is “I don’t win awards.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The best writing advice is always “read stuff,” but you’ve heard that before, so here’s something more novel: My thesis advisor, a wonderful man named John Skoyles, once said in a workshop—I think he was repeating something he’d heard from another poet—that if a poem has the word “chocolate” in it, it should also have the word “disconsolate.” I took this advice literally at least once, but it also works as a metaphor: that is to say, a piece of writing should have internal resonances (which could occur at the level of the word or the phrase or the idea or even the implication) that work semantically like slant rhymes, parts that call back softly to other parts, that make a chime in your mind.
Elisa Gabbert, author of The Word Pretty. (Credit: Adalena Kavanagh)
Ten Questions for Guy Gunaratne
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Guy Gunaratne, whose debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, is out today from MCD x FSG Originals. Inspired by the real-life murder of a British soldier at the hands of religious fanatics, Gunaratne’s novel explores class, racism, immigration, and the chaotic fringes of modern-day London. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Gordon Burn Prize, In Our Mad and Furious City tells a story, Marlon James says, “so of this moment that you don’t even realize you’ve waited your whole life for it.” Gunaratne was born in London and has worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker covering human rights stories around the world. He divides his time between London and Malmö, Sweden.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study, in Malmö. A large wooden desk, surrounded by books set where I left them. I write as much as I can, when I can. The most focused period tends to be early mornings, between 5 AM and 6 AM to 9 AM, and then in dribs and drabs throughout the day.
2. How long did it take you to write In Our Mad and Furious City?
The novel took about four years to write the initial manuscript and then another year with my editor. As someone who enjoys the solitary commitment of writing, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of collaborating on it. I’ve found the process to be rewarding and instructive.
3. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Patience, probably. And space. Once when working on In Our Mad and Furious City, my editor and I were working on a specific part of one character’s voice. She asked me to go away and think about a few specific things. She gave a list. “Just think,” she said. She gave me the time to simmer, which I think is important when making any significant change.
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I try, sometimes with difficulty, not to be cynical about the relationship between art and industry. My hopefulness comes from knowing that there are usually enough dedicated people in any industry who are committed to doing good work. My surprise comes from finding out that I’d actually underestimated the amount of good people I’d meet during the process.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I think about this more as a reader than as a writer. I think we can all agree that homogeneity in any industry is unbearably boring. I’m interested in reading anything surprising, challenging, and provocative, in the best sense of the word. But I do wonder, at least with my experience thus far, how anything truly new, different, or challenging can ever come out of an industry that looks and acts so conservatively. There is still vitality here, and a desire to experiment with what gets published. The challenge is in encouraging those voices to keep on.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a nonfiction book called Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger, which is about the Kurds of Northern Syria. And I’ve finally got around to Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
More people should be reading Machado de Assis and Nawal El Saadawi. But I think, more generally, people should be reading translated fiction. One of the beautiful things about the novel is its capacity to offer the reader a way to transgress beyond the parochial or familiar. It opens new territory to explore. At times it can even help confront learned biases that you wouldn’t have known were there. Many of my most surprising and enriching experiences have come from reading translated fiction.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Inevitably, there was always going to be a degree of friction because of the time I now commit to the public side of all this—the events, publicity, the travel. I think I underestimated how much all that would impact the other side, the writing side. Not to say I don’t like the public facing part. Engaging with readers, for example, I think is hugely rewarding. I find it a privilege, honestly. But I do find myself missing home quite a bit. I find that I need to have an extended period writing in once place in order to gather momentum. Sadly, I’ve been flitting back and forth, which doesn’t help.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I don’t have any external goals with my writing, not really. Right now I just want to write, publish, and keep writing. If I’m still writing novels in my sixties, it would mean that I would have attained something I had once thought impossible. Namely, a writer’s life.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who spoke about this, but there was something I heard early on which I get the sense has become more and more apparent as I continue to write. It’s simple really, it’s just that there is something about your own subconscious that is far more perceptive than whatever your conscious mind can conjure up. Being attentive to allowing that stuff to come through, to trust in allowing a degree of exploration as you write. This has become very important to me, and useful to know, too, any time I sit and stare at a blank page. You’ve got to get out of your own way.
Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City. (Credit: Jai Stokes)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Sherwin Bitsui
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sherwin Bitsui, whose new book of poetry, Dissolve, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, and Dissolve is imbued with Navajo history and tradition. The book is a long poem, an inventive and sweeping work that blurs the lines between past and present, urban and rural, landscape and waste, crisis and continuity, and leads readers on a dissonant and dreamlike journey through the American Southwest. Bitsui is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), which won the 2010 American Book Award in poetry. He lives in Arizona, where since 2013 he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write best when I return from visiting my family on the reservation. The journey home feeds my creative process. I move between language, history, and worldviews—it’s always place between that gives me the most insight into my creative process.
2. How long did it take you to write Dissolve?
Dissolve took about seven years to complete. Most of those seven years I spent revising the poem. It was a challenge to harmonize all its layers and dimensions. I’m excited for people to read and experience this work.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
The care and attention Copper Canyon Press gave to my creative process. They’ve been wonderful—and it’s not so much a surprise. I’m always grateful.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
People should know more about the contributions Indigenous poets and writers have given to world poetry. There’s so much work out there, but many voices are seemingly still invisible to the general public. I would love for the literary world to stay open to all the poets from my community and not focus on only a few “representative” voices. It happens time and time again. Poets Heid Erdrich and Allison Hedge Coke have recently edited great anthologies that may give the larger public a glimpse of the diversity and range of contemporary Indigenous poetry.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading poems by a few contemporary Chinese poets I’ve been asked to translate this week for a translation festival in China. This work is entirely new for me and I’m excited to learn more about poetry from this part of the world.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
There are people I like who deserve more attention—I wouldn’t call them “underrated,” they are incredible in their own right and will receive the attention they deserve. People should read more Indigenous writers. They are writing some of the most innovative and important work in contemporary literature.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value an editor’s ability to trust the poet. I’m fortunate to have great editors in who’ve been absolutely supportive of my poetic vision. I’ve never felt I had to compromise my artistic integrity. It’s a wonderful thing when one’s editor is also protective and supportive of one’s body of work and creative vision.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I hope I continue to feel I can innovate upon previous creations. I want to blend all my poetic and visual work into a singular expression someday. I don’t know what this means. I’ll find out when I get there.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’m grateful for the writers and artist who’ve advised me to maintain my creative and artistic integrity. My poems continue to reach new readers and I’m grateful they can trust that I will always want more from poetry than what is easily available and accessible. I want them to return to my books and feel they experience something new with each reading.
Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve.
Road Trip: A Profile of Sherwin Bitsui
This isn’t really my landscape,” says Sherwin Bitsui as we head east on Interstate 10 through the Sonoran Desert. We’ve just left Tucson, and almost immediately the surroundings open up. No more southwestern tourist traps or neighborhoods heavy with generations of conflict among Mexicans, Native Americans, and whites. Around us, the mesquite and the cholla, with bursts of white spikes, grow in abundance along the highway. Aside from the road itself, the only other man-made objects in sight are the shrines—descansos in Spanish—commemorating tragic highway accidents.
While it may not be his preferred landscape, Bitsui has learned to appreciate it. “Especially with this sky, and when it rains,” he says.
Indeed, the land has just been blessed with rain for the first time in five months—half an inch in a matter of hours, which is rare for southern Arizona, where the average rainfall is twelve inches a year. The heavy downpour caused more than a few traffic mishaps in the city. Sirens blared as the drains flooded at every intersection. But past the city limits everything is calm: Large clouds hover over the Catalina Mountains and the Tucsons, and the land releases the soothing smell of wet earth.
It’s Bitsui who suggested conducting our interview while driving in a car. “It’s how I remember hearing stories when I was a child,” he says. “Riding in my father’s truck.”
And soon, Bitsui, whose second book of poetry, Flood Song, will be released this month by Copper Canyon Press, should be sitting back and enjoying the proverbial ride. Up to now, he’s been laboring over last-minute revisions and worrying a bit about how his work will be received. But Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon’s executive editor, speaks with excitement and confidence when he characterizes Bitsui’s new book: “There’s a distinct music to Flood Song, an almost mournful high-desert mysticism at work among all the wonder and uncertainty he’s addressing. It’s an intensely visual book that jumps back and forth between the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the personal and the tribal; its vision is sprawling and marvelously ambitious—the poem is in constant motion through landscape and time and cultures.”
The landscape that is Bitsui’s preference lies five hours to the north of Tucson, in the Navajo reservation where his family has lived “since time immemorial,” he says, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s difficult to convince people that my upbringing is not like the traumatic ones shown in books and documentaries about Native peoples,” Bitsui says. He points out a turkey vulture descending gracefully from above, and then launches into a story about having seen a caracara, also known as a Mexican eagle (“It’s really a falcon.”), for the first time. What amused him about it was that he spotted the bird in a parking lot, a place far removed from the romantic notions of land and nature that are so often imposed on his work by readers because he’s Native American.
“I have no control over how people perceive me. One time a white woman came to my reading and just cried in front of me,” he says. “She was reacting to my indigenousness, not my poetry, which isn’t even about reservation life.” There have been many other awkward exchanges: Once he was shown a picture of Geronimo and asked if he was related (“No. Geronimo is Apache.”), another time he was given tobacco. “What did that person think I was going to do, trade with it?” he asks, incredulously.
Bitsui shrugs these things off. At thirty-four, he’s more concerned about larger issues, like the fate of the next generation of Native Americans. He has been teaching writing workshops lately with ArtsReach, a Tucson-based program designed to provide Native American youth with avenues for creative expression. “The stories they tell,” Bitsui says sadly, shaking his head. “All violence and poverty.” Indeed, suicide among young Native American people has risen at an alarming rate over the last few years.
“I guess I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “I’m not a displaced Indian, my family lives on our land, and even though problems exist on my reservation, I had a happy upbringing compared with the ones these kids are dealing with.”
As it starts to drizzle again, the raindrops splattering on the windshield trigger his memories of monsoon season on the reservation. In the fall, the monsoons, with their heavy downpours and spectacular lightning shows, rejuvenate the landscape. “For some reason I also have this impression that up there the sun feels closer,” he says. “It must be the joy of being home, where the houses all face east and the taste of mutton always reminds me of the flavors of the land.” He ponders his words for a moment and then adds, “I suppose even I crave myth.”
For Bitsui, the second of five children born to a carpenter and a teacher’s aide, living on the Navajo reservation meant the freedom to wander the land for hours, knowing he wasn’t trespassing. He would sit on the mesa for long stretches of time and meditate while listening to his Walkman. (His musical preference at the time was heavy metal. “It relaxed me,” he says, smiling.)
He was allergic to horses and to hay, so he didn’t become a ranch hand. Instead, he was introduced to the goat- and sheepherding life by his grandparents. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it and the company of his grandmother, especially during the summers, when he wasn’t getting bused to an elementary school outside of the reservation.
“School was the only thing I didn’t like while growing up,” he says. “It’s where I learned to become invisible among the white kids in order to survive.” He contrasts that tactic with the one most of the kids in the ArtsReach program resort to, which is to be loud and confrontational. “I guess neither one works,” he says.
For the past eight years, Tucson has been his home away from home, but adaptation was a shaky process. “When I first moved there,” he says, “it was my introduction to America. And it freaked me out.”
Bitsui initially left home in 1997, at the age of twenty-one, to attend the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I loved it there,” he says. “We were from all sorts of tribes but we were all Indian, and aspiring artists.” Bitsui wanted to become a painter, to capture the colors and textures that had given him so much pleasure as a child. But he lacked the skill. “So I decided on the next best thing: poetry.”
This was an unusual choice for a boy who grew up in a place where the nearest library was over forty miles away. Books and writing were not completely absent on the reservation, just scarce. “There were many stories around,” says Bitsui. “These stories made me see into other worlds that no longer exist. Worlds that were made alive in the retelling.”
Under the tutelage of poet Arthur Sze, Bitsui found his voice. “I remember those first awful poems I wrote,” says Bitsui. “To this day I’m grateful to Arthur for being so patient, for believing in me.” The IAIA, however, didn’t fully prepare Bitsui for what a writing workshop would be like in a public university. With Sze’s encouragement, Bitsui applied for and was accepted to the prestigious writing program at the University of Arizona. He moved to Tucson in 2001, and when he arrived on campus, he had a flashback to his “invisible days” during his early education—feeling marginalized among the greater student population.
“I had a meltdown,” he says, refusing to elaborate, except to say that it was the first time he experienced culture shock. The faculty and students in the program were well meaning, but he rarely found workshops useful. His lyrical, elliptical style was neither personal nor anthropological; it resisted straightforward narrative and folkloric characterizations. Few readers understood what he was doing, and he began to feel claustrophobic in the often insular world of academia. “The communities writing programs promote are true gifts to poets and poetry,” he says. “But it was important for me to find poetry and attempt to define it on my own terms outside of venues where poetry is maintained.” So just as he was about to complete his MFA degree, Bitsui dropped out of the program.
“At the IAIA, I didn’t have to explain where I was coming from, let alone where I was headed to,” he says. But from the painful awareness of his otherness came a body of work that would form his first poetry collection.
University of Arizona Press acquisitions editor Patti Hartmann heard about Bitsui’s poetry from members of Native American literary circles, such as Ofelia Zepeda, a linguist, poet, and MacArthur fellow, who is also the editor of Sun Tracks, the press’s Native American literary series. Hartmann called Bitsui to ask if he had a manuscript. Although he hadn’t finished his MFA, he did have a manuscript completed, which he sent to Hartmann. After several revisions, she accepted the book for publication, and Shapeshift was published in 2003.
The first lines of Shapeshift—“Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened”—refer to the arrival of Columbus in America and the beginning of a major shift in Native American history, culture, and life. For Bitsui, the new millennium, a few years ago, marked a time to reflect on whether Native people were surviving and thriving or heading on a path toward extinction. And the poems in Shapeshift—a collection of mythical journeys, dream images, dead ends, and reservation realities—explore this subject.
“I also wanted to reclaim that word, shapeshift, which has a different connotation to us,” Bitsui says. “It doesn’t only signify physical transformation by power or magic; it also means spiritual or social transition into a new way of being.”
Reviewers received Shapeshift with both skepticism and excitement aroused by its stylistic risks. “Some people were baffled by the book because it did not work in a way that was palpable to certain trends in Native American poetics; others liked it because it was new and distinctive,” Bitsui says.
After the book’s release, Bitsui found himself drawn into the national poetry-reading circuit and onto the international stage. Besides traveling all over the country, he has been featured in the Fiftieth Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte at the Venice Biennial with the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance, and he’s been invited to Colombia to attend the International Poetry Festival of Medellín with Joy Harjo. Most recently he attended Poesiefestival Berlin, where he read alongside Rita Dove and John Yau.
“Every day’s a gift,” Bitsui says, pondering the opportunities he’s had. In 2006 he received news he’d won a prestigious forty-thousand-dollar Whiting Award. At the time, though, he was in the middle of writing an elegy for his cousin. Because his family was grieving, he didn’t want to encroach on their grief with his news, and neither did he understand the magnitude of the prize until he was sitting on the stage in New York City, listening to his work being praised.
When he returned, having made the trip alone, he attempted to describe for his grandmother this place he had visited, where crowds flowed through the streets and the buildings reached high into the sky. “Oh, you went to New York City,” she responded. Bitsui chuckles at the recollection.
As the new face of Native American literature, Bitsui takes his responsibility seriously, which is why he doesn’t turn down any offers to travel or read poetry or be interviewed. “Though I hope I’m not the only one being asked,” he says. He names two of his contemporaries, poets Santee Frazier and Orlando White, who released books earlier this year. Frazier published Dark Thirty with the University of Arizona Press, and White released Bone Light with Red Hen Press.
“I’m excited that there’s a new group out there, but I worry about what’s expected of us,” Bitsui says. He admits that one thing he’s been disappointed by in many of his presentations is the comparisons that audience members will make between him and the Native American superstar, Sherman Alexie.
“Sherman’s charismatic and funny,” Bitsui observes, “but there’s only one Sherman. The rest of us should be allowed to be who we are.”
When we finally arrive in Bisbee, it’s painfully obvious what happens when a place attempts not to change. This old copper-mining town tries to remain the same in order to cultivate tourism. The old brothel is now a hotel decorated to resemble a brothel, and the saloon’s decor includes stuffed javelina heads and hunting rifles. Most of the residents of Bisbee are white, as are the visitors. The original buildings along the main street now house expensive art galleries.
We take a walk to a copper mine, the entrance fenced to prevent tourists from leaning over the edge. “They say that one time water pooled at the bottom,” says Bitsui, “and that a flock of Canadian geese flying overhead detected it and swooped down for a drink. The water was toxic, poisoned. And the next day, the bottom of this mine glowed fluorescent white with the dead pile of birds.”
And as if on cue, it begins to rain again. “Perhaps that’s why I gave my second book that title,” Bitsui says. “The poem is a song that floods, ebbs, and is searching for a name. I feel that it’s a body of work that speaks a third language, combining Navajo sensibilities with English linearity.”
This poetic hybrid is also what attracted Wiegers to Bitusi’s work. “That was another word-of-mouth phone call,” Bitsui says of how Wiegers first contacted him. “I met Michael briefly at an Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. I was introduced to him by Matthew Shenoda, the Coptic poet. And Michael eventually called me up out of the blue to ask if I had a second manuscript.”
Wiegers wanted to hear Bitsui off the page, so in 2007 he accepted an invitation to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where Bitsui was a fellow that year. “I arrived at the conference the day after he read,” Wiegers recalls, “so I pulled him aside and asked him to read a poem to me. We walked down to the pond, where I sat on a big rock while he told me nearly the entirety of the new manuscript, which was still in development. I was impressed, to say the least. I suggested to him that when he finished and was looking to publish the book, he’d have a ready ear in me.”
As we take cover in the local coffee shop, a musician starts to set up his equipment. We are determined to make it to the saloon to have a beer once the rain stops.
“With Flood Song I wanted to go back to my beginning as an aspiring painter,” Bitsui says. “I think of many of those poems as portraits with their own elliptical stories to tell.”
Bitsui says that his ideal readers are visual artists, who discover something of their techniques in his writing style. But he confesses that even his family members are puzzled by his poetry. “They’re waiting for me to write a poem they can understand,” he says, laughing.
In the meantime, Bitsui will continue to live in Tucson, where he has been most productive in his writing. And while he’s scratching out a living as a visiting poet in various tribal schools in the area, he’s also moving forward with other projects. He has decided to return to the University of Arizona to complete his MFA and to finish a screenplay he’s been struggling with since he received a fellowship last year from the Sundance Native Initiative to adapt one of his stories for film. Bitsui doesn’t consider himself a short story writer, but as a descendant of storytellers, he couldn’t refuse the opportunity. The Sundance programmer, N. Bird Runningwater, has been patiently waiting for Bitsui to turn in the script. “It’s not poetry, though, which is hard enough,” Bitsui says.
The beer at the saloon (more like a movie set) is anticlimactic, so after one drink we head back to Tucson, making a brief stop in Tombstone, home of the O.K. Corral. It’s Wyatt Earp Days in the town, and the locals are capitalizing on the occasion with a street fair selling cheap Native American jewelry and charging for a chance to ride in a covered wagon, old Wild West style.
“I once brought my grandmother here,” Bitsui says. “And I remembered her stories about riding in a wagon in the old days, so I asked her if she wanted to relive that memory by taking a wagon ride. She said, ‘Been there, done that. It’s not a very fun ride.’”
We find our way back to I-10, going west this time, riding off into what will become the sunset. It’s been a pleasure being on the road, talking story. But all good things must come to an end. Bitsui needs to return the car by sundown. It’s a rental.
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
(Photos by Jackie Alpers.)Ten Questions for Grady Chambers
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Grady Chambers, whose debut poetry collection, North American Stadiums, was published this month by Milkweed Editions. The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places “bleached / pale by time and weather”—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces. Born and raised in Chicago, Chambers received an MFA from Syracuse University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have appeared in Adroit Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Nashville Review; Ninth Letter; New Ohio Review; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My routine seems to change every year or two, but for the past six months or so my tendency has been to write once a week, typically on Sundays, in a block of hours beginning around eight or nine in the morning and ending in the early afternoon, and most often at a coffee shop not far from my apartment.
2. How long did it take you to write North American Stadiums?
About six years, I think. The last poem in the book is the oldest, and I wrote the first draft of that poem on Memorial Day, 2012. It’s an interesting question because unlike someone setting out to write a novel, there was no real destination in mind. I didn’t (and probably this is true of writers of most books of poetry) set out to write North American Stadiums as such. The poems that comprise it are simply a curated selection from a much broader collection of writing that began in 2011 or so, when I began to be more strict with myself about making time to write. That the book contains the poems it does seems largely a result of my preferences and inclinations around the time I began thinking I should try and shape that growing stack of poems into a book. That was actually the scariest part in making this come together: the endless possible permutations of inclusion, exclusion, order; the fear of endless possibility.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Probably the way it forces a different relationship to one’s manuscript and writing. By the time I was copyediting the book for the third or fourth time I was so wholly attentive to formatting, spelling, margins—all the aesthetics of language on a page—that I didn’t even feel like I was reading the poems anymore. Thanks to the awesome people at Milkweed Editions I had the unusual opportunity to create an audiobook version of the manuscript, and as I was traveling to the sound studio I was hit with a sudden fearful sense that I’d forgotten the sound and rhythm of the poems because I’d been so wrapped up in the copyediting. But that experience of doing the recording proved to be a great one: sitting down and reading it into a microphone, it was the first time that I was just able to simply read the book without looking at it through the lens of an editor. At that late stage, the book was in its final form, and all I had to do was read what was there. In doing so I felt again the rhythm and pacing and speed (or slowness) of the poems, not their marks and margins and format.
4. Where did you first get published?
The first piece of “creative writing” I wrote that actually ended up being bound between two covers were a few poems written as part of a high school English class. As I remember it, part of the final assignment for the class was for us to collectively make and bind a book (and of course produce the writing it contained). I’m fairly sure I used a phrase along the lines of, “from the lens of my itinerant being,” and it still makes me cringe to think about.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kawabata’s last and unfinished novel, Dandelions, and have been reading around in Turgenev’s great Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook (though the title is sometimes translated differently) and Robin Becker’s wonderful new collection of poems, The Black Bear Inside Me.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I can already envision this answer producing audible groans in some readers of this interview, but in all honesty I’d probably bring Moby Dick. I love the music of so much of that book, the rhythmic and sonic propulsion of Melville’s sentences, the astounding and way-ahead-of-its-time structure of his novel; and I think the book is deeply funny. I’ve mentioned how funny I find the book to a number of people, and that comment is usually met with a perplexed look, but I think there is great humor in the narrative distance between writer Melville and narrator Ishmael. Ishmael is, to me, a narrator who is totally over the top, and doesn’t have the self-awareness to recognize that quality in himself. But Melville certainly knew it, and I can imagine him laughing as he wrote some of Ishmael’s more grandiose meditations.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I find it hard to say because I feel I have such a limited sense of how authors are perceived or rated by others. But a few collections that I think are amazing but that are maybe under-read—or at least don’t seem to be read much among writers my age—are David Ferry’s incredible book, Bewilderment, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of sonnets, Kyrie, and Adrian C. Louis’s Ceremonies of the Damned. I don’t think these writers are underrated, but with so much out there and with this increasing thirst, it seems, for what’s new or what’s next, these are three books that come quickly to mind that are very worth returning to, each one remarkable in its own way.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I sleep very poorly, and that can sometimes really knock my days off course. That said, sleeplessness has also been beneficial to my writing life as, like it or not, my mind seems to be receptive to degrees of fear or strangeness or anxiety in those sleepless hours that come back in sometimes productive or interesting ways when I write.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I’m not sure I have the perfect phrase for it, but something along the lines of “generative inquiry.” What I have in mind is a tendency on the part of a reader, when talking about a certain piece, to press on certain sections of the poem, to push me about the intent or meaning of a certain sequence. In doing so, they communicate their understanding of the poem and I am able to weigh it against my intention. This helps give me a sense of which sections or sequences feel flat or outside the orbit of images and ideas that the poem is working through and forces me to verbalize, and then try and put into words on the page, a sometimes originally cloudy intent.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s not quite advice, but the most important thing someone has said to me about writing, the thing that has had a tangible impact on my work, is what my friend Charif Shanahan (his collection Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing is so good) said during a workshop a couple years ago. He asked the room, “What aren’t you writing about, and why?” Though maybe to some it seems a fairly obvious thing to ask oneself, it had a pretty significant impact on me. It helped me think about and re-examine the ways I defined myself as a writer, and encouraged me to look directly at, and at least attempt to write about, things that daily occupied my mind but for various reasons I previously had overlooked, shied away from, or not thought to write about.
Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums.
Ten Questions for A. M. Homes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features A. M. Homes, whose story collection Days of Awe, published today by Viking, “exposes the heart of an uneasy America...exploring our attachments to one another through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.” Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Days of Awe?
The stories in this collection took twelve years—stories accrue over time. I don’t sit down to write a collection of stories. I have ideas for them that can take years to form and there is a compression to storytelling, the sense that the story is already in progress by the time the reader comes to it—which means that I, like, know what it’s all about before diving in.
And there’s also an editorial/curating process—we build the collection—so once I have six to eight stories I like, I start to think about the balance, of voices within the stories, about narrative threads, ideas that appear in multiple stories—and sometimes we put a few stories aside and I write one or two more. There’s a moment when you know it’s getting close—which is very exciting. For me that was last summer. I was in Oxford, England, and knew I had two stories to finish: “Days of Awe,” the title story, which I’d literally been carrying with me for almost ten years, and “The National Caged Bird Show,” which had been with me for almost two years. Finishing those was thrilling and they’re two of my favorites in the book.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In a perfect world I write daily, starting at about 6 AM. I wake up early, I go into my office and start writing. And then around 1 PM I join the rest of the world.
But as we know it’s not a perfect world, so I often have to fight to carve out work time—a writer’s calendar should be empty—but when most of us look at an empty calendar we think, “Great time to make a dentist appointment.” So it’s a struggle, learning to say no to things.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it takes. The lead time is about a year.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first publications were in Folio, a student publication at American University, and the Sarah Lawrence Review and then On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine, founded in 1984. They published a story of mine called “72 Hours on a Towel.”
5. What are you reading right now?
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. And I love reading history, I love biography. I’m a huge nonfiction fan.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kelly’s Textbook of Internal Medicine. I’m practical and I have a good enough imagination to otherwise entertain myself.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Joyce Carol Oates.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Honesty and a sharp red pencil.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the truth according to the character—from Grace Paley, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.
A. M. Homes, author of Days of Awe (Viking).
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Lillian Li
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lillian Li, whose debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, is out this month from Henry Holt. Loosely based on Li’s own waitressing experience at a Peking duck restaurant in northern Virginia, the novel follows the complicated lives and loves of the people working at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland. The multigenerational, multi-voiced, and darkly comic novel “practically thumps with heartache and dark humor,” says novelist Chang-rae Lee. “If a Chinese restaurant can be seen as a kind of cultural performance,” says Peter Ho Davies, “Lillian Li takes us behind the scenes.” Li received a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction and Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, and Jezebel. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a bookseller at Literati Bookstore and a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write wherever is free (so usually my apartment), and I tend to write whenever I can put it off no longer (so anywhere in the late afternoon to the pre-morning hours). I find that I’m disciplined in short bursts. So I can write every day and sustain that practice for a week. Then I pat myself on the back and forget to write for a week. Rinse and repeat.
2. How long did it take you to write Number One Chinese Restaurant?
About three years. Although the bulk of that time was spent completing just the first draft. I’m a faster reviser than I am a writer.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How much I would grow to depend on my editor (Barbara Jones)! She taught me so much about writing, especially on the character and sentence-level. I hadn’t expected to find such mentorship, especially since the book had already been written, but I’m thrilled I did.
4. Where did you first get published?
I was first published as a Granta New Voice, which was an online feature started by their then–fiction editor Patrick Ryan. I recently ran into Patrick at a conference and had the privilege of gushing my gratitude at him.
5. What are you reading right now?
My Education by Susan Choi. A deeply sexy, emotionally turbulent book about a graduate student who falls for a notorious professor’s equally charismatic wife. Also Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars, which comes out August 14. Hua writes about San Francisco Chinatown with such savvy and heart. Both books are also incredibly funny.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I’ve read it so many times I’ve lost count, and his voice never ceases to thrill. So clearly it would be good company on a desert island.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t know about most underrated, but I wish more people talked about Jessica Hagedorn. Dogeaters remains one of the most awe-inspiring books I’ve ever read.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I only have myself to blame, but I also tend to let myself off the hook pretty easily.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
A combination of a sharp tongue and a big heart.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Avoid the word “it” whenever possible. Which is to say, specificity whenever possible.
Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Christopher Kennedy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Christopher Kennedy, whose fifth poetry collection, Clues From the Animal Kingdom, is out today from BOA Editions. In the collection, Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. “There is joy and dread here, in every carefully considered line,” writes Dave Eggers about the book. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, Kennedy offers prose poems that offer, as George Saunders puts it, “a moving portrait of the human heart examining itself.” Christopher Kennedy is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, 2011), and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write anywhere I happen to be at any time of day, though I tend to write first drafts at night and revise during the day. I take breaks, sometimes for months, usually because I’m teaching and want to devote my energy to my students’ work, but when I’m writing, I write every day.
2. How long did it take you to write the poems in Clues From the Animal Kingdom?
There are some lines in the poems that are decades old, but I’d say most of the poems were written between 2007 and 2016. I tend to save old poems and scavenge from them when I’m stuck working on something newer. I trust that it’s all coming from the same source and can be reshaped to resolve whatever dilemma I’m facing.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I was surprised at the relationship between the poems in the collection. It feels as if it’s part poetry, part fiction, part memoir, in the sense that if you read it cover to cover there is a narrative arc, at least in the sense of moving from one emotional/psychological state to another, as well as temporal shifts that feel organic to a plot I never would have imagined would exist.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I have a fantasy that book publishers could find a way to form consortiums that would allow them to open their own bookstores. I miss being able to browse shelves and strike up conversations with knowledgable staff in a place devoted to books.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mostly I’m reading my students’ work, which impresses me on a daily basis, but I was on leave last semester, so I was able to read a lot over the spring and summer. Here’s a short list of books I read and recommend. Poetry: former students Grady Chambers and Jessica Poli’s book and chapbook, respectively, North American Stadiums and Canyons. Short story collections: Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark, Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved, and Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Novels: Paula Saunders’s debut, The Distance Home, and Jonathan Dee’s The Locals. I also read some unpublished stories from a collection in process by Sarah Harwell, a wonderful poet and fiction writer. They’re linked stories set in an airport, and they’re fantastic.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
If I had a good dictionary, I’d have everything I need and lots of time to recreate everything I’ve ever read. That seems impractical, though, so I’d bring Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge. It had a profound influence on me thirty-plus years ago, and every time I read it again, it holds up.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I could name several, but Gary Lutz comes to mind immediately. One Gary Lutz sentence is worth a thousand pictures.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I don’t have any impediments other than my own psychology. For me, writing is a constant struggle between thinking I have nothing of any importance to say and believing that when I do have something to say I won’t be able to express it properly. I have three states of being: feeling doubt, manifesting a vague desire to say something that seems important, and writing toward ground zero of that desire.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to dunk a basketball, but I’d settle for writing more poems that are focused on the current socio-political scene. Some of my work has that emphasis, but I’d like to expand that part of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Hayden Carruth wrote this in a letter to me several years ago: “The language of a poem is like a balloon, it must be stressed enough to make its shape full and taut, but not enough to make it explode.”
Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues From the Animal Kingdom. (Credit: David Broda)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for May-Lee Chai
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features May-Lee Chai, whose story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants is out today from Blair, an imprint of Carolina Wren Press. Chai’s collection, which Edward P. Jones calls “a splendid gem” and Tayari Jones calls “essential reading,” is, at its essence, about migration—both physical and psychological, between cities and countries, among families and individuals. The stories are marked by complex and vividly rendered characters, Chinese American and Chinese women, men, and children who navigate relationships and the land, asking important questions about themselves, their families, and their culture. As Lisa Ko puts it, “You won’t forget these characters.” May-Lee Chai is the award-winning author of ten books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, the novel Tiger Girl, and her original translation from Chinese into English of Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and is an assistant professor in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing as a student, I used to write after midnight, after all my work was done for the day. But now I find that too tiring. I can write only on days when I’m not teaching and when all my grading and reading are done. Otherwise, I can’t turn off my editing brain to reach my subconscious, creative thoughts.
2. How long did it take you to write Useful Phrases for Immigrants?
I had been working on some of the stories for four or five years before I decided to put together a collection. Some had already been published. Once I came up with my theme, I knew which ones should go together and how to revise the others.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I received the most beautiful blurb quote from Edward P. Jones. After that I thought, “I will never again receive an endorsement as wonderful, as meaningful, as generous as his. You can put this one on my tombstone!”
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish it were easier for writers of color who don’t come from moneyed backgrounds to be heard and celebrated.
5. What are you reading right now?
Just finished reading Vanessa Hua’s novel A River of Stars, which is so good at taking a story that’s ripped from the headlines and then going deeper into the characters and their motivations, and I’m just starting Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection, A Lucky Man, which is full of heartbreak and longing and exquisitely crafted sentences.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Sei Shonagon. She was a member of the Heian Court in 10th-century Japan and wrote a “pillowbook” of diary-like entries on daily life, rituals, human relationships, all kinds of opinionated, lyric-essay-like observations. Everyone should read her.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My editor at Blair, Robin Miura, has the best editors’ traits: an eagle eye and a light hand.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The current political situation is the biggest impediment to my continued well-being as a woman of color in America, so that naturally impedes the writing. It takes time and energy to resist, and it takes time and energy to heal. That leaves relatively little time for everything else.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Peace of mind.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writer Nona Caspers (The Fifth Woman) just visited my undergraduate class and told the students to learn to trust their subconscious. As an example, she said when something turns up in a writing exercise or in their notebooks, they should be willing to explore and unpack and develop what their subconscious is telling them is important. I thought that was great advice.
May-Lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants.
Ten Questions for Rosellen Brown
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rosellen Brown, whose eleventh book, The Lake on Fire, is out today from Sarabande Books. The novel is an epic family narrative that begins among nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm and follows the young protagonist, Chaya, and her brother Asher, who flee to industrialized Chicago with the hopes of finding a better life. Instead, they find themselves confronted with the extravagance of the World’s Fair, during which they depend on factory work and pickpocketing to survive. The Lake on Fire is a “keen examination of social class, family, love, and revolution in a historical time marked by a tumultuous social landscape.” Rosellen Brown is the author of the novels Civil Wars, Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, Before and After, and six other previous books. Her stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories , and Best Short Stories of the Century. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Where depends almost entirely on the shifting light in my apartment that, most marvelously, sits sixteen stories up and a couple of blocks from constantly-changing Lake Michigan. So I follow the sun around and sit wherever it’s brightest (often with my cat on my lap). I sometimes wonder if I’d focus better if I had one desk, one room of my own, but I’m light-thirsty and this seems to work out pretty well. As for the “how often,” when my kids were little and I had to take advantage of every minute they were in school, I’ll admit I was a lot more disciplined; I published three books in three years. Like my waistline, I’m afraid things have slackened a little, but I still try to work every day that I’m not teaching and feel like I’m cheating when I don’t at least try, or on a dry day default to reading. It’s interesting that many people worry that reading while they’re writing might influence their work. On the contrary, I’ve always read just enough (of just about anything good) until I find myself thinking, hungrily, “I want to do that!” Then I put the book or the story away and get down to it, energized by envy.
2. Where did you first get published?
This is crazy to remember: The New York Times used to—I’m talking about the fifties—publish poetry, mostly pretty bad, on their editorial page and while I was in high school I sent them, and had accepted, a sonnet on the ghost of Thomas Wolfe. (I’m not talking about Tom Wolfe but the Thomas of Look Homeward, Angel: “Oh, lost and by the wind-grieved ghost...” and so on. A book not to be read when you’re older than sixteen.) In college, I had a few poems in little magazines and one in Mademoiselle and then my coup, never to be repeated: Poetry Magazine took a sestina of mine and published it in my senior year. A sestina is always a sort of tour de force; maybe if I tried that again, they’d take another poem! As for my fiction, I didn’t start writing that until later, moving gradually from poetry to prose poetry to some pretty unconventional fiction because I didn’t really know (or care about) “the rules.”
3. How long did it take you to write The Lake On Fire?
Oh, what a question! I just discovered, via an old letter that I happened upon, that I had begun talking about what became this book as long ago as 1987! I’m horrified. I published four books between that early hint of curiosity and my actually writing and revising it, so I was obviously not sidelined by that early—I’ll call it an itch. Somewhere along the way I wrote a first version that was set in New Hampshire. Of course, Chicago is at the center of the published novel. I could write a lot more than I have room for here about how long it takes me—and, I suspect, most writers—the coming together of two impulses to ignite a story, and that’s what happened when I moved here and learned so much about the city’s history. I sort of (but only sort of) wish I could find the original manuscript that never took fire but I have no idea what happened to it. (Good metaphor, given the name of the final book.)
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How wonderfully attentive an independent (read: small but not powerless) press could be, if it’s seriously well-run. I got an almost instant response from Sarah Gorham, whose Sarabande has always been one of my favorites—none of that hanging around the (virtual) mailbox waiting for somebody in New York to say yea or nay because, I trust, she didn't have to run things past an army of marketers and others before she could say “I love it!” And their marketing has been another surprise: Really attentive and responsive, Joanna Englert is all in, efficient, and enthusiastic. Though I had a good experience at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with their publicity and marketing for my book Before and After, this is far more personal and agile.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Respect for my intentions and an absence of the need to prevail. A good ear, not always available even from editors who can talk about structure or motivation and so on but who can’t hear a rhythmically perfect (or imperfect) line. I’ve had two great editors: The first, John Glusman, was just starting his family when I worked with him on Before and After, which raises some hard questions about parental responsibility, and he was deeply attuned to what I was trying to do. And my current editor, Sarah Gorham, is herself a terrific poet and essayist who knows how to listen to the rhythm of my writing, which—as someone who herself began as a poet—I take very seriously.
6. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m hardly alone in saying that—both understandably and unforgivably—the “legacy” publishers look at their numbers, past and projected, far more attentively than I think they consider the quality of books they deem marginal. They are, like their counterparts in the entertainment industry, more sheeplike than daring.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Not under-rated—he gets great reviews and sometimes wins prizes—but I find too few people who know Charles Baxter’s stories and novels. I’m not sure why: Too quiet, maybe? Never brings down the house but writes with exquisite sensitivity and great good humor, with his passion for social justice sometimes stage center, sometimes lurking around the edges. I remember him saying, memorably and better than this, that what we need to do is make people less certain about their certainties.
8. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
This is still a little too much like the “who are your favorite writers?” kind of question. I hate ranking writers because it’s so apples and oranges. Two of my favorite novels, for example, are William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. But then, what about Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, which I consider one of the most satisfying collections of (connected) stories I know? To the Lighthouse? And then, on another day, trying keep dry the suitcase I’d have rescued from whatever boat capsized and deposited me on that island, where do I put Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene or Marilynn Robinson’s Houskeeping, novels so different you might want to find another name for their genres? And then there’s poetry. And then there’s nonfiction, at least half the entries in The Art of the Personal Essay. So many delights! How to choose? I refuse.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a plodding, one-idea-at-a-time writer, unlike some of my friends, who are filled to overflowing with great projects jostling each other to be attended to. Then again, with eleven books behind me, I guess I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment Weekly, of all places, recently chose The Lake on Fire as one of their “20 Fall Books Not To Be Missed,” and they called me some very complimentary things, but it was kind of a backhanded compliment because they said people ought to get to know my name because I’d been flying under the radar. Then again, whoever compiled the list was probably in first grade (if that) when my last book came out so I guess that’s on me!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The only teacher with whom I ever took a fiction class, a fine and much undernoticed writer named George P. Elliott cautioned us, at a time when we young ‘uns were too easily snarky and judgmental, to be compassionate toward our characters. He cited a letter by Chekhov in which Chekhov suggested that, at most, we should admonish people whom we find wanting: “Look how you live, my friends. What a pity to live that way.” Hard to live up to and I fail often because cleverness is so much easier to reach for than sympathy, but I try to remember and, without too many compromises, act upon it.
Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire.
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Amy Bonnaffons
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amy Bonnaffons, whose debut story collection, The Wrong Heaven, is out today from Little, Brown. In this collection of funny, strange, and inventive stories, whose “conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places,” Bonnaffons writes about women, desire, and transformation through the lens of the fantastic. Bonnaffons received an MFA from New York University and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and her story “Horse”—which juxtaposes one woman’s journey through IVF with her roommate’s transition from woman to animal—was performed by actresses Grace Gummer and Geraldine Hughes on This American Life.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Ideally every day, for two hours or so in the morning, at home or at a nearby coffee shop. I do my best to stick to that schedule, but interruptions and hiatuses are common—due to the demands of life, work, and school, or the need to replenish myself creatively. I’ve been taking a long break for the past few months, reading and drawing a lot rather than pressuring myself to produce any new writing.
2. How long did it take you to write The Wrong Heaven?
The first story (“Doris and Katie”) was written in 2008; the most recent story is “Horse,” written in 2016. So I’ve been working on these stories for the last decade of my life—while also writing a novel, The Regrets, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How capable and nice everyone has been. I’d heard horror stories about publishing that made me anticipate encountering a lot of incompetent jerks—but everyone I’ve worked with has been really good at their jobs, and also just so darn likable. I want to invite them all over for a potluck where we get drunk and dork out about books.
4. Where did you first get published?
Word Riot and Kenyon Review Online.
5. What are you reading right now?
Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman; Hiromi Kawakami’s Record of a Night Too Brief; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I just finished Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Myriam Gurba’s Mean, and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I could read that book forever.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t really like to rate authors, because everything’s a matter of taste, and taste is political, and hierarchy has no place in the creative life. That said, there are some authors I’ve read recently and wondered, “WHY HAS NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THIS PERSON BEFORE? WHY IS THIS BOOK NOT ON EVERY SYLLABUS EVER?” Sometimes I’m just late to the party—but it’s also true that women, people of color, and authors from the Global South have to fight harder to find an audience. This is changing, but we’re not yet anywhere near where we should be.
The books I’m thinking of at the moment are Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, and The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy (why did no one make me read her in college?). I’m grateful to my professor Susan Rosenbaum to introducing me to Loy and Loos (check out her Mina Loy project), to Reginald McKnight for turning me on to Tutuola, and to Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, which made me run and check out Ingalls.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’d like to say, “being super busy.” If I’m honest, I’m only medium busy, but I really like to sleep. A friend recently sent me a new-age astrology website that claimed to identify, based on birth date and time, “where in your body you generate energy.” When I entered my data it claimed that I am a rare type that “generates no energy,” should only work two to four hours per day, and needs at least ten hours of sleep per night. I’ve never felt so seen.
Seriously, though, aside from just finding the time, I think my biggest problem is pressuring myself to finish something when there’s just no energy in it. That just makes me beat myself up and get depressed. I’ve learned how to strategically take breaks and how to refresh my angle of approach when needed.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Being able to pinpoint where the energy and heat is in the story, and reflecting that back to me. When you’re writing something long, like a novel, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and to forget why you started writing in the first place. A good editor—be it friend, teacher, agent, or publishing-house professional—can show you where your work has pulse and where it doesn’t. It’s helpful sometimes if they have specific suggestions for how to get the rest of the manuscript back on track, but this isn’t always necessary. Usually, for me, once I’ve been re-oriented to what really matters, I can fix the problems myself. The two editors I’ve worked with at Little, Brown—Lee Boudreaux and Jean Garnett—have both been amazing in this respect, as has my agent, Henry Dunow, an excellent editor himself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve gotten many wonderful pieces of writing advice over the years from mentors, friends, and books. Most recently, I’ve been enormously helped by Lynda Barry—in particular by her suggestion to keep the hand moving at all times. Now, when I’m writing, I keep a sketchpad by my desk; when I pause my typing because I’m stumped, or because I need to ponder something further, I pick up a pencil and start doodling rather than staring blankly at my computer screen or looking out the window or checking my phone. I don’t know why this works, other than that it engages the right brain—but it does!
I’m coming to believe more and more that the whole body should be engaged in the writing process, and that drawing is a particularly useful way to connect brain and body and wake up the imagination. My hypothesis—currently being tested in my own pedagogical practice—is that creative writers should be encouraged to draw and diagram as well as to get words down on paper. It also helps to collaborate with folks in other media, as we do at the journal I edit, 7x7. Collaboration can encourage spontaneity and open up fresh perspectives on one’s work.
Amy Bonnaffons, author of The Wrong Heaven. (Credit: Kristen Bach)
Ten Questions for Keith Gessen
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Keith Gessen, whose second novel, A Terrible Country, is out this month from Viking. A literary portrait of modern Russia, A Terrible Country tells the story of Andrei, a young academic living in New York who is called back to Moscow on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis to care for his grandmother. Once there, Andrei sees a country still grappling with the legacy of Soviet Russia and exhausted by Putin’s capitalism. “Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas...while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story,” says George Saunders. “At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing poliltical moment, this novel is a reassurance from a wonderful and important writer.” Gessen is also the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 2008) and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or cotranslator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Diaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). A contributor to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write A Terrible Country?
It took eight years. This is a little embarrassing to admit because it’s not like the book is a thousand pages long. At one point during the writing of it a friend who works in finance asked how long it would physically take to type a book if you knew all the words already, and the answer in my case, given how fast I type, was one week. And yet it still took eight years.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
If I’m writing, then the answer is whenever and however I can—in notebooks, on scraps of paper, whatever. I wrote large portions of this book in the Gmail app of my old Blackberry while on the subway. That was a great writing phone. Now I use “Notes” on the iPhone—am using it right now in fact—and of course compared to the old Blackberries the keyboard on the iPhone is bullshit. Progress isn’t always progressive.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
It’s been ten years since I published my first/previous novel, so a lot has changed. One obvious thing is the number of new outlets that do interviews, podcasts, etc.—I thought I would find this annoying but actually I like it. I’ve met a bunch of great readers and writers already just through the various interviews.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first non-student publication was in AGNI. I sent a story to Sven Birkerts through my friend George Scialabba, and he took it. I was just out of grad school and wondering if anyone outside my workshop would ever read anything I wrote, so it was very encouraging.
5. What are you reading right now?
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Tony Wood’s forthcoming Russia Without Putin. Both excellent.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
A classic question but I find it hard to answer. Under what circumstances did I arrive on this island? Will I have an opportunity to seek revenge on the forces that put me here? And how long am I here for? Am I Lenin in Finland, just biding my time until I return, or Trotsky in Mexico, counting the days till my assassins arrive? Is this a difficult island to survive on—is it literally a desert?—or an easy one? Would I find it useful and heartening to read about someone in a similar situation, like Robinson Crusoe, or would I find it annoying because he had it so much easier? Finally, who owns the island? Do I need to pay rent?
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Rebecca Curtis. She should be a household name.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Sloth. Indecision. Inconstancy.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
My editor at Viking, Allison Lorentzen, is amazing. She is brilliant and ruthless and thoughtful, all at once. I guess if there’s one particular trait, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s passion. Or commitment, to choose a more respectable-sounding word. Either way, it’s the ability to persevere in a very tough business, living with both constant pressure and constant disappointment. You can’t keep doing it and doing it well if you don’t care.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I once heard George Saunders tell a story about being edited at the New Yorker, where his editor kept asking him to cut a highly precise number of lines—18 lines, 25 lines. And George would go do it each time thinking that the editor had a very specific vision for his story. But then he realized the editor just wanted it to be shorter. And the advice here was: There’s almost no piece of writing that can’t be improved by removing 18, then 25, then 21 lines; i.e. you can almost always make something better by making it shorter. This interview being the rare exception to that rule.
Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country (Viking).
Ten Questions for Alexia Arthurs
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alexia Arthurs, whose debut story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, is out today from Ballantine Books. Drawing on Arthurs’s own experiences growing up in Jamaica and moving with her family to Brooklyn, New York, at age twelve, the stories in this collection explore issues of race, class, gender, and family, and feature a cast of complex and richly drawn characters, from Jamaican immigrants in America to their families back home, from tight-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and small Midwestern college towns. Arthurs is a graduate of Hunter College in New York City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her stories have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and the Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I love lattes and coffee shop ambiance, but whenever I try to write in public, I regret it. Everything and everyone is too loud. I need to be in the privacy and quiet of my home, at my desk with a cup of tea. I drink lots of tea when I write. My magic hours are between 12 AM and 2 AM or until I absolutely can’t keep my eyes open anymore. If I’m working on something, I try to write as often as I can—every day, every other day, whenever I can. I can go weeks without writing if the material isn’t pressing. I can’t decide if my writing is better when I feel inspired, or if it’s the process that feels more pleasant.
2. How long did it take you to write How to Love a Jamaican?
I wrote the first story, “Slack,” during my first year of graduate school—this was late 2012 or early 2013. I finished the last story during the winter of 2017.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Often writers talk about writing in an individualized way, our dreams and failures, but on the other end, it feels like a community project—it’s for the culture, for my culture. How to Love a Jamaican feels bigger than me. A surprising and beautiful realization. I’ve gotten messages from people who tell me that they were waiting on a book like mine.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published a short story called “Lobster Hand” in Small Axe.
5. What are you reading right now?
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. It’s incredible. This is such a good year for short story collections.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
The Bible I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s marked-up and worn, and it is one of the most precious things I own. I’m not religious anymore, or I’m still trying to figure out my relationship with religion, but my family is, and my father was a minister when I was growing up, so Biblical stories still hold personal relevance for me.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Whenever I’m asked this question (if I’m asked this question again—I was asked this question last week) I’m going to name short story collections I love. We need to get more people reading story collections! I really admire You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale and Are You Here For What I’m Here For? by Brian Booker.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
All of my feelings and daydreaming. It’s hard sometimes to sit still and trust the process. The other challenge is the pain of recognizing myself in my writing because my stories come from such a personal place. I don’t always feel like looking in a mirror.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Kindness. Intelligence is nice, but kindness is lovelier. Andra Miller has both. I respect her as a person and as a thinker.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I took photographs in high school. There was a dark room, which now feels like a small miracle in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. When I was graduating, my photography teacher, Mr. Solo, gave me a little book—The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He taped one of my photographs in one of the blank pages and wrote a note saying that he hoped I would stay involved in art-making wherever life took me. Not really advice, but encouragement, which for me is the same thing. I still have that book. What he did was one of the most generous things a teacher or anyone has ever done for me.
Alexia Arthurs, author of How to Love a Jamaican. (Credit: Kaylia Duncan)
Ten Questions for Sharlene Teo
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sharlene Teo, whose debut novel, Ponti, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Praised by Tash Aw as “not just a singular debut, but a milestone in Southeast Asian literature,” Ponti is the tale of three women in modern-day Singapore: Szu, a teenager living in a dark house on a cul-de-sac; her mother, Amisa, once a beautiful actress starring in a series of cult horror movies as a beautiful, cannibalistic monster, now a hack medium performing séances with her sister; and the privileged, acid-tongued Circe. Told from the perspective of each of the three women, Ponti explores the fraught themes of friendship, memory, and belonging. A Singaporean writer based in the UK, Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award, the 2013 David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire UK, Magma Poetry, and Eunoia Review.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly at my desk, at home. Thinking best in the morning before the weight of the day and the effluvium of social media and the news cycle settles in. When I’m in the middle of a project I’ll work on it whenever I can. In between projects, or struggling to finish something unpleasant before I can get back to fiction writing (like now), I make cryptic notes that I have trouble decoding later, as often as I can. But I read all the time, which I think is a form of thinking novelistically.
2. How long did it take you to write Ponti?
The first, failed iteration took me two years: from 2012 to 2014. I restarted it and that draft took two years: 2014 to 2016. And then the editorial process.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How gently collaborative it’s been. My editors were exacting but never didactic. Postpublication, my publicist is a life buoy. And everything is out of my control since I handed in the final edits, including (this is hard to let go of) how people respond to it.
4. If you could go anywhere in the world for a writing retreat where would it be?
A really high-tech underwater retreat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where you can see whales and jellyfish through the glass but any time you like you get taken back up to the surface to crystalline beaches. The food would be really good, fresh seafood, and everything would be sustainable and not exploitative in any way and there would be plenty of pasta available too.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s claustrophobic, terrifying, and has incredible narrative momentum. I know it’s been adapted into a film already, but right now as I read it I’m imagining it as a psychological thriller codirected by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfred Hitchcock.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Mary Gaitskill. I feel like she’s always been fearless, way ahead of the curve.
7. Where did you first get published?
It must have been in a creative writing anthology in Singapore, for teenaged poets.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome. My Eeyorish tendencies. My over-analysis and constant need for approval and comparison.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their perceptiveness, empathy, and patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The Anne Lamott classic: The first draft is the down draft; get the words down. The next draft is the up draft: Fix it up, somehow. Or also (I forgot where I heard this from) to doubt yourself means you’re on to the right thing. I find that reassuring.
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti. (Credit: Barney Poole)
Ten Questions for Jos Charles
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jos Charles, whose new poetry collection, feeld, is out today from Milkweed Editions. Charles’s second book is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech. In an inventive transliteration of the English language that is uniquely her own—like Chaucer for the twenty-first century: “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage,” she writes—Charles reclaims the language of the past to write about trans experience. “Jos Charles rearranges the alphabet to survive its ferocity against her body,” writes Fady Joudah, who selected the collection as a winner of the National Poetry Series. “Where language is weaponized, feeld is a whistleblower, a reclamation of art’s domain.” Charles is the author of a previous poetry collection, Safe Space, published by Ahsahta Press in 2016, and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in Long Beach, California.
1. How long did it take you to write the poems in your new book?
I began writing many of the poems in feeld in 2014; I had a compiled set of them in 2016 and completed the edited, to-be-published version in 2017.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When writing the poems that make up Safe Space, I was working retail and then an office job. So I would spend, on a productive weekday, one to two hours writing and editing and about two to three hours a day reading, researching, and taking notes. Weekends I was more intensive. With feeld, I was writing during an MFA program, which meant time was a little less discrete. I wrote an hour or two a day, edited for about two hours a day, and spent four or so hours reading and taking notes. I’ve maintained something close to that now. That said, there can be weeks I don’t write and weeks where I’m writing much more. I write at my laptop, phone, or in a notebook, and just about anywhere.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most unexpected thing is how people have found uses to my work. I say this not to self-negate, but to communicate the surprise, the praise, of people coming to find, leave, return to art.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you can get into a funded program, yes—it is better pay, hours, and easier than working retail. If you can afford to pay for an MFA, it seems you have access to most resources the MFA provides and your money would be better spent elsewhere—like paying for someone else to get an MFA. It seems to me not worth going in debt over.
5. What are you reading right now?
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and manuel arturo abreu’s transtrender, both of which are beautiful works. I recently subscribed to the Trans Women Writers Collective, which sends out a booklet of writing by a different trans woman writer each month. If you’re able, you ought to sign up for it.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I frequently have been finding myself recommending Eduoárd Glissant’s poetry. Le Sel noir is a particularly astounding work.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Its problems are many and the same as the problems most everywhere else, just articulated in a “literary” way. I would, ideally, want the conditions that give rise to all these problems to be fundamentally removed. This would include “big” things like the United States government as it exists, has existed; profit, private ownership of public goods and labor. The old socialist hopes. It would also include those “smaller” things like behaviors and words and presumptions. In lieu of this, if not this, until this, I could see, as a kind of coping with these conditions, an extramarket or extragovernmental body that organizes material support for writers. A public fund where writers get together and try to decide what to do with the pharmaceutical, supermarket, and other such kinds of money that somehow found its way—through tax write offs, donations—to “the writing community,” to be distributed to the most vulnerable within that community. Of course, violences are not equal, so there would need to be some sort of weighted system to determine distribution of funds based on “quantifying” larger social exclusions. I imagine there’d be fewer prizes and grants and more public goods and services—like housing for writers without fixed addresses or legal support for incarcerated writers, online or mailed lending libraries. This would require middle-class, largely academic-situated writers to forgo their grants and, many having faced financial and housing instability before, unfortunately, to become adjacent to those horrors again. That’s what is at stake though. It’s a messy thought for a messy time.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I can’t think of any impediments unique to my writing life, only impediments that are obvious, manifold, to life in general that happen to additionally hinder my writing life: money, other people, myself.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would like to one day run a local, worker’s paper. It would include creative work, organizational events, opinion pieces, and lots of collectivizing of labor, goods. It would also inevitably be time-consuming and a financial failure.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Saeed Jones once said—and I may very well be misquoting—poets don’t make money. If they have money, it came from somewhere that wasn’t, at least initially, directly their writing. Maybe support from parents, another job, or, if lucky, eventually and in addition, a grant here and there, an academic or nonprofit job. As someone who had been writing and publishing for close to ten years before making any money off of my writing, and then certainly not enough to sustain myself, it was good to hear at that time. Which is to say, in a system that doesn’t value writing, but only the marketing possibility of the writer and the written object, to write is the “success” itself. It’s both disheartening and astonishing. So you make a market of yourself and keep what you can off the books. Along the axes of familiar identarian violences, this is typical: You cross the street to walk over there, you shut up there to speak over here, you sell your wares to buy some shoes—and if not shoes, a coke; if not a coke, a book; if not a book, a bag of rice. And what isn’t your wares?
Jos Charles, author of feeld. (Credit: Cybele Knowles)
Ten Questions for Jasmine Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jasmine Gibson, whose debut poetry collection, Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, is out this month from Nightboat Books. In poems that inexorably tie the personal to the political, Gibson speaks to the disillusioned in moments of crisis, whether in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or in the long, slow echo of the Syrian civial war. “Reading this collection is like listening to love poems on a dock while watching transnational cargo ships on fire and sinking,” writes poet Tonga Eisen-Martin about the collection. “Here there are no gods of private causes. Just words dashing on our behalf, only a breath’s distance in front of the beast.” Gibson is also the author of the chapbook Drapetomania, released by Commune Editions in 2015, and coauthor, with Madison Van Oort, of the chapbook TimeTheft: A Love Story (The Elephants, 2018). Originally from Philadelphia, Gibson lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Don’t Let Them See Me Like This?
The book was written over the course of three years. It has changed a lot from what it was originally supposed to be. I thought it would only be two years of work, which is what it was at first. Different things happened, choices made, no love lost, and now it’s a three-year-old maenad waiting to be born.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing about five years ago, I would go to this specific bar in Manhattan’s West Village and do a whole ritual. I’d get my paycheck, get a book from St.Mark’s Bookstore, then a banh mi, and then four margaritas in I’d start writing in the darkness of the bar. I did this ritualistically: a specific day, a specific time, a specific bar, alone in the dark. I don’t do this anymore. I like writing in the sun, in bed, in the middle or after kissing. I’m a true Leo, I love love, and writing is like love. It’s painful sometimes, but it really burns you in a way that everyday stuff doesn’t really do. It reminds me of this Bobby Womack quote I saw once: “I live for love. I’ve always been tortured by love. I don’t mind the pain. I want to be the king of pain.” And in a way I, too, love to be the King of Pain, Queen of Ache.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Everyone says time, but babies come when they want to come, that’s what books are like. I’d say the most surprising thing is how the publication process really makes your world smaller and prepares you for postpartum from your book. It gives you a little taste into the way people think about you and your work. It’s really truth telling.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published first by Commune Editions. They were, at that time, the only people to really dig my work before anyone else.
5. What are you reading right now?
Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo terciario / The Tertiary, Reek Bell’s A Great Act, and Claude McKay’s A Long Way From Home.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Authors outside of institutions. That’s where the most interesting work is coming from. With institutions, it’s always this bait-and-switch thing that happens that puts a straight jacket on people’s work.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself, sometimes I’m unsure, sometimes I’m hubris. I think when I wrote TimeTheft: A Love Story with Madison Van Oort, I was able to balance out my own thoughts with her level headedness.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
My most genuine response would be that it was more accessible to voices that are pushed to the margins. But also I think this response gets perverted by the publishing and literary community, which is why you have “special”(fetish) issues to talk about subjects that are just normal ways of living for a lot of people. So, I’d say: more incendiary small presses and zine makers to the front.
9. When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?
I like to hangout with friends, drink, talk to my mom and sister, and go on dates with my partner. I like reading about strange factoids and record shopping.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There is none really, either it’s classicist or unfeasible. I think sincerity is important to the process of writing, because the work really can speak for itself, and no one can pimp that out. So, mine is this: Get in where you fit in, and where you don’t, break it.
Jasmine Gibson, author of Don’t Let Them See Me Like This. (Credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith)
Ten Questions for J. M. Holmes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features J. M. Holmes, whose debut story collection, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, is out today from Little, Brown. This linked collection follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio, four young friends coming of age in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, grappling with the complexities of family history and class; the discovery of sex, drugs, and desire; and the struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as Black men in America. Holmes is, as Rebecca Makkai puts it, “not just a new voice but a new force: honest, urgent, compelling, often hilarious, and more often gut-wrenching.” Born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island, Holmes is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the White Review, and H.O.W. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is currently at work on a novel.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Starting with a simple question and I can’t even answer this one. I used to write at night a lot, very late when everything is quiet. I’m not much of a morning person. Lately, I’ve been writing on my phone at work when it’s slow and we don’t have any tickets in the kitchen—sacrilege, I know.
2. How long did it take you to write How Are You Going to Save Yourself?
Some of the stories are revamped versions of pieces I wrote as an undergrad, so I guess seven years. It pains me to say that since it makes those 250 pages seem really small. The bulk of the collection was written between 2015 and 2016, though.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How little control I have over it. It is a terrifying process to release your literary babies into the world, where anybody can say anything they want about them. Also, just how long it takes from sale to shelf—slowest seventeen months of my life.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published in some student publications as an undergrad, but the first time I got paid for anything literary was the Paris Review. (Shameless shout out to Anna, my agent. She’s dope.)
5. What are you reading right now?
Currently, I’m reading Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts and Ohio by Stephen Markley. They are very different books. The former is probably in conjunction with my answer to the publication process question. Trying to fill the Zen reserves (even though it definitely doesn’t work like that) before this process really takes off.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
You mean if I couldn’t have any albums? Cause music would be the first piece of art I took with me—probably [Kendrick Lamar’s] Section.80 or Channel Orange. And am I stranded for an indefinite amount of time? Cause if not I’d probably pick something long enough to keep me occupied until I’m rescued. Enough deflecting; tough question. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. I feel like that book would satisfy my philosophy itch and still give me a plot to escape through. I’ve only read it in its entirety once, but the excerpts I’ve read here and there since then keep revealing new things to me.
7. Who is the most underrated author in your opinion?
Claude McKay or Breece D’J Pancake. The latter cause he took his own life so young and has a small body of work. The former, I don’t really know, maybe because he was writing at a time when there were a lot of literary sharks in the water—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. But either way, they both deserve to be on ELA curriculums in the United States.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paying rent.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Attention to detail. I know it sounds like an obvious one, but Ben George is a meticulous dude when it comes to the written word. We’ve had debates over single words. He was also instrumental in helping me hammer out all the age and time continuities in the book.
10. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Almost everything Amity Gaige has ever told me probably ranks up there. When I was graduating from college she told me to go get a job and live a little. She said, “Learn how to write and have a job and if you’re still writing and yearning to write, you’ll be fine. You’ll be a writer.” Either that or, “Don’t write drunk too often, you’ll lose the sound of your own voice.” Her husband might’ve said that one, actually. Either way, they both come from her section and they’re both true.
J. M. Holmes, author of How Are You Going to Save Yourself. (Credit: Julie Keresztes)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Catherine Lacey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Lacey, whose new story collection, Certain American States, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lacey’s formidable range as a fiction writer is on full display in a dozen short stories populated by ordinary people seeking the extraordinary, from a young New Yorker trying to decipher a series of urgent, mysterious messages on a stranger’s phone (“ur heck box”) to a nameless man recently fired by “The Company” who wakes up in a purgatory of linens and pillows (“The Grand Claremont Hotel”). Lacey is the author of the novels The Answers (2017) and Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), both published by FSG. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017. Her novels have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she coauthored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair, published by Bloomsbury last year. Born in Mississippi, she lives in Chicago.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Certain American States?
The oldest story in Certain American States was written in 2012, and the newest was finished in early 2018. But I also wrote two novels during those six years, and I wrote several other stories that I did not include in the collection.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day, usually first thing in the morning until lunch, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Writing regularly has always been the primary way I’ve avoided a nervous breakdown, so it’s unclear to me whether it’s a joyful or medicinal activity. It’s probably both.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Being translated was a shock to me. It continues to be a shock. Based on reception, it seems my novels are better in Italian than English.
4. When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
There are two senses in which a person is a writer; only one of them matters. The more important sense is that you are a person who writes. I don’t recall making the decision to be that writer; I was always writing. The second sense is that you somehow convince other people to pay you to write. I was slow to accept that I wanted to be that sort of writer, or rather I was slow to believe that it was even an option for me, so the moment I realized I had that desire is similarly difficult to track.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Unfortunately, it’s probably someone I’ve never read. The amount of books that were either not written or not published because the authors did not believe anyone would ever care, or could not find the people who would care, is staggering.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish American publishers would pursue more work in translation, especially from smaller countries.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Wanting to read all the time. Illness. The weather. My own overwrought tendency toward nostalgia.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s always the next book. I don’t think beyond the book I’m writing and I’m always writing one.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You can only do a day’s work in a day.
Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States. (Credit: Willy Somma)
The Written Image: The Art of the Affair
Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.
Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Wesley Yang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Wesley Yang, whose debut essay collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is out today from W. W. Norton. A mix of reporting, sociology, and personal history, The Souls of Yellow Folk collects thirteen essays on race and gender in America today. Titled after The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic 1903 collection, Yang’s book takes the reader “deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse,” novelist Karan Mahajan writes. In addition to essays on race and whiteness, The Souls of Yellow Folk includes profile pieces on Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007; political scientist Francis Fukuyama; historian Tony Judt; and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Yang has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, New York magazine, the New Republic, Tablet, and n+1. He lives in Montreal.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day at one of two public libraries in Montreal.
2. How long did it take you to write the essays in The Souls of Yellow Folk?
The essays collected in The Souls of Yellow Folk were written over the course of ten years.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This was the first book I’ve ever published so I had no expectations. I just took everything as it came and accepted it just as it was.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
See above.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Really hard to say. I’m a big fan of Heinrich Kleist, who isn’t universally taught and known.
7. Where was your very first publication?
I worked for a weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, New Jersey, when I graduated from Rutgers. My first publication that wasn’t straight news for a New Jersey local paper was a review of a biography of Albert Speer for Salon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Family life and raising a child requires a writer to organize his workflow in a way that is at odds with the way writing happens, at least for me. I’ve made partial strides in this direction but many remain to be made.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
This collection is a miscellany of previously published essays. Still haven’t written a book that is a single free-standing work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writing is a form of manual labor and should be approached in that spirit.
Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk. (Credit: Rich Woodson)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Kenji C. Liu
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kenji C. Liu, whose second poetry collection, Monsters I Have Been, is out today from Alice James Books. Using an invented method he calls “frankenpo” (or Frankenstein poetry), Liu takes an existing text and remixes it, resurrecting older work to create new poetry that investigates the intersections between toxic masculinity, violence, and marginalization. A book that Douglas Kearney calls “sharp, protean, dextrous, and discontent,” Liu’s collection “shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as hell.” Kenji C. Liu is the author of a previous poetry collection, Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Apogee, Barrow Street, the Progressive, the Rumpus, and other publications. A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of the VONA/Voices workhop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, he lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Monsters I Have Been?
It took about three years, coming on the heels of my first collection. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and received some great advice from Jaswinder Bolina while at the Kundiman retreat. He suggested I pick a line or idea from my first collection that still felt juicy and go all the way down the rabbit hole with it. I did, and Monsters I Have Been is a direct result.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Since the book looks at various types of masculinities, I had to seriously reflect on how to write responsibly about gender. Toxic and conventional masculinities were easier, considering that there are always fresh examples in the news ad nauseam, though I did also try to give them some complexity without excusing away their violence. Unconventional masculinities were more challenging because I didn’t want to replicate dominant forms of representational violence. So I decided to approach these via some of the ways I’ve experienced being racially gendered, misgendered, and sexualized as an Asian American man.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
What’s kept me going is a semi-underground, e-mail–based writing accountability group where you sign up to write every day for a month. Recently I haven’t had time for it, but for many years I joined in for months at a time. When I participate, I write everywhere and anytime, often just a sentence or line per day. I might be at work, in transit, or even stranger places. After doing this consistently for years, writing feels like a habit, something you do every day like brushing your teeth. Writing becomes less “special,” which I consider to be a good thing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
There wasn’t anything in particular about the publication process, but the DIY digital marketing campaign I undertook to promote the book ahead of publication created some unexpected results. Drawing on my experience in design and marketing, I decided to focus on an Instagram account (@monstersihavebeen) dedicated solely to the themes of the book, which cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. I found this created a lot of advance interest, and really helped me gauge the book’s audience ahead of time.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Inheritance of Haunting by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, 2018 winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; I Even Regret Night, poems of Lalbihari Sharma, an indentured Indian servant in the Caribbean, translated by Rajiv Mohabir; American Sutra, on religious freedom and Japanese American Buddhists imprisoned in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, by Duncan Ryuken Williams; and Oculus by Sally Wen Mao.
6. Which authors, in your opinion, deserve wider recognition?
Vickie Vértiz, Muriel Leung, Sesshu Foster, Angela Peñaredondo, Mia Ayumi Malhotra.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I experience my corner of the poetry community as very generous and caring, but I have many issues with professionalizing poetry as a career with certain prizes and residencies you “have to” achieve—it can make people greedy, competitive, and encourage a perception of the world based on lack. I think the poetry community works better when it is cooperative and generous. Poetry shouldn’t be just another capitalist product.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money and time.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I need to sense that they understand what my project is trying to do at a fundamental level. Alice James Books seems to have had that understanding immediately, which I’m grateful for because Monsters I Have Been might take some time for the reader’s brain to adjust to if you have conventional expectations of poetry. If an editor, press, reviewer, or anyone else doesn’t seem to understand the project, it’s clearly not a good fit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
What I actually think of is a writing prompt I received from the poet Suheir Hammad many years ago. She asked us to write about a traumatic experience, and also to find something in the environment of the memory that was beautiful. For me, I think this has translated into ongoing writing advice—to look for beauty and grace even in the challenging material, whenever possible.
Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Mona Awad
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you.
Mona Awad, author of Bunny.
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead. (Credit: Kim Newmoney)
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The Blue Clerk
“I have withheld more than I have written. I have restrained more than I have given. I have left unsaid more than I have said.” In this Granta video, Dionne Brand reads from her collection The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
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Ten Questions for Caite Dolan-Leach
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Caite Dolan-Leach, whose novel We Went to the Woods is out today from Random House. Certain that society is on the verge of economic and environmental collapse, five millennials flee to Upstate New York to transform an abandoned farm, once the site of a turn-of-the-century socialist commune, into a utopian compound called Homestead. What starts out as an idyllic sanctuary, however, soon turns dark, deeply isolating, and deadly. Caite Dolan-Leach is a writer and literary translator. She was born in the Finger Lakes region of New York and is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the American University in Paris. Her first novel, Dead Letters, was published by Random House in 2017.
1. How long did it take you to write We Went to the Woods?
I worked on it for about two and a half years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I started the book before the 2016 elections, and my feelings about the characters and their sense of political doom really changed—I had to take a moment to reconsider what they were trying to do and their motivations for doing it. It definitely slowed me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I travel a bit, so the “where” tends to be a variable: sometimes my desk at home, sometimes a café in a different country, sometimes a hotel room. But I work best in the mid-morning, and I try to write at least four days a week.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
This is my second book with Random House, so there weren’t too many surprises. But I’m always struck—and deeply grateful—at how many people are involved in a book’s life, and how much time and effort goes into the publication process. As a young reader, I don’t think I imagined the dozens of people who contribute to just one manuscript, and as a writer, it’s simply amazing.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just got back from Italy, so I’ve been reading some Italian novels: Sabbia nera by Christina Scalia, and L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante—I read the English translation a few years ago, but I’ve missed working in Italian, so I’m re-immersing.
6. Who do you trust to be the first reader of your work?
My husband is always the first person who sets eyes on anything I write.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing We Went to the Woods, what would say?
Don’t do an outline! I did a pretty detailed outline for this book, and I think it changed how I approached the process, and ultimately made it harder.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
I think it’s pretty obvious that we need to be more inclusive as a community. But since I also work as a translator, I’d specifically like to see more books coming from other languages—particularly under-represented ones.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who said it to me, but it’s a truism that I deploy often: Don’t be precious about your writing. By which I mean: Let people read your work, and listen to what they say about it. Obviously, you shouldn’t share until you’re ready, but I think fearing criticism or worrying that people might dislike your work gets in the way of what you really want to write.
Ten Questions for Peter Orner
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Peter Orner, whose story collection Maggie & Other Stories is out today from Little, Brown. Forty-four interlocking stories—some as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages—are paired with a novella, “Walt Kaplan Is Broke,” that together form a composite portrait of life so intricately drawn, line by line, strand by strand, that it shimmers with the heaviness and lightness of the human experience. As Yiyun Li wrote in her prepublication praise, “This book, exquisitely written, is as necessary and expansive as life.” Peter Orner is the author of two novels, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love, and two story collections, Esther Stories and Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge. His latest book, Am I Alone Here?, a memoir, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Orner’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Southern Review, and many other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Maggie Brown & Others?
Hard to say. Stories come slow and I try not to force them. One, “An Ineffectual Tribute to Len” I began in 1999. Many of the others I carried around for years before I managed to put them right, or sort of right. The novella took about ten years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
For me the stories in a collection should be both disparate and—somehow—cohesive. Cohesive isn’t the right word. They should talk to each other, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I like for stories to talk to each other across generations, across geography. So they can’t all be speaking in the same voice, and yet, like I say, they’re communicating, or at least trying to. This takes years and a lot of fiddling, in the sense of fiddling as tinkering—and fiddling as in fiddling around, riffing, etc. (I flunked violin, but I still have aspirations.)
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Whenever I’m not reading, and I read all the time. I squeeze some of my own stuff inbetween. Mornings are the best when my head is a little less cluttered.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Though this is my sixth book, I take nothing for granted. When the book comes in the mail I’m still astonished by the physicality of it. For days I walk around with it, sleep with it. It’s weird. I wish I wasn’t serious.
5. What are you reading right now?
The poetry of Ada Limón.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Randal Kenan, author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a seminal story collection published in the early ’90s.
7. Do you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It’s like asking, “So, should I marry this guy?” Well, I dunno. Is he kind? How about the snoring? If the question is, does a writer need an MFA? No. Can it help to be surrounded by other neurotics who love literature? Sometimes. Sure. Doesn’t make it any less lonely though, which as it should be.
8. What has changed about your writing process over the years, since writing your first book?
If anything, I feel less confident than ever I’m going to be able to make a story work. Back around the time of Esther Stories I remember days when I felt I could make a story out of anything. I was kidding myself, but sometimes kidding yourself tricks you into working harder.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself, myself, myself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
My old teacher and friend Andre Dubus would often say: “You got to walk around with it. Walk around with it. You’ll get it.” He meant, in a sense, that sometimes you got to get up and leave the story, walk around, live a little—and when you least expect it, there’s your ending.
Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Other Stories. (Credit: Pawel Kruk)
Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead?
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.
5. What are you reading right now?
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say?
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Student loan debt.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.
Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead. (Credit: Kim Newmoney)
Ten Questions for Catherine Chung
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and SanFranciscoChronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.
Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. (Credit: David Noles)
Ten Questions for Mona Awad
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you.
Mona Awad, author of Bunny.
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Namwali Serpell
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Namwali Serpell, whose novel The Old Drift is out today from Hogarth. Blending historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction, The Old Drift tells a sweeping tale of Zambia, a small African country, as it comes into being, following the trials and tribulations of its people, whose stories are told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. In the words of Chinelo Okparanta, it is a “dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishingly historical and futuristic feat.” Namwali Serpell teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “The Sack.” She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to indentify the best African writers under the age of forty. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
1. How long did it take you to write The Old Drift?
I’ve been writing it off and on since the year 2000. I worked on it in between getting my PhD; publishing my first work of literary criticism, a dozen stories, and a few essays and reviews; getting tenure; and writing a novel that went in a drawer. I concentrated exclusively on The Old Drift after I sold it based on a partial manuscript—about a third—in 2015. I finished in 2017.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Fact-checking. The novel is rife with speculative fiction—fairy tale, magical realism, science fiction—but I was anxious to get historical, scientific, and cultural details right, that the notes didn’t sound off. Because the novel is so sprawling, it was hard to verify everything. I’m grateful for my informants—family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and the blessed internet.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m too nomadic, or “movious” as we say in Zambia, to limit myself to a particular desk in a specific nook with a certain slant of light. I write from late morning to late afternoon, when most people are hungry or sleepy—I seem to find both states conducive to “flow,” as they call it. My writing frequency varies by genre. I can write nonfiction or scholarly prose for about five hours at a time, and as many days in a row as needed. I can write fiction for about three hours at a time, and it improves distinctly if I write every other day. My best work, regardless of genre, often happens in one big burst—an eight hour stretch, say, like a fugue. But I can’t prime my schedule or prepare myself for those eruptions. They come as they wish. I am left spent and grateful.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The chasm between writing the book and marketing the book. It’s a rift in one’s psychology but also in logistics (who does what), and most shockingly, in value. There is simply no calculable relation between these two value systems: the literary and the financial, the good and the goods.
5. What are you reading right now?
Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow. I’m excited because it draws on a longstanding preoccupation of mine: the recurrent fantasy of racial transformation in sci-fi.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
María Luisa Bombal.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Blurbs. They tap into our most craven, gratuitous, and back-patting tendencies. End them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The problem of money, of course.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Being able to recognize how things will best coincide—opportunities, ideas, words, people—and not forcing them, but setting up the space for them to do so. It goes by various names: “finger on the pulse,” “a sense of the zeitgest,” “savvy.” I think of it as a feel for kismet.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Amitav Ghosh once visited a graduate course I was taking. And he said of a writer (who shall remain nameless): “If everything is a jewel, nothing shines.”
Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift. (Credit: Peg Skorpinski)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
First Fiction 2017
For our seventeenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2017 issue of the magazine for interviews between Zinzi Clemmons and Danzy Senna, Hala Alyan and Mira Jacob, Jess Arndt and Maggie Nelson, Lisa Ko and Emily Raboteau, and Diksha Basu and Gary Shteyngart. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
What We Lose (Viking, July) by Zinzi Clemmons
Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May) by Hala Alyan
Large Animals (Catapult, May) by Jess Arndt
The Leavers (Algonquin Books, May) by Lisa Ko
The Windfall(Crown, June) by Diksha Basu
What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons
My parents’ bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was. The big mahogany dresser sits opposite the bed, the doily still in place on the vanity. My mother’s little ring holders and perfume bottles still stand there. On top of all these old feminine relics, my father has set up his home office. His old IBM laptop sits atop the doily, a tangle of cords choking my mother’s silver makeup tray. His books are scattered around the tables, his clothes draped carelessly over the antique wing chair that my mother found on a trip to Quebec.
In the kitchen, my father switches on a small flat-screen TV that he’s installed on the wall opposite the stove. My mother never allowed TV in the kitchen, to encourage bonding during family dinners and focus during homework time. As a matter of fact, we never had more than one television while I was growing up—an old wood-paneled set that lived in the cold basement, carefully hidden from me and visitors in the main living areas of the house.
We order Chinese from the place around the corner, the same order that we’ve made for years: sesame chicken, vegetable fried rice, shrimp lo mein. As soon as they hear my father’s voice on the line, they put in the order; he doesn’t even have to ask for it. When he picks the order up, they ask after me. When my mother died, they started giving us extra sodas with our order, and he returns with two cans of pineapple soda, my favorite.
My father tells me that he’s been organizing at work, now that he’s the only black faculty member in the upper ranks of the administration.
I notice that he has started cutting his hair differently. It is shorter on the sides and disappearing in patches around the crown of his skull. He pulls himself up in his chair with noticeable effort. He had barely aged in the past twenty years, and suddenly, in the past year, he has inched closer to looking like his father, a stooped, lean, yellow-skinned man I’ve only seen in pictures.
“How have you been, Dad?” I say as we sit at the table.
The thought of losing my father lurks constantly in my mind now, shadowy, inexpressible, but bursting to the surface when, like now, I perceive the limits of his body. Something catches in my throat and I clench my jaw.
My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.
“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.
He asks about Peter.
“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.
“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”
He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork. “Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.
I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.
“Are you all right?”
All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.
From What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, published in July by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2017 by Zinzi Clemmons.
(Photo: Nina Subin)Salt Houses
by Hala Alyan
On the street, she fumbles for a cigarette from her purse and smokes as she walks into the evening. She feels a sudden urge, now that she is outside the apartment, to clear her head. This is her favorite thing about the city—the ability it gives you to walk, to literally put space between your body and distress. In Kuwait, nobody walks anywhere.
Mimi lives in a quiet part of the city, mostly residential, with small, pretty apartments, each window like a glistening eye. The streetlamps are made of wrought iron, designs flanking either side of the bulbs. There is a minimalist sense of wealth in the neighborhood, children dressed simply, the women always adjusting scarves around their necks, their hair cut into perfectly symmetrical lines. Souad walks by the manicured lawns of a grammar school, empty and discarded for the summer. Next to it a gray-steepled church. She tries to imagine that, elsewhere, there is smoke and destroyed palaces and men carrying guns. It seems impossible.
The night is cool, and Souad wraps her cardigan tightly around her, crosses her arms. A shiver runs through her. She is nervous to see him, a familiar thrill that he always elicits in her. Even before last night.
Le Chat Rouge is a fifteen-minute walk from Mimi’s apartment, but within several blocks the streets begin to change, brownstones and Gothic-style latticework replaced with grungier alleyways, young Algerian men with long hair sitting on steps and drinking beer from cans. One eyes her and calls out, caressingly, something in French. She can make out the words for sweet and return. Bars line the streets with their neon signs and she walks directly across the Quartier Latin courtyard, her shoes clicking on the cobblestones.
“My mother’s going to call tomorrow,” she told Elie yesterday. She wasn’t sure why she said it, but it felt necessary. “They’re taking me to Amman.” In the near dark, Elie’s face was peculiarly lit, the sign making his skin look alien.
“You could stay here,” Elie said. He smiled mockingly. “You could get married.”
Souad had blinked, her lips still wet from the kiss. “Married?” She wasn’t being coy—she truthfully had no idea what Elie meant. Married to whom? For a long, awful moment, she thought Elie was suggesting she marry one of the other Lebanese men, that he was fobbing her off on a friend in pity.
“Yes.” Elie cocked his head, as though gauging the authenticity of her confusion. He smiled again, kinder this time. He closed his fingers around hers so that she was making a fist and he a larger one atop it. They both watched their hands silently for a few seconds, an awkward pose, more confrontational than romantic, as though he were preventing her from delivering a blow. It occurred to her that he was having a difficult time speaking. She felt her palm itch but didn’t move. Elie cleared his throat, and when he spoke, she had to lean in to hear him.
“You could marry me.”
Now, even in re-creating that moment, Souad feels the swoop in her stomach, her mouth drying. It is a thing she wants in the darkest, most furtive way, not realizing how badly until it was said aloud. Eighteen years old, a voice within her spoke, eighteen. Too young, too young. And her parents, her waiting life.
But the greater, arrogant part of Souad’s self growled as if woken. Her steps clacked with her want of it. The self swelled triumphantly—Shame, shame, she admonishes herself, thinking of the war, the invasion, the troops and fire, but she is delighted nonetheless.
From Salt Houses by Hala Alyan. Copyright © 2017 by Hala Alyan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
(Photo: Beowulf Sheehan)Large Animals
by Jess Arndt
In my sleep I was plagued by large animals—teams of grizzlies, timber wolves, gorillas even came in and out of the mist. Once the now extinct northern white rhino also stopped by. But none of them came as often or with such a ferocious sexual charge as what I, mangling Latin and English as usual, called the Walri. Lying there, I faced them as you would the inevitable. They were massive, tube-shaped, sometimes the feeling was only flesh and I couldn’t see the top of the cylinder that masqueraded as a head or tusks or eyes. Nonetheless I knew I was in their presence intuitively. There was no mistaking their skin; their smell was unmistakable too, as was their awful weight.
During these nights (the days seemed to disappear before they even started) I was living two miles from a military testing site. In the early morning and throughout the day the soft, dense sound of bombs filled the valley. It was comforting somehow. Otherwise I was entirely alone.
This seemed a precondition for the Walri—that I should be theirs and theirs only. on the rare occasion that I had an overnight visitor to my desert bungalow the Walri were never around. Then the bears would return in force, maybe even a large local animal like a mountain lion or goat, but no form’s density came close to walrusness. So I became wary and stopped inviting anyone out to visit at all.
The days, unmemorable, had a kind of habitual slide. I would wake up with the sun and begin cleaning the house. No matter how tightly I’d kept the doors shut the day before, dust and sand and even large pieces of mineral rock seemed to shove their way inside. I swept these into piles. Then the dishes that I barely remembered dirtying—some mornings it was as if the whole artillery of pots and pans had been used in the night by someone else—then the trash (again always full), then some coffee. Eight o’clock.
This work done, I sat in various chairs in the house following the bright but pale blades of light. I was drying out. oh, an LA friend said somewhat knowingly, from the booze? But I had alcohol with me, plenty of it. It wasn’t that. I moved as if preprogrammed. only later did I realize that my sleep was so soggy that it took strong desert sun to unshrivel me and since it was the middle of winter and the beams were perforce slanted, I’d take all of it I could find.
For lunch I got in my car and drove into town, to the empty parking lot of Las Palmas. There were many Mexican joints along the highway that also functioned as Main Street. I hadn’t bothered to try them out. Las Palmas, with its vacant booths, dusty cacti, and combination platter lunch special for $11.99 including $4 house margarita, was fine.
A waitress named Tamara worked there. She seemed like the only one. She wasn’t my type—so tall she bent over herself and a bona fide chain-smoker. Sometimes to order you’d have to exit your booth and find her puffing outside. A friend who had borrowed the bungalow before I did told me about Tamara and so if I had a crush at all it was an inherited one that even came with inherited guilt—from having taken her on once he could no longer visit her. Regardless, we barely spoke.
I had things I was supposed to be doing, more work than I could accomplish even if I
duct-taped my fists to my laptop, but none of it seemed relevant to my current state. In the afternoons I drove back home slowly, always stopping for six-packs of beer at the Circle K. I enjoyed the task. The beer evaporated once I stuck it in my fridge—it was there and then, it was gone.
My sleeping area was simple: a bed on a plywood platform. A wooden dresser. Built-in closets and a cement floor. At first I would wake up in the night from the sheer flattening silence of the desert. It was impossible that the world still existed elsewhere. After that initial jolt, relief.
Don’t you miss it? my same friend said during our weekly telephone chats. But I couldn’t explain the euphoria of walking up and down the chilly aisles of Stater Bros. In week-old sweatpants if I wanted, uncounted by life. Would I buy refried or whole beans? This brand or that? It didn’t matter, no one cared.
It was in these conditions that the Walri arrived.
* * *
I’d slept as usual for the first few hours, heavily, in a kind of coma state. Then had woken, I thought to pee. But lying there with the gritty sheets braided around me, the violet light that was created from the fly zapper, the desert cold that was entering through the gaps and cracks in the fire’s absence—I felt a new form of suffocation.
It wasn’t supernatural. I’d also had that. The sense of someone’s vast weight sitting on the bed with you or patting your body with ghostly hands. This breathless feeling was larger, as if I was uniformly surrounded by mammoth flesh.
Dream parts snagged at me. Slapping sounds and hose-like alien respiration. I felt I was wrestling within inches of what must be—since I couldn’t breathe—the end of my life. Now the lens of my dream panned backward and I saw my opponent in his entirety.
He lay (if that’s what you could call it) on my bed, thick and wrinkled, the creases in his hide so deep I could stick my arms between them. His teeth were yellow and as long as my legs.
“I’m sexually dormant,” I said aloud to him. “But I want to put my balls in someone’s face.”
Then somehow light was peeling everything back for dawn.
From Large Animals. Used with permission of Catapult. Copyright 2017 by Jess Arndt.
(Photo: Johanna Breiding)The Leavers
by Lisa Ko
The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school. A navy blue hat sat low on her forehead, scarf around her neck like a big brown snake. “What are you waiting for, Kid? It’s cold out.”
He stood in the doorway of P.S. 33 as she zipped his coat so hard the collar pinched. “Did you get off work early?” It was four thirty, already dark, but she didn’t usually leave the nail salon until six.
They spoke, as always, in Fuzhounese. “Short shift. Michael said you had to stay late to get help on an assignment.” Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and he couldn’t tell if she bought it or not. Teachers didn’t call your mom when you got detention, only gave a form you had to return with a signature, which he forged. Michael, who never got detention, had left after eighth period, and Deming wanted to get back home with him, in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down.
Snow fell like clots of wet laundry. Deming and his mother walked up Jerome Avenue. In the back of a concrete courtyard three older boys were passing a blunt, coats unzipped, wearing neither backpacks nor hats, sweet smoke and slow laughter warming the thin February air. “I don’t want you to be like that,” she said. “I don’t want you to be like me. I didn’t even finish eighth grade.”
What a sweet idea, not finishing eighth grade. He could barely finish fifth. His teachers said it was an issue of focus, of not applying himself. Yet when he tripped Travis Bhopa in math class Deming had been as shocked as Travis was. “I’ll come to your school tomorrow,” his mother said, “talk to your teacher about that assignment.” He kept his arm against his mother’s, loved the scratchy sound of their jackets rubbing together. She wasn’t one of those TV moms, always hugging their kids or watching them with bemused smiles, but insisted on holding his hand when they crossed a busy street. Inside her gloves her hands were red and scraped, the skin angry and peeling, and every night before she went to sleep she rubbed a thick lotion onto her fingers and winced. Once he asked if it made them hurt less. She said only for a little while, and he wished there was a special lotion that could make new skin grow, a pair of superpower gloves.
Short and blocky, she wore loose jeans—never had he seen her in a dress—and her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound than when she slapped her knees and cackled at something silly. She laughed at things that weren’t meant to be funny, like TV dramas and the swollen orchestral soundtracks that accompanied them, or, better yet, at things Deming said, like when he nailed the way their neighbor Tommie always went, “Not bad-not bad-not bad” when they passed him in the stairwell, an automatic response to a “Hello-how-are-you” that hadn’t yet been issued. Or the time she’d asked, flipping through TV stations, “Dancing with the Stars isn’t on?” and he had excavated Michael’s old paper mobile of the solar system and waltzed with it through the living room as she clapped. It was almost as good as getting cheered on by his friends.
When he had lived in Minjiang with his grandfather, Deming’s mother had explored New York by herself. There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Who wants to go for a walk?” she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. “Sit down? We’ve been sitting all day!” Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn’t say no to her and they’d go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside—a family named Smith, five kids, father dead, mother addicted to bagels, he speculated the day they went to the Upper East Side. “To bagels?” she said. “What flavor bagel?” “Everything bagels,” he said, which made her giggle harder, until they were both bent over on Madison Avenue, laughing so hard no sounds were coming out, and his stomach hurt but he couldn’t stop laughing, old white people giving them stink eye for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt.
A bus lumbered past, spraying slush. The walk sign flashed on. “You know what I did today?” his mother said. “One lady, she had a callus the size of your nose on her heel. I had to scrape all that dead skin off. It took forever. And her tip was shit. You’ll never do that, if you’re careful.”
He dreaded this familiar refrain. His mother could curse, but the one time he’d let motherfucker bounce out in front of her, loving the way the syllables got meatbally in his mouth, she had slapped his arm and said he was better than that. Now he silently said the word to himself as he walked, one syllable per footstep.
“Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I’m going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger’s toe? That was not my plan.”
Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago, a cashier at the one around the corner had smirked at her lousy English. It was lousy, Deming agreed.
From The Leavers. Printed by permission of Algonquin Books. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Ko.
(Photo: Bartosz Potocki)page_5:
The Windfall
by Diksha Basu
The following week, on an unusually overcast September day, Mr. Jha pulled into the quiet lane of his new Gurgaon home. He had never been here by himself, he realized. Mrs. Jha was usually with him, and this summer Rupak had come with them a few times, and there were all the contractors and painters and builders buzzing around, working. He had never really appreciated the silence and the greenery before. Gurgaon felt still while the rest of Delhi throbbed.
The air was heavy with heat and the promise of rain. On the radio, a Bon Jovi song played. “It’s been raining since you left me,” the lyrics said. How funny, Mr. Jha thought. An Indian song would have to say, “It hasn’t rained since you left me.” Unless, of course, you were happy that they left you.
An electronic shoe-polishing machine in a large box was on the passenger seat of his Mercedes. He had strapped it in with the seat belt. It was beautiful. And it was expensive. It was not a planned purchase. This morning he had a breakfast meeting with two young men who were launching a website that would help you find handymen around Delhi, and they asked him to join their team as a consultant. He declined. He did not have time to take on any new work until they were done moving homes. And then they had to visit Rupak, so he was not going to have any free time until November or December. And then it would be the holiday season, so really it was best if he took the rest of the year off work.
The meeting was over breakfast at the luxurious Teresa’s Hotel in Connaught Place in central Delhi, and after filling himself up with mini croissants, fruit tarts, sliced cheeses, salami, coffee, and orange juice, Mr. Jha went for a stroll through the lobby and the other restaurants in the hotel. All the five-star hotels in the center of town were little oases of calm and cool. Mr. Jha was walking by the large windows that overlooked the swimming pool that was for guests only when he thought he would book a two-night stay here. He knew his wife loved the indulgence of nice hotels and he had recently read about what youngsters were calling a staycation—a vacation where you don’t leave the city or the home you usually live in, but you give yourself a few days to take a holiday. Of course, since he didn’t work much anymore, most days, weeks, months were a staycation, but how wonderful it would be to check into a hotel and have a lazy few days. Having room service—or, like they were called at Teresa’s, butlers—was a different sort of pleasure than having servants bringing you food and cleaning your home. Butlers showed that you had made the progression from servants to expensive appliances to uniformed men who ran the expensive appliances.
From The Windfall, published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in June. Copyright © 2017 by Diksha Basu.
(Photo: Mikey McCleary)First Fiction 2016
For our sixteenth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2016 issue of the magazine for interviews between Yaa Gyasi and Angela Flournoy, Masande Ntshanga and Naomi Jackson, Rumaan Alam and Emma Straub, Maryse Meijer and Lindsay Hunter, and Imbolo Mbue and Christina Baker Kline. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.
Homegoing (Knopf, June) by Yaa Gyasi
The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio, June) by Masande Ntshanga
Rich and Pretty (Ecco, June) by Rumaan Alam
Heartbreaker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July) by Maryse Meijer
Behold the Dreamers (Random House, August) by Imbolo Mbue
The night Effia Otcher was born into the musky heat of Fanteland, a fire raged through the woods just outside her father’s compound. It moved quickly, tearing a path for days. It lived off the air; it slept in caves and hid in trees; it burned, up and through, unconcerned with what wreckage it left behind, until it reached an Asante village. There, it disappeared, becoming one with the night.
Effia’s father, Cobbe Otcher, left his first wife, Baaba, with the new baby so that he might survey the damage to his yams, that most precious crop known far and wide to sustain families. Cobbe had lost seven yams, and he felt each loss as a blow to his own family. He knew then that the memory of the fire that burned, then fled, would haunt him, his children, and his children’s children for as long as the line continued. When he came back into Baaba’s hut to find Effia, the child of the night’s fire, shrieking into the air, he looked at his wife and said, “We will never again speak of what happened today."
The villagers began to say that the baby was born of the fire, that this was the reason Baaba had no milk. Effia was nursed by Cobbe’s second wife, who had just given birth to a son three months before. Effia would not latch on, and when she did, her sharp gums would tear at the flesh around the woman’s nipples until she became afraid to feed the baby. Because of this, Effia grew thinner, skin on small bird- like bones, with a large black hole of a mouth that expelled a hungry crywhich could be heard throughout the village, even on the days Baaba did her best to smother it, covering the baby’s lips with the rough palm of her left hand.
“Love her,” Cobbe commanded, as though love were as simple an act as lifting food up from an iron plate and past one’s lips. At night, Baaba dreamed of leaving the baby in the dark forest so that the god Nyame could do with her as he pleased.
Effia grew older. The summer after her third birthday, Baaba had her first son. The boy’s name was Fiifi, and he was so fat that some- times, when Baaba wasn’t looking, Effia would roll him along the ground like a ball. The first day that Baaba let Effia hold him, she accidentally dropped him. The baby bounced on his buttocks, landed on his stomach, and looked up at everyone in the room, confused as to whether or not he should cry. He decided against it, but Baaba, who had been stirring banku, lifted her stirring stick and beat Effia across her bare back. Each time the stick lifted off the girl’s body, it would leave behind hot, sticky pieces of banku that burned into her flesh. By the time Baaba had finished, Effia was covered with sores, screaming and crying. From the floor, rolling this way and that on his belly, Fiifi looked at Effia with his saucer eyes but made no noise.
Cobbe came home to find his other wives attending to Effia’s wounds and understood immediately what had happened. He and Baaba fought well into the night. Effia could hear them through the thin walls of the hut where she lay on the floor, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. In her dream, Cobbe was a lion and Baaba was a tree. The lion plucked the tree from the ground where it stood and slammed it back down. The tree stretched its branches in protest, and the lion ripped them off, one by one. The tree, horizontal, began to cry red ants that traveled down the thin cracks between its bark. The ants pooled on the soft earth around the top of the tree trunk.
And so the cycle began. Baaba beat Effia. Cobbe beat Baaba. By the time Effia had reached age ten, she could recite a history of the scars on her body. The summer of 1764, when Baaba broke yams across her back. The spring of 1767, when Baaba bashed her left foot with a rock, breaking her big toe so that it now always pointed away from the other toes. For each scar on Effia’s body, there was a companion scar on Baaba’ s, but that didn’t stop mother from beating daughter, father from beating mother.
Matters were only made worse by Effia’s blossoming beauty. When she was twelve, her breasts arrived, two lumps that sprung from her chest, as soft as mango flesh. The men of the village knew that first blood would soon follow, and they waited for the chance to ask Baaba and Cobbe for her hand. The gifts started. One man tapped palm wine better than anyone else in the village, but another’s fishing nets were never empty. Cobbe’s family feasted off Effia’s burgeoning woman- hood. Their bellies, their hands, were never empty.
Excerpted from HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi. Copyright © 2016 by Yaa Gyasi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Reactive
By Masande Ntshanga
The way I got to know them, by the way, my two closest friends here, is that we met at one of the new HIV and drug-counseling sessions cropping up all over the city. We were in the basement parking lot of the free clinic in Wynberg. The seminar room upstairs had been locked up and taped shut, there’d been a mercury spill, and our group couldn’t meet in there on account of the vapors being toxic to human tissue. Instead, they arranged us in the basement parking lot, and in two weeks we got used to not being sent upstairs for meetings. I did, in any case, and that was enough for me in the beginning.
In those days, I attended the meetings alone. I’d catch a taxi from Obs over to Wynberg for an afternoon’s worth of counseling. By the end of my first month, when the seminar room had been swept once, and then twice, and then three times by a short man who wore a blue contamination meter over his chest, each time checking out clean, everyone decided they preferred it down below, and so that’s where we stayed.
Maybe we all want to be buried here, I said.
It had been the first time I’d spoken in group. Talking always took me a while, back then, but the remark succeeded in making a few of them laugh. It won me chuckles even from the old-timers, and later, I wrote down my first addiction story to share with the group. It was from a film I saw adapted from a book I wasn’t likely to read. Ruan and Cissie arrived on the following Wednesday.
I noticed them immediately. Something seemed to draw us in from our first meeting. In the parking lot, we eyeballed each other for a while before we spoke. During the coffee break, we stood by the serving table in front of a peeling Toyota bakkie, mumbling tentatively towards each other’s profiles. I learned that Cecelia was a teacher. She pulled week-long shifts at a daycare center just off Bridge Street in Mowbray, and she was there on account of the school’s accepting its first openly positive pupil. Ruan, who was leaning against the plastic table, gulping more than sipping at the coffee in his paper cup, said that he suffocated through his life by working on the top floor of his uncle’s computer firm. He was there to shop for a social issue they could use for their corporate responsibility strategy. He called it CRS, and Cissie and I had to ask him what he meant.
In the end, I guess I was impressed. I told them how I used to be a lab assistant at Peninsula Tech, and how in a way this was part of how I’d got to be sick with what I have.
When we sat back down again, we listened to the rest of the members assess each other’s nightmares. They passed them around with a familiar casualness. Mark knew about Ronelle’s school fees, for instance, and she knew about Linette’s hepatitis, and all of us knew that Linda had developed a spate of genital warts over September. She called them water warts, when she first told us, and, like most of her symptoms, she blamed them on the rain.
That day, when the discussion turned to drug abuse, as it always did during the last half-hour of our sessions, the three of us had nothing to add. I looked over at Ruan and caught him stashing a grin behind his fist, while on my other side, Cecelia blinked up at the ceiling. I didn’t need any more evidence for our kinship.
The meeting lasted the full two hours, and when it came to an end, I collected my proof of attendance and exchanged numbers with Ruan and Cecelia. I suppose we said our goodbyes at the entrance of the parking lot that day, and later, within that same week I think, we were huffing paint thinner together in my flat in Obs.
Excerpted from The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga. Copyright © 2016 by Masande Ntshanga. Excerpted by permission of Two Dollar Radio. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Rich and Pretty
By Rumaan Alam
Lauren’s office is freezing. You could keep butter on the desk. You could perform surgery. Every woman in the office—they’re all women—keeps a cashmere sweater on the back of her chair. They sit, hands outstretched over computer keyboards like a bum’s over a flaming garbage can. The usual office noises: typing, telephones, people using indoor voices, the double ding of an elevator going down. For some reason, the double ding of the elevator going down is louder than the single ding of the elevator going up. There’s a metaphor in there, waiting to be untangled. They make cookbooks, these women. There’s no food, just stacks of paper and editorial assistants in glasses. She’s worked here for four years. It’s fine.
Today is different because today there’s a guy, an actual dude, in the office with them, not a photographer or stylist popping by for a meeting, as does happen: He’s
a temp, because Kristen is having a baby and her doctor put her on bed rest. Lauren isn’t totally clear on what Kristen does, but now there’s a dude doing it. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans, and loafers, not sneakers, which implies a certain maturity. Lauren’s been trying to get him to notice her all day. She’s the second-prettiest woman in the office, so it isn’t hard. Hannah, the prettiest, has a vacant quality about her. She’s not stupid, exactly—in fact, she’s very competent—but she doesn’t have spark. She’s not interesting, just thin and blond, with heavy eyeglasses and a photograph of her French bulldog on her computer screen.
Lauren has it all planned out. She’ll walk past his desk a couple of times, which isn’t suspicious because his desk isn’t far from the kitchen, and the kitchen is where the coffee is, and by the third time, he’ll follow her in there, and she’ll make a wisecrack about the coffee, and he’ll say it’s not so bad, and they’ll talk, and exchange phone numbers, e-mail addresses, whatever, and then later they’ll leave the office at the same time, ride down together in the elevator and not talk because they both understand that the social contract dictates that sane people do not talk in elevators, and then he’ll let her go through the revolving door first, even though she’s pretty sure that etiquette has it that men precede women through revolving doors, and then they’ll both be standing on Broadway, and there will be traffic and that vague smell of charred, ethnic meat from the guy with the lunch cart on the corner, and he’ll suggest they get a drink, and she’ll say sure, and they’ll go to the Irish pub on Fifty-Fifth Street, because there’s nowhere else to go, and after two drinks they’ll be starving, and he’ll suggest they get dinner, but there’s nowhere to eat in this part of town, so they’ll take the train to Union Square and realize there’s nowhere to eat there either, and they’ll walk down into the East Village and find something, maybe ramen, or that Moroccan-y place that she always forgets she likes, and they’ll eat, and they’ll start touching each other, casually but deliberately, carefully, and the check will come and she’ll say let’s split it, and he’ll say no let me, even though he’s a temp and can’t make that much money, right? Then they’ll be drunk, so taking a cab seems wise and they’ll make out in the backseat, but just a little bit, and kind of laugh about it, too: stop to check their phones, or admire the view, or so he can explain that he lives with a roommate or a dog, or so she can tell him some stupid story about work that won’t mean anything to him anyway because it’s only his first day and he doesn’t know anyone’s name, let alone their personality quirks and the complexities of the office’s political and social ecosystem.
Then he’ll pay the driver, because they’ll go to his place—she doesn’t want to bring the temp back to her place—and it’ll be nice, or fine, or ugly, and he’ll open beers because all he has are beers, and she’ll pretend to drink hers even though she’s had enough, and he’ll excuse himself for a minute to go to the bathroom, but really it’s to brush his teeth, piss, maybe rub some wet toilet paper around his ass and under his balls. This is something Gabe had told her, years ago, that men do this, or at least, that he did. Unerotic, but somehow touching. Then the temp will come sit next to her on the couch, please let it be a couch and not a futon, and he’ll play with her hair a little before he kisses her, his mouth minty, hers beery. He’ll be out of his shirt, then, and he’s hard and hairy, but also a little soft at the belly, which she likes. She once slept with this guy Sean, whose torso, hairless and lean, freaked her out. It was like having sex with a female mannequin. The temp will push or pull her into his bedroom, just the right balance of aggression and respect, and the room will be fine, or ugly, and the bedsheets will be navy, as men’s bedsheets always are, and there will be venetian blinds, and lots of books on the nightstand because he’s temping at a publishing company so he must love to read. She’ll tug her shirt over her head, and he’ll pull at her bra, and they’ll be naked, and he’ll fumble around for a condom, and his dick will be long but not, crucially, thick, and it will be good, and then it will be over. They’ll laugh about how this whole thing is against the company’s sexual harassment policy. She’ll try to cover herself with the sheet, and he’ll do the same, suddenly embarrassed by his smaller, slightly sticky dick. When he’s out of the room, to get a beer, to piss, whatever, she’ll get dressed. He’ll call her a car service, because there are no yellow cabs wherever he lives. They’ll both spend the part of the night right before they fall asleep trying to figure out how to act around each other in the office tomorrow.
Or maybe not that. Maybe she’ll find a way to go up to him and say, what, exactly, Hey, do you like parties? Do you want to goto a party . . . tonight? No, the jeans and tie are fine. It’s not fancy. Aparty. A good party. Good open bar, for sure. Probably canapés, what are canapés exactly, whatever they are, there will probably be some. Last party, there were these balls of cornbread and shrimp, like deep fried, holy shit they were great. That was last year, I think. Anyway, there might be celebrities there. There will definitely be celebrities there. I once saw Bill Clinton at one of these parties. He’s skinnier than you’d think. Anyway, think about it, it’ll be a time, and by the way, I’m Lauren, I’m an associate editor here and you are? She can picturehis conversation, the words coming to her so easily, as they do in fantasy but never in reality. They call it meeting cute, in movies, but it only happens in movies.
From Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam. Copyright© 2016 by Rumaan Alam. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Heartbreaker
By Maryse Meijer
Daddy comes over on Thursdays. My husband and son are out watching movies where people blow each other up. They have burgers afterward and buf- falo wings and milkshakes and they talk about TV shows and girls and the latest bloody video game. At least that’s what I imagine they do. No way do they imagine what I am doing, sitting here at the kitchen table doing my math homework as Daddy microwaves the mac and cheese he brought over. We have three hours together and in these three hours I am twelve years old and my daddy is the most wonderful man in the world.
On craigslist I post the photo from my work website, the one with my hair scraped back in a ponytail, expos- ing my shiny forehead, my thin lips, my arms bursting from the sleeves of my blue blouse. Daughter seeks Father is all I write as a caption. In response I receive an avalanche of cell-phone numbers, chat invitations, and penis pics lifted from porn sites.
I delete all the emails except for Richard’s: Sweetheart, please call home. I sit for a moment hunched in my cubicle, sweating, before lifting the receiver and dialing his number.
Daddy? I whisper, hand up to cover my mouth so no one walking by can see it moving.
He doesn’t skip a beat. Sweetheart! he says. Did you see the photo? I ask.
Of course, he says.
I’m not better in person, I warn. You’re perfect, he assures me.
I’m married, I tell him. I have a kid. No problem, he insists.
I chew the inside of my cheek. There’s not going to be any sex, I say.
Absolutely not! he agrees.
I wait for him to say something creepy or disgusting, but he doesn’t. We make arrangements to meet at McDonald’s for dinner on Thursday.
Don’t kill me, I say, and he laughs.
Oh sweetheart, he says. What on earth?
I’m early. I don’t know what Daddy looks like and every time the door swings open my head jerks like a ball on a string. I convince myself I’m going to be stood up and that it will be better anyway if I am. But at seven on the dot he enters and he looks straight at me and waves.
Our usual, sweetheart? he says, loud enough for other people to hear, and I nod. He brings a tray of chicken nugget combos to my table. He kisses my cheek. The food steams in our hands as we look at each other; he seems about twenty, twenty-two, with chinos frayed at the bottoms and red hair and glasses and biceps as skinny as my wrist. Maybe someday he will be good- looking.
Extra barbecue sauce, just the way you like, he says, gesturing to my nuggets. I smile and take a bite. He asks me about school and I ask him about work and he is as interested in how I’m doing in gym class as I am in the stocks he’s trading at the office; we slip into our new roles as easily as knives into butter.
I almost forgot, he says. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a CD with a Christmas bow stuck on it. Just a little something, he adds, and hands it to me. I unstick the bow and turn the CD over in my hands: Britney Spears. I bounce, once, and my left butt cheek, which doesn’t quite fit on the plastic chair, bangs on the edge of the seat.
Oh Daddy, I say, touched because I k now he went into a store and asked what would be the right thing to get for his little girl, and he paid for it with his own money and put it in his pocket and found the gaudy bow to go with it and then brought it all the way here, to me, because he k new he would like me and already wanted to give me something, and this makes me want to give everything I have to him in return.
Apart from Thursday nights—and it’s always Thurs- days, always nights—we don’t communicate, except by email. Sometimes he’ll send me a note just to say, Have a great day!! or he’ll tell me what plans he has for dinner: Working late need a treat pizza sound good??? or he’ll hint at imagined happenings in my little-girl life: Don’t forget dentist today xoxoxoxo!! and Good luck on the history quiz I know you’ll do awesome!!!! I write back in equally breathless terms to report the results of the history quiz or the number of cavities rotting my teeth or to squeal over the impending pizza feast. These exchanges give me a high so intense my chest muscles spasm and when my boss calls and says to bring her such-and-such adocument I hit print and out comes an email from Daddy, not the work document, and I giggle into my hand and hit print again.
He always arrives exactly fifteen minutes after my hus- band and son leave. I sit on the couch with the televi- sion on while he fumbles with the keys and the empty banged-up briefcase he always brings. Sweetheart! he says when he enters, and I yelp Daddy! and if I was maybe ten or twenty or, okay, thirty pounds lighter, I might run toward him, but as it is I wait on the couch for him to come over and k iss my hair. I’ll pour him a soda on the rocks and he’ll pour me some milk and we touch glasses and smile. If my husband calls I stand by the back door with my head down and say Uh-huh, yes, fine, all right, see you soon, no, nothing for me, thanks, I’m enjoying the leftovers, have fun, love you.
Excerpted from Heartbreaker by Maryse Meijer. Copyright © Maryse Meijer, 2016. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Behold the Dreamers
By Imbolo Mbue
He’d never been asked to wear a suit to a job interview. Never been told to bring along a copy of his résumé. He hadn’t even owned a résumé until the previous week when he’d gone to the library on Thirty-fourth and Madison and a volunteer career counselor had written one for him, detailed his work history to suggest he was a man of grand accomplishments: farmer responsible for tilling land and growing healthy crops; street cleaner responsible for making sure the town of Limbe looked beautiful and pristine; dishwasher in Manhattan restaurant, in charge of ensuring patrons ate from clean and germ-free plates; livery cabdriver in the Bronx, responsible for taking passengers safely from place to place.
He’d never had to worry about whether his experience would be appropriate, whether his English would be perfect, whether he would succeed in coming across as intelligent enough. But today, dressed in the green double-breasted pinstripe suit he’d worn the day he entered America, his ability to impress a man he’d never met was all he could think about. Try as he might, he could do nothing but think about the questions he might be asked, the answers he would need to give, the way he would have to walk and talk and sit, the times he would need to speak or listen and nod, the things he would have to say or not say, the response he would need to give if asked about his legal status in the country. His throat went dry. His palms moistened. Unable to reach for his handkerchief in the packed downtown subway, he wiped both palms on his pants.
“Good morning, please,” he said to the security guard in the lobby when he arrived at Lehman Brothers. “My name is Jende Jonga. I am here for Mr. Edwards. Mr. Clark Edwards.”
The guard, goateed and freckled, asked for his ID, which he quickly pulled out of his brown bifold wallet. The man took it, examined it front and back, looked up at his face, looked down at his suit, smiled, and asked if he was trying to become a stockbroker or something.
Jende shook his head. “No,” he replied without smiling back. “A chauffeur.”
“Right on,” the guard said as he handed him a visitor pass. “Good luck with that.”
This time Jende smiled. “Thank you, my brother,” he said. “I really need all that good luck today.”
Alone in the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, he inspected his fingernails (no dirt, thankfully). He adjusted his clip-on tie using the security mirror above his head; reexamined his teeth and found no visible remnants of the fried ripe plantains and beans he’d eaten for breakfast. He cleared his throat and wiped off whatever saliva had crusted on the sides of his lips. When the doors opened he straightened his shoulders and introduced himself to the receptionist, who, after responding with a nod and a display of extraordinarily white teeth, made a phone call and asked him to follow her. They walked through an open space where young men in blue shirts sat in cubicles with multiple screens, down a corridor, past another open space of cluttered cubicles and into a sunny office with a four-paneled glass window running from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the thousand autumn-drenched trees and proud towers of Manhattan standing outside. For a second his mouth fell open, at the view outside—the likes of which he’d never seen—and the exquisiteness inside. There was a lounging section (black leather sofa, two black leather chairs, glass coffee table) to his right, an executive desk (oval, cherry, black leather reclining chair for the executive, two green leather armchairs for visitors) in the center, and a wall unit (cherry, glass doors, white folders in neat rows) to his left, in front of which Clark Edwards, in a dark suit, was standing and feeding sheets of paper into a pullout shredder.
“Please, sir, good morning,” Jende said, turning toward him and half-bowing.
“Have a seat,” Clark said without lifting his eyes from the shredder.
Jende hurried to the armchair on the left. He pulled a résumé from his folder and placed it in front of Clark’s seat, careful not to disturb the layers of white papers and Wall Street Journals strewn across the desk in a jumble. One of the Journal pages, peeking from beneath sheets of numbers and graphs, had the headline: “Whites’ Great Hope? Barack Obama and the Dream of a Color-blind America.” Jende leaned forward to read the story, fascinated as he was by the young ambitious senator, but immediately sat upright when he remembered where he was, why he was there, what was about to happen.
“Do you have any outstanding tickets you need to resolve?” Clark asked as he sat down.
“No, sir,” Jende replied.
“And you haven’t been in any serious accidents, right?”
“No, Mr. Edwards.”
Clark picked up the résumé from his desk, wrinkled and moist like the man whose history it held. His eyes remained on it for several seconds while Jende’s darted back and forth, from the Central Park treetops far beyond the window to the office walls lined with abstract paintings and portraits of white men wearing bow ties. He could feel beads of sweat rising out of his forehead.
“Well, Jende,” Clark said, putting the résumé down and leaning back in his chair. “Tell me about yourself.”
Excerpted from Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Copyright © 2016 by Imbolo Mbue. Reprinted with permission of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Fiction 2016: Nine More Notable Debuts
As part of our sixteenth annual First Fiction roundup, in which five debut authors—Yaa Gyasi, Masande Ntshanga, Rumaan Alam, Maryse Meijer, and Imbolo Mbue—discuss their first books, we picked nine more notable debuts that fans of fiction should consider reading this summer.
Remarkable (BOA Editions, May) by Dinah Cox
Set primarily in Oklahoma, the remarkable (that’s right, remarkable) stories in Cox’s award-winning collection spotlight characters whose wit, resilience, and pathos are as vast as the Great Plains landscape they inhabit.
Anatomy of a Soldier (Knopf, May) by Harry Parker
A former officer in the British Army who lost his legs in Afghanistan in 2009, Parker delivers a riveting, provocative novel that captures his wartime experience in an unconventional way. Forty-five inanimate objects—including a helmet, boots, and weapons—act as narrators, together offering the reader a powerful new perspective on war.
Goodnight, Beautiful Women (Grove, June) by Anna Noyes
With language both sensuous and precise, these interconnected stories immerse us in the lives of women and girls in coastal Maine as they navigate familial intimacy, sexual awakening, and love’s indiscretions.
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers(Graywolf, June) by Max Porter
In the wake of his wife’s sudden death, a man is visited by Crow, a “sentimental bird” that settles into the man’s life and the lives of his children in an attempt to heal the wounded family. A nuanced meditation that not only breaks open the boundaries of what constitutes a novel, but also demonstrates through its fragmentary form the unique challenge of writing about grief.
A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Viking, June) by Bob Proehl
Valerie and her son embark on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles to reunite the nine-year-old with his estranged father, attending comic-book conventions along the way. Proehl weaves the comic-con worlds of monsters and superheroes into a complex family saga, a tribute to a mother’s love and the way we tell stories that shape our lives.
Lily and the Octopus (Simon & Schuster, June)
by Steven Rowley
Rowley’s novel centers on narrator Ted Flask and his aging companion—a dachshund named Lily—but readers who mistake this as a simple “boy and his dog” story are in for a profound and pleasant surprise. This powerful debut is a touching exploration of friendship and grief.
Pond (Riverhead Books, July)
by Claire-Louise Bennett
In this compelling, innovative debut, the interior reality of an unnamed narrator—a solitary young woman living on the outskirts of a small coastal village—is revealed through the details of everyday life, some rendered in long stretches of narrative and others in poetic fragments. Bennett’s unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut.
Champion of the World (Putnam, July) by Chad Dundas
Gangsters, bootlegging, and fixed competitions converge in the tumultuous world of 1920s American wrestling, which disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean and his wife, Moira, must navigate in order to create the life they want. With crisp, muscular prose, this 470-page historical novel illuminates a time of rapid change in America.
Problems (Emily Books, July) by Jade Sharma
Raw, unrepentant, and biting with dark humor, Problems turns the addiction-redemption narrative inside out, as Sharma follows heroin hobbyist Maya through her increasingly chaotic life after the end of both her marriage and an affair.
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Elisa Gabbert
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elisa Gabbert, whose essay collection The Word Pretty is just out from Black Ocean. Part of the press’s new Undercurrents series of literary nonfiction, the book combines personal essay, criticism, meditation, and craft to offer lyric and often humorous observations on a wide range of topics related to writing, reading, and life—from emojis and aphorisms to front matter, tangents, and Twitter. Gabbert is the author of the poetry collections The French Exit and L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems; and a previous collection of essays, The Self Unstable. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, A Public Space, the Paris Review, Guernica, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications, and she writes an advice column for writers, The Blunt Instrument, at Electric Literature. She lives in Denver.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I just turned in a manuscript, another collection of essays, and the way I wrote that was very specific: For between one and three months, depending on my time constraints, I’d surround myself with, or submerse myself in, material on a topic—for example nuclear disasters, or “hysteria,” or memory—and read and watch films and think and take tons of notes. Then after a while the essay would start to take shape in my mind. I’d outline a structure, and then block off time to write it. As this process got systematized, I became more efficient; for the last essay I finished, I wrote most of it, about 5,000 words, in a single day. It was pretty much my ideal writing day: I got up relatively early on a Saturday morning and wrote until dark. Then I poured a drink and read over what I’d written. Of course I wouldn’t be able to do that if I didn’t give myself plenty of processing time. I can write 5,000 good words in a day, but I can only do that maybe once a month. I did most of the work for this book, the note-taking and the actual writing, sitting at the end of our dining room table. I try not to write at the same desk where I do my day job.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Yes. With prose, all I need is time to think and I can generate it pretty easily; a lot of my thoughts are already in prose. Poetry is harder. I feel like I have less material, and I can’t waste it, so it’s this delicate, concentrated operation not to screw it up. It feels like there’s some required resource I deplete. And I have to change my process entirely every three or four years if I’m going to write poems at all. Basically I come up with a form and then find a way to “translate” my thoughts into the form. It wasn’t always like that, but that’s the way it is now. I used to think in lines.
3. How long did it take you to write The Word Pretty?
I hadn’t set out to write a book, per se; I was just writing little essays until eventually they started to feel like a collection. But I think I wrote all of them between 2015 and 2017.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I hope this doesn’t sound like faux humility, but I am surprised by the number of people who have bought it and read it already. I thought this was one for, like, eight to ten of my super-fans. We didn’t have a lot of time or money (read: any money) to promote it. What doesn’t surprise me is everyone commenting on how pretty it is. Black Ocean makes beautiful books.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
One thing? I’d like to change a lot, but I wish both were less beholden to trends and the winner-take-all tendencies of hype and attention.
6. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely cover to cover—I’d only read parts of it before—which got me thinking about the indirect, out-of-sequence nature of influence. My second book, The Self Unstable, looks the way it does (i.e. little chunks of essayistic, aphoristic, sometimes personal prose) in part because I’d just read a few collections of prose poetry I really liked. One was a chapbook by my friend Sam Starkweather, who was always talking about Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. This was years ago, before Claudia Rankine was a household name. I finally read the whole book and thought, “Oh! This was an influence on me!” Next I am planning to reread The Bell Jar, which I last read in high school, in preparation to write about the new Sylvia Plath story that is being published in January. I have an early copy of the story as a PDF, but I haven’t even opened the file yet. I’m terrified of it.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I didn’t invent Elizabeth Bowen but I just read her for the first time this year and she blew my mind. I’m always telling people to read this hilarious novella about Po Biz called Lucinella by Lore Segal, and Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet I love who doesn’t have a book yet. Also, some people will find this gauche, but my husband, John Cotter, writes beautiful essays that don’t get enough attention.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not being independently wealthy, I guess? I have a job, so I can only work on writing stuff at night and on the weekends.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It would be nice to win some kind of major award—but that would really go against my brand, which is “I don’t win awards.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The best writing advice is always “read stuff,” but you’ve heard that before, so here’s something more novel: My thesis advisor, a wonderful man named John Skoyles, once said in a workshop—I think he was repeating something he’d heard from another poet—that if a poem has the word “chocolate” in it, it should also have the word “disconsolate.” I took this advice literally at least once, but it also works as a metaphor: that is to say, a piece of writing should have internal resonances (which could occur at the level of the word or the phrase or the idea or even the implication) that work semantically like slant rhymes, parts that call back softly to other parts, that make a chime in your mind.
Elisa Gabbert, author of The Word Pretty. (Credit: Adalena Kavanagh)
Ten Questions for Guy Gunaratne
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Guy Gunaratne, whose debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, is out today from MCD x FSG Originals. Inspired by the real-life murder of a British soldier at the hands of religious fanatics, Gunaratne’s novel explores class, racism, immigration, and the chaotic fringes of modern-day London. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and Gordon Burn Prize, In Our Mad and Furious City tells a story, Marlon James says, “so of this moment that you don’t even realize you’ve waited your whole life for it.” Gunaratne was born in London and has worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker covering human rights stories around the world. He divides his time between London and Malmö, Sweden.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study, in Malmö. A large wooden desk, surrounded by books set where I left them. I write as much as I can, when I can. The most focused period tends to be early mornings, between 5 AM and 6 AM to 9 AM, and then in dribs and drabs throughout the day.
2. How long did it take you to write In Our Mad and Furious City?
The novel took about four years to write the initial manuscript and then another year with my editor. As someone who enjoys the solitary commitment of writing, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of collaborating on it. I’ve found the process to be rewarding and instructive.
3. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Patience, probably. And space. Once when working on In Our Mad and Furious City, my editor and I were working on a specific part of one character’s voice. She asked me to go away and think about a few specific things. She gave a list. “Just think,” she said. She gave me the time to simmer, which I think is important when making any significant change.
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I try, sometimes with difficulty, not to be cynical about the relationship between art and industry. My hopefulness comes from knowing that there are usually enough dedicated people in any industry who are committed to doing good work. My surprise comes from finding out that I’d actually underestimated the amount of good people I’d meet during the process.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I think about this more as a reader than as a writer. I think we can all agree that homogeneity in any industry is unbearably boring. I’m interested in reading anything surprising, challenging, and provocative, in the best sense of the word. But I do wonder, at least with my experience thus far, how anything truly new, different, or challenging can ever come out of an industry that looks and acts so conservatively. There is still vitality here, and a desire to experiment with what gets published. The challenge is in encouraging those voices to keep on.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m currently reading a nonfiction book called Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger, which is about the Kurds of Northern Syria. And I’ve finally got around to Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
More people should be reading Machado de Assis and Nawal El Saadawi. But I think, more generally, people should be reading translated fiction. One of the beautiful things about the novel is its capacity to offer the reader a way to transgress beyond the parochial or familiar. It opens new territory to explore. At times it can even help confront learned biases that you wouldn’t have known were there. Many of my most surprising and enriching experiences have come from reading translated fiction.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Inevitably, there was always going to be a degree of friction because of the time I now commit to the public side of all this—the events, publicity, the travel. I think I underestimated how much all that would impact the other side, the writing side. Not to say I don’t like the public facing part. Engaging with readers, for example, I think is hugely rewarding. I find it a privilege, honestly. But I do find myself missing home quite a bit. I find that I need to have an extended period writing in once place in order to gather momentum. Sadly, I’ve been flitting back and forth, which doesn’t help.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I don’t have any external goals with my writing, not really. Right now I just want to write, publish, and keep writing. If I’m still writing novels in my sixties, it would mean that I would have attained something I had once thought impossible. Namely, a writer’s life.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I can’t remember who spoke about this, but there was something I heard early on which I get the sense has become more and more apparent as I continue to write. It’s simple really, it’s just that there is something about your own subconscious that is far more perceptive than whatever your conscious mind can conjure up. Being attentive to allowing that stuff to come through, to trust in allowing a degree of exploration as you write. This has become very important to me, and useful to know, too, any time I sit and stare at a blank page. You’ve got to get out of your own way.
Guy Gunaratne, author of In Our Mad and Furious City. (Credit: Jai Stokes)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Sherwin Bitsui
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sherwin Bitsui, whose new book of poetry, Dissolve, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Bitsui was raised in White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, and Dissolve is imbued with Navajo history and tradition. The book is a long poem, an inventive and sweeping work that blurs the lines between past and present, urban and rural, landscape and waste, crisis and continuity, and leads readers on a dissonant and dreamlike journey through the American Southwest. Bitsui is the author of two previous poetry collections, including Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003) and Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), which won the 2010 American Book Award in poetry. He lives in Arizona, where since 2013 he has served on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write best when I return from visiting my family on the reservation. The journey home feeds my creative process. I move between language, history, and worldviews—it’s always place between that gives me the most insight into my creative process.
2. How long did it take you to write Dissolve?
Dissolve took about seven years to complete. Most of those seven years I spent revising the poem. It was a challenge to harmonize all its layers and dimensions. I’m excited for people to read and experience this work.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
The care and attention Copper Canyon Press gave to my creative process. They’ve been wonderful—and it’s not so much a surprise. I’m always grateful.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
People should know more about the contributions Indigenous poets and writers have given to world poetry. There’s so much work out there, but many voices are seemingly still invisible to the general public. I would love for the literary world to stay open to all the poets from my community and not focus on only a few “representative” voices. It happens time and time again. Poets Heid Erdrich and Allison Hedge Coke have recently edited great anthologies that may give the larger public a glimpse of the diversity and range of contemporary Indigenous poetry.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading poems by a few contemporary Chinese poets I’ve been asked to translate this week for a translation festival in China. This work is entirely new for me and I’m excited to learn more about poetry from this part of the world.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
There are people I like who deserve more attention—I wouldn’t call them “underrated,” they are incredible in their own right and will receive the attention they deserve. People should read more Indigenous writers. They are writing some of the most innovative and important work in contemporary literature.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value an editor’s ability to trust the poet. I’m fortunate to have great editors in who’ve been absolutely supportive of my poetic vision. I’ve never felt I had to compromise my artistic integrity. It’s a wonderful thing when one’s editor is also protective and supportive of one’s body of work and creative vision.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I hope I continue to feel I can innovate upon previous creations. I want to blend all my poetic and visual work into a singular expression someday. I don’t know what this means. I’ll find out when I get there.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’m grateful for the writers and artist who’ve advised me to maintain my creative and artistic integrity. My poems continue to reach new readers and I’m grateful they can trust that I will always want more from poetry than what is easily available and accessible. I want them to return to my books and feel they experience something new with each reading.
Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve.
Road Trip: A Profile of Sherwin Bitsui
This isn’t really my landscape,” says Sherwin Bitsui as we head east on Interstate 10 through the Sonoran Desert. We’ve just left Tucson, and almost immediately the surroundings open up. No more southwestern tourist traps or neighborhoods heavy with generations of conflict among Mexicans, Native Americans, and whites. Around us, the mesquite and the cholla, with bursts of white spikes, grow in abundance along the highway. Aside from the road itself, the only other man-made objects in sight are the shrines—descansos in Spanish—commemorating tragic highway accidents.
While it may not be his preferred landscape, Bitsui has learned to appreciate it. “Especially with this sky, and when it rains,” he says.
Indeed, the land has just been blessed with rain for the first time in five months—half an inch in a matter of hours, which is rare for southern Arizona, where the average rainfall is twelve inches a year. The heavy downpour caused more than a few traffic mishaps in the city. Sirens blared as the drains flooded at every intersection. But past the city limits everything is calm: Large clouds hover over the Catalina Mountains and the Tucsons, and the land releases the soothing smell of wet earth.
It’s Bitsui who suggested conducting our interview while driving in a car. “It’s how I remember hearing stories when I was a child,” he says. “Riding in my father’s truck.”
And soon, Bitsui, whose second book of poetry, Flood Song, will be released this month by Copper Canyon Press, should be sitting back and enjoying the proverbial ride. Up to now, he’s been laboring over last-minute revisions and worrying a bit about how his work will be received. But Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon’s executive editor, speaks with excitement and confidence when he characterizes Bitsui’s new book: “There’s a distinct music to Flood Song, an almost mournful high-desert mysticism at work among all the wonder and uncertainty he’s addressing. It’s an intensely visual book that jumps back and forth between the urban and the rural, the modern and the traditional, the personal and the tribal; its vision is sprawling and marvelously ambitious—the poem is in constant motion through landscape and time and cultures.”
The landscape that is Bitsui’s preference lies five hours to the north of Tucson, in the Navajo reservation where his family has lived “since time immemorial,” he says, tongue-in-cheek. “It’s difficult to convince people that my upbringing is not like the traumatic ones shown in books and documentaries about Native peoples,” Bitsui says. He points out a turkey vulture descending gracefully from above, and then launches into a story about having seen a caracara, also known as a Mexican eagle (“It’s really a falcon.”), for the first time. What amused him about it was that he spotted the bird in a parking lot, a place far removed from the romantic notions of land and nature that are so often imposed on his work by readers because he’s Native American.
“I have no control over how people perceive me. One time a white woman came to my reading and just cried in front of me,” he says. “She was reacting to my indigenousness, not my poetry, which isn’t even about reservation life.” There have been many other awkward exchanges: Once he was shown a picture of Geronimo and asked if he was related (“No. Geronimo is Apache.”), another time he was given tobacco. “What did that person think I was going to do, trade with it?” he asks, incredulously.
Bitsui shrugs these things off. At thirty-four, he’s more concerned about larger issues, like the fate of the next generation of Native Americans. He has been teaching writing workshops lately with ArtsReach, a Tucson-based program designed to provide Native American youth with avenues for creative expression. “The stories they tell,” Bitsui says sadly, shaking his head. “All violence and poverty.” Indeed, suicide among young Native American people has risen at an alarming rate over the last few years.
“I guess I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “I’m not a displaced Indian, my family lives on our land, and even though problems exist on my reservation, I had a happy upbringing compared with the ones these kids are dealing with.”
As it starts to drizzle again, the raindrops splattering on the windshield trigger his memories of monsoon season on the reservation. In the fall, the monsoons, with their heavy downpours and spectacular lightning shows, rejuvenate the landscape. “For some reason I also have this impression that up there the sun feels closer,” he says. “It must be the joy of being home, where the houses all face east and the taste of mutton always reminds me of the flavors of the land.” He ponders his words for a moment and then adds, “I suppose even I crave myth.”
For Bitsui, the second of five children born to a carpenter and a teacher’s aide, living on the Navajo reservation meant the freedom to wander the land for hours, knowing he wasn’t trespassing. He would sit on the mesa for long stretches of time and meditate while listening to his Walkman. (His musical preference at the time was heavy metal. “It relaxed me,” he says, smiling.)
He was allergic to horses and to hay, so he didn’t become a ranch hand. Instead, he was introduced to the goat- and sheepherding life by his grandparents. It was hard work, but he enjoyed it and the company of his grandmother, especially during the summers, when he wasn’t getting bused to an elementary school outside of the reservation.
“School was the only thing I didn’t like while growing up,” he says. “It’s where I learned to become invisible among the white kids in order to survive.” He contrasts that tactic with the one most of the kids in the ArtsReach program resort to, which is to be loud and confrontational. “I guess neither one works,” he says.
For the past eight years, Tucson has been his home away from home, but adaptation was a shaky process. “When I first moved there,” he says, “it was my introduction to America. And it freaked me out.”
Bitsui initially left home in 1997, at the age of twenty-one, to attend the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I loved it there,” he says. “We were from all sorts of tribes but we were all Indian, and aspiring artists.” Bitsui wanted to become a painter, to capture the colors and textures that had given him so much pleasure as a child. But he lacked the skill. “So I decided on the next best thing: poetry.”
This was an unusual choice for a boy who grew up in a place where the nearest library was over forty miles away. Books and writing were not completely absent on the reservation, just scarce. “There were many stories around,” says Bitsui. “These stories made me see into other worlds that no longer exist. Worlds that were made alive in the retelling.”
Under the tutelage of poet Arthur Sze, Bitsui found his voice. “I remember those first awful poems I wrote,” says Bitsui. “To this day I’m grateful to Arthur for being so patient, for believing in me.” The IAIA, however, didn’t fully prepare Bitsui for what a writing workshop would be like in a public university. With Sze’s encouragement, Bitsui applied for and was accepted to the prestigious writing program at the University of Arizona. He moved to Tucson in 2001, and when he arrived on campus, he had a flashback to his “invisible days” during his early education—feeling marginalized among the greater student population.
“I had a meltdown,” he says, refusing to elaborate, except to say that it was the first time he experienced culture shock. The faculty and students in the program were well meaning, but he rarely found workshops useful. His lyrical, elliptical style was neither personal nor anthropological; it resisted straightforward narrative and folkloric characterizations. Few readers understood what he was doing, and he began to feel claustrophobic in the often insular world of academia. “The communities writing programs promote are true gifts to poets and poetry,” he says. “But it was important for me to find poetry and attempt to define it on my own terms outside of venues where poetry is maintained.” So just as he was about to complete his MFA degree, Bitsui dropped out of the program.
“At the IAIA, I didn’t have to explain where I was coming from, let alone where I was headed to,” he says. But from the painful awareness of his otherness came a body of work that would form his first poetry collection.
University of Arizona Press acquisitions editor Patti Hartmann heard about Bitsui’s poetry from members of Native American literary circles, such as Ofelia Zepeda, a linguist, poet, and MacArthur fellow, who is also the editor of Sun Tracks, the press’s Native American literary series. Hartmann called Bitsui to ask if he had a manuscript. Although he hadn’t finished his MFA, he did have a manuscript completed, which he sent to Hartmann. After several revisions, she accepted the book for publication, and Shapeshift was published in 2003.
The first lines of Shapeshift—“Fourteen ninety-something, / something happened”—refer to the arrival of Columbus in America and the beginning of a major shift in Native American history, culture, and life. For Bitsui, the new millennium, a few years ago, marked a time to reflect on whether Native people were surviving and thriving or heading on a path toward extinction. And the poems in Shapeshift—a collection of mythical journeys, dream images, dead ends, and reservation realities—explore this subject.
“I also wanted to reclaim that word, shapeshift, which has a different connotation to us,” Bitsui says. “It doesn’t only signify physical transformation by power or magic; it also means spiritual or social transition into a new way of being.”
Reviewers received Shapeshift with both skepticism and excitement aroused by its stylistic risks. “Some people were baffled by the book because it did not work in a way that was palpable to certain trends in Native American poetics; others liked it because it was new and distinctive,” Bitsui says.
After the book’s release, Bitsui found himself drawn into the national poetry-reading circuit and onto the international stage. Besides traveling all over the country, he has been featured in the Fiftieth Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte at the Venice Biennial with the Indigenous Arts Action Alliance, and he’s been invited to Colombia to attend the International Poetry Festival of Medellín with Joy Harjo. Most recently he attended Poesiefestival Berlin, where he read alongside Rita Dove and John Yau.
“Every day’s a gift,” Bitsui says, pondering the opportunities he’s had. In 2006 he received news he’d won a prestigious forty-thousand-dollar Whiting Award. At the time, though, he was in the middle of writing an elegy for his cousin. Because his family was grieving, he didn’t want to encroach on their grief with his news, and neither did he understand the magnitude of the prize until he was sitting on the stage in New York City, listening to his work being praised.
When he returned, having made the trip alone, he attempted to describe for his grandmother this place he had visited, where crowds flowed through the streets and the buildings reached high into the sky. “Oh, you went to New York City,” she responded. Bitsui chuckles at the recollection.
As the new face of Native American literature, Bitsui takes his responsibility seriously, which is why he doesn’t turn down any offers to travel or read poetry or be interviewed. “Though I hope I’m not the only one being asked,” he says. He names two of his contemporaries, poets Santee Frazier and Orlando White, who released books earlier this year. Frazier published Dark Thirty with the University of Arizona Press, and White released Bone Light with Red Hen Press.
“I’m excited that there’s a new group out there, but I worry about what’s expected of us,” Bitsui says. He admits that one thing he’s been disappointed by in many of his presentations is the comparisons that audience members will make between him and the Native American superstar, Sherman Alexie.
“Sherman’s charismatic and funny,” Bitsui observes, “but there’s only one Sherman. The rest of us should be allowed to be who we are.”
When we finally arrive in Bisbee, it’s painfully obvious what happens when a place attempts not to change. This old copper-mining town tries to remain the same in order to cultivate tourism. The old brothel is now a hotel decorated to resemble a brothel, and the saloon’s decor includes stuffed javelina heads and hunting rifles. Most of the residents of Bisbee are white, as are the visitors. The original buildings along the main street now house expensive art galleries.
We take a walk to a copper mine, the entrance fenced to prevent tourists from leaning over the edge. “They say that one time water pooled at the bottom,” says Bitsui, “and that a flock of Canadian geese flying overhead detected it and swooped down for a drink. The water was toxic, poisoned. And the next day, the bottom of this mine glowed fluorescent white with the dead pile of birds.”
And as if on cue, it begins to rain again. “Perhaps that’s why I gave my second book that title,” Bitsui says. “The poem is a song that floods, ebbs, and is searching for a name. I feel that it’s a body of work that speaks a third language, combining Navajo sensibilities with English linearity.”
This poetic hybrid is also what attracted Wiegers to Bitusi’s work. “That was another word-of-mouth phone call,” Bitsui says of how Wiegers first contacted him. “I met Michael briefly at an Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. I was introduced to him by Matthew Shenoda, the Coptic poet. And Michael eventually called me up out of the blue to ask if I had a second manuscript.”
Wiegers wanted to hear Bitsui off the page, so in 2007 he accepted an invitation to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where Bitsui was a fellow that year. “I arrived at the conference the day after he read,” Wiegers recalls, “so I pulled him aside and asked him to read a poem to me. We walked down to the pond, where I sat on a big rock while he told me nearly the entirety of the new manuscript, which was still in development. I was impressed, to say the least. I suggested to him that when he finished and was looking to publish the book, he’d have a ready ear in me.”
As we take cover in the local coffee shop, a musician starts to set up his equipment. We are determined to make it to the saloon to have a beer once the rain stops.
“With Flood Song I wanted to go back to my beginning as an aspiring painter,” Bitsui says. “I think of many of those poems as portraits with their own elliptical stories to tell.”
Bitsui says that his ideal readers are visual artists, who discover something of their techniques in his writing style. But he confesses that even his family members are puzzled by his poetry. “They’re waiting for me to write a poem they can understand,” he says, laughing.
In the meantime, Bitsui will continue to live in Tucson, where he has been most productive in his writing. And while he’s scratching out a living as a visiting poet in various tribal schools in the area, he’s also moving forward with other projects. He has decided to return to the University of Arizona to complete his MFA and to finish a screenplay he’s been struggling with since he received a fellowship last year from the Sundance Native Initiative to adapt one of his stories for film. Bitsui doesn’t consider himself a short story writer, but as a descendant of storytellers, he couldn’t refuse the opportunity. The Sundance programmer, N. Bird Runningwater, has been patiently waiting for Bitsui to turn in the script. “It’s not poetry, though, which is hard enough,” Bitsui says.
The beer at the saloon (more like a movie set) is anticlimactic, so after one drink we head back to Tucson, making a brief stop in Tombstone, home of the O.K. Corral. It’s Wyatt Earp Days in the town, and the locals are capitalizing on the occasion with a street fair selling cheap Native American jewelry and charging for a chance to ride in a covered wagon, old Wild West style.
“I once brought my grandmother here,” Bitsui says. “And I remembered her stories about riding in a wagon in the old days, so I asked her if she wanted to relive that memory by taking a wagon ride. She said, ‘Been there, done that. It’s not a very fun ride.’”
We find our way back to I-10, going west this time, riding off into what will become the sunset. It’s been a pleasure being on the road, talking story. But all good things must come to an end. Bitsui needs to return the car by sundown. It’s a rental.
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
(Photos by Jackie Alpers.)Ten Questions for Grady Chambers
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Grady Chambers, whose debut poetry collection, North American Stadiums, was published this month by Milkweed Editions. The winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the collection serves as a map to some of America’s more overlooked places of industry, specifically within the Midwest and central New York—places “bleached / pale by time and weather”—and as an exploration of the grace we might find in such spaces. Born and raised in Chicago, Chambers received an MFA from Syracuse University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. His poems have appeared in Adroit Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Nashville Review; Ninth Letter; New Ohio Review; and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My routine seems to change every year or two, but for the past six months or so my tendency has been to write once a week, typically on Sundays, in a block of hours beginning around eight or nine in the morning and ending in the early afternoon, and most often at a coffee shop not far from my apartment.
2. How long did it take you to write North American Stadiums?
About six years, I think. The last poem in the book is the oldest, and I wrote the first draft of that poem on Memorial Day, 2012. It’s an interesting question because unlike someone setting out to write a novel, there was no real destination in mind. I didn’t (and probably this is true of writers of most books of poetry) set out to write North American Stadiums as such. The poems that comprise it are simply a curated selection from a much broader collection of writing that began in 2011 or so, when I began to be more strict with myself about making time to write. That the book contains the poems it does seems largely a result of my preferences and inclinations around the time I began thinking I should try and shape that growing stack of poems into a book. That was actually the scariest part in making this come together: the endless possible permutations of inclusion, exclusion, order; the fear of endless possibility.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Probably the way it forces a different relationship to one’s manuscript and writing. By the time I was copyediting the book for the third or fourth time I was so wholly attentive to formatting, spelling, margins—all the aesthetics of language on a page—that I didn’t even feel like I was reading the poems anymore. Thanks to the awesome people at Milkweed Editions I had the unusual opportunity to create an audiobook version of the manuscript, and as I was traveling to the sound studio I was hit with a sudden fearful sense that I’d forgotten the sound and rhythm of the poems because I’d been so wrapped up in the copyediting. But that experience of doing the recording proved to be a great one: sitting down and reading it into a microphone, it was the first time that I was just able to simply read the book without looking at it through the lens of an editor. At that late stage, the book was in its final form, and all I had to do was read what was there. In doing so I felt again the rhythm and pacing and speed (or slowness) of the poems, not their marks and margins and format.
4. Where did you first get published?
The first piece of “creative writing” I wrote that actually ended up being bound between two covers were a few poems written as part of a high school English class. As I remember it, part of the final assignment for the class was for us to collectively make and bind a book (and of course produce the writing it contained). I’m fairly sure I used a phrase along the lines of, “from the lens of my itinerant being,” and it still makes me cringe to think about.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kawabata’s last and unfinished novel, Dandelions, and have been reading around in Turgenev’s great Sketches from a Hunter’s Notebook (though the title is sometimes translated differently) and Robin Becker’s wonderful new collection of poems, The Black Bear Inside Me.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I can already envision this answer producing audible groans in some readers of this interview, but in all honesty I’d probably bring Moby Dick. I love the music of so much of that book, the rhythmic and sonic propulsion of Melville’s sentences, the astounding and way-ahead-of-its-time structure of his novel; and I think the book is deeply funny. I’ve mentioned how funny I find the book to a number of people, and that comment is usually met with a perplexed look, but I think there is great humor in the narrative distance between writer Melville and narrator Ishmael. Ishmael is, to me, a narrator who is totally over the top, and doesn’t have the self-awareness to recognize that quality in himself. But Melville certainly knew it, and I can imagine him laughing as he wrote some of Ishmael’s more grandiose meditations.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I find it hard to say because I feel I have such a limited sense of how authors are perceived or rated by others. But a few collections that I think are amazing but that are maybe under-read—or at least don’t seem to be read much among writers my age—are David Ferry’s incredible book, Bewilderment, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collection of sonnets, Kyrie, and Adrian C. Louis’s Ceremonies of the Damned. I don’t think these writers are underrated, but with so much out there and with this increasing thirst, it seems, for what’s new or what’s next, these are three books that come quickly to mind that are very worth returning to, each one remarkable in its own way.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I sleep very poorly, and that can sometimes really knock my days off course. That said, sleeplessness has also been beneficial to my writing life as, like it or not, my mind seems to be receptive to degrees of fear or strangeness or anxiety in those sleepless hours that come back in sometimes productive or interesting ways when I write.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I’m not sure I have the perfect phrase for it, but something along the lines of “generative inquiry.” What I have in mind is a tendency on the part of a reader, when talking about a certain piece, to press on certain sections of the poem, to push me about the intent or meaning of a certain sequence. In doing so, they communicate their understanding of the poem and I am able to weigh it against my intention. This helps give me a sense of which sections or sequences feel flat or outside the orbit of images and ideas that the poem is working through and forces me to verbalize, and then try and put into words on the page, a sometimes originally cloudy intent.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s not quite advice, but the most important thing someone has said to me about writing, the thing that has had a tangible impact on my work, is what my friend Charif Shanahan (his collection Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing is so good) said during a workshop a couple years ago. He asked the room, “What aren’t you writing about, and why?” Though maybe to some it seems a fairly obvious thing to ask oneself, it had a pretty significant impact on me. It helped me think about and re-examine the ways I defined myself as a writer, and encouraged me to look directly at, and at least attempt to write about, things that daily occupied my mind but for various reasons I previously had overlooked, shied away from, or not thought to write about.
Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums.
Ten Questions for A. M. Homes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features A. M. Homes, whose story collection Days of Awe, published today by Viking, “exposes the heart of an uneasy America...exploring our attachments to one another through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.” Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Days of Awe?
The stories in this collection took twelve years—stories accrue over time. I don’t sit down to write a collection of stories. I have ideas for them that can take years to form and there is a compression to storytelling, the sense that the story is already in progress by the time the reader comes to it—which means that I, like, know what it’s all about before diving in.
And there’s also an editorial/curating process—we build the collection—so once I have six to eight stories I like, I start to think about the balance, of voices within the stories, about narrative threads, ideas that appear in multiple stories—and sometimes we put a few stories aside and I write one or two more. There’s a moment when you know it’s getting close—which is very exciting. For me that was last summer. I was in Oxford, England, and knew I had two stories to finish: “Days of Awe,” the title story, which I’d literally been carrying with me for almost ten years, and “The National Caged Bird Show,” which had been with me for almost two years. Finishing those was thrilling and they’re two of my favorites in the book.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In a perfect world I write daily, starting at about 6 AM. I wake up early, I go into my office and start writing. And then around 1 PM I join the rest of the world.
But as we know it’s not a perfect world, so I often have to fight to carve out work time—a writer’s calendar should be empty—but when most of us look at an empty calendar we think, “Great time to make a dentist appointment.” So it’s a struggle, learning to say no to things.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it takes. The lead time is about a year.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first publications were in Folio, a student publication at American University, and the Sarah Lawrence Review and then On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine, founded in 1984. They published a story of mine called “72 Hours on a Towel.”
5. What are you reading right now?
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson. And I love reading history, I love biography. I’m a huge nonfiction fan.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kelly’s Textbook of Internal Medicine. I’m practical and I have a good enough imagination to otherwise entertain myself.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Joyce Carol Oates.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Honesty and a sharp red pencil.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the truth according to the character—from Grace Paley, who was my teacher at Sarah Lawrence College.
A. M. Homes, author of Days of Awe (Viking).
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Lillian Li
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lillian Li, whose debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant, is out this month from Henry Holt. Loosely based on Li’s own waitressing experience at a Peking duck restaurant in northern Virginia, the novel follows the complicated lives and loves of the people working at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland. The multigenerational, multi-voiced, and darkly comic novel “practically thumps with heartache and dark humor,” says novelist Chang-rae Lee. “If a Chinese restaurant can be seen as a kind of cultural performance,” says Peter Ho Davies, “Lillian Li takes us behind the scenes.” Li received a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction and Glimmer Train’s New Writer Award, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Granta, and Jezebel. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a bookseller at Literati Bookstore and a lecturer at the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write wherever is free (so usually my apartment), and I tend to write whenever I can put it off no longer (so anywhere in the late afternoon to the pre-morning hours). I find that I’m disciplined in short bursts. So I can write every day and sustain that practice for a week. Then I pat myself on the back and forget to write for a week. Rinse and repeat.
2. How long did it take you to write Number One Chinese Restaurant?
About three years. Although the bulk of that time was spent completing just the first draft. I’m a faster reviser than I am a writer.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How much I would grow to depend on my editor (Barbara Jones)! She taught me so much about writing, especially on the character and sentence-level. I hadn’t expected to find such mentorship, especially since the book had already been written, but I’m thrilled I did.
4. Where did you first get published?
I was first published as a Granta New Voice, which was an online feature started by their then–fiction editor Patrick Ryan. I recently ran into Patrick at a conference and had the privilege of gushing my gratitude at him.
5. What are you reading right now?
My Education by Susan Choi. A deeply sexy, emotionally turbulent book about a graduate student who falls for a notorious professor’s equally charismatic wife. Also Vanessa Hua’s A River of Stars, which comes out August 14. Hua writes about San Francisco Chinatown with such savvy and heart. Both books are also incredibly funny.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. I’ve read it so many times I’ve lost count, and his voice never ceases to thrill. So clearly it would be good company on a desert island.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t know about most underrated, but I wish more people talked about Jessica Hagedorn. Dogeaters remains one of the most awe-inspiring books I’ve ever read.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I only have myself to blame, but I also tend to let myself off the hook pretty easily.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
A combination of a sharp tongue and a big heart.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Avoid the word “it” whenever possible. Which is to say, specificity whenever possible.
Lillian Li, author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Akil Kumarasamy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features debut author Akil Kumarasamy, whose collection of linked stories, Half Gods, published today by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “portrays with sharp clarity the ways in which parents, children, and friends act as unknowing mirrors to each other, revealing in their all-too-human weaknesses, hopes, and sorrows a connection to the divine.” Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the University of East Anglia.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I usually write at home or at a café, but I’m pretty open to working anywhere. I don’t necessarily write every day; sometimes I just let an idea sit for a while, seep in my head. I might write ferociously for a week and then have a period where I don’t write at all. Maybe it’s a kind of mental crop rotation, giving the mind time to rest before the next creative burst. For Half Gods, I often wrote at night. I liked working while everyone else was sleeping. I think it made the act feel secretive, like I was tapping into some unknown frequency. Now I’m trying to write in the mornings. It feels more responsible.
2. How long did it take you to write Half Gods?
It took a few years of actual writing, but the earliest portion of the book was written in 2010.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long the process takes! From selling the manuscript to the actual publication, it takes around a year and half. I’ve been working on a second book and feel pretty involved it, so it’s interesting now having to discuss Half Gods, which to me feels like a different version of myself.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
It definitely depends on what you’re looking for. There are many paths toward publication and getting an MFA is just one of them. It can possibly offer the time to fine-tune one’s craft, financial flexibility, and community.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, which is out in August. It’s amazing.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I would want a book on how to appreciate and thrive on a desert island while you are away from humanity and the appendix should have the directions on how to build a canoe when you/if you want to reconnect with the rest of the world. In other words, maybe some Chekov.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Well think about how many wonderful books don’t get translated into English. The English language is currency.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
It’s probably myself. What I think is possible.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their unwavering belief in me. It feels extraordinary.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. Sometimes you go to the computer and nothing valuable comes out and that’s okay. It’s all about how you see the writing process. You don’t need to call it writer’s block and you don’t need to feel guilty when you’re not sitting by the computer. The work requires so much of you that if the guilt doesn’t make you more productive, then the feeling is not worth it. You always have a choice in how you are going to perceive something.
Akil Kumarasamy, author of Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Ten Questions for Lee Martin
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lee Martin, whose new book, The Mutual UFO Network, published today by Dzanc Books, “explores the intricacies of relationships and the possibility for redemption in even the most complex misfits and loners.” It is his first story collection since his acclaimed debut, The Least You Need to Know, was published by Sarabande Books in 1996. Martin is also the author of three memoirs as well as the novels Quakertown (Penguin, 2001); The Bright Forever (Shaye Areheart, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; RiverofHeaven (Shaye Areheart, 2008); Break the Skin (Crown, 2011); and Late One Night (Dzanc, 2015). He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Mutual UFO Network?
The earliest story in this collection was published in 1997, and the last one appeared in 2014. In the time since my first collection came out in 1996, I’ve published five novels, three memoirs, and a craft book, but I’ve also kept writing stories. There were times in that gap between 1996 and now when we could have tried to bring out a new collection, but I’m glad we waited until the book was truly a book rather than merely a random gathering of stories.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m a morning writer, and I normally work in my writing room at home, sometimes with my senior editor, Stella the Cat, on my lap. She has claws, and she holds me to task. Lately, though, I’ve discovered another writing space. My wife works remotely for a hospital in our home area of southeastern Illinois. She has to be onsite four days out of each month, and, when I can, I go with her. I end up writing in the small public library I used when I was in high school. It pleases me to know I’m writing in a place where I once read so many other people’s books and dreamed of one day having a book of my own. Sometimes people stop by and tell me stories, and sometimes I use them. I try to write at least five days a week. I used to write every day, but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more comfortable with rest and the way it can re-energize me. For the most part, we writers are introverts, and it can become easy to withdraw from the world. I’m lucky enough to be married to an extrovert, and the weekend is now our time to engage with life outside the writing space.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That I ever got published at all! Seriously, when I was starting out, I gathered so many rejections, I started to believe that door would never open for me. I couldn’t stop writing, though. It’s what gave me pleasure, and I knew even if I never got published, I’d still love moving words around on the page. That’s why I tell my students to keep doing what they love as long as they love it. As I began to publish books, I learned so much about the part of the process that doesn’t involve writing or editing. I’m talking about the behind-the-scenes work of publicity and marketing. Everything from how the sales reps work to cover design. I’m still amazed by the decisions that get made that can make or break a book before it even hits the shelves.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published my first story in 1987 in the literary journal Sonora Review. My first collection, The Least You Need to Know, was the first winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and it came out in 1996.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished a fascinating memoir by David Giffels called Furnishing Eternity. It’s about the author’s desire to build his own casket even though he has no immediate need for it. His aged father, an accomplished woodworker, sets out to help him. That’s the narrative spine, but the book is about so much more. With wit and warmth, Giffels explores aging and death and family and friendship. It’s a beautifully written book with not a trace of sentimentality.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
In our family room, there’s a length of an old door casing that my wife and I rescued from the debris of the farmhouse where my family lived when I was young. My wife turned it into this shelf, and we put old family photos and mementos on it. My mother was a teacher, and one of the things she left behind was the school bell she rang at the old country schools where she once taught. That bell sits on top of two books, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby. If I had to choose one to have with me on that desert island, it would probably be Gatsby. I reread it each year with continued admiration. I guess I’m a romantic at heart. The story of Daisy and Gatsby gets me every time.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I’ve had the privilege of knowing a number of writers who would fall into that category. I’ve met them through their books, and sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to know them personally and to be able to call them my friends. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I’m only honestly stating the fact. I imagine there are literally thousands of writers who should be appreciated more than they are. These writers are doing work just as memorable and just as necessary as the big-name folks, but for whatever reason they haven’t broken out the way their more famous counterparts have.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I once told someone that any writer would gladly trade money for time. I’m not sure that’s true, but it feels true from where I sit. I’m a writer who has a hard time saying no to people, so I sometimes find my writing time being reduced due to things I’ve promised other writers, or my students, that I’ll do. I think of all the favors others did for me when I was just starting out—blurbs, letters of recommendation, etc.—and I try my best to keep giving back to the profession. As the years have gone on, I’ve begun to feel a slightly different pressure, and that’s the threat that comes from our “connected culture.” The internet, social media, e-mail, texts—they all demand that we always be available, and, if we let them, they can destroy the solitude and quiet writers need to immerse themselves fully in their work.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
I like an editor and an agent who will tell me the truth about a manuscript, no matter how painful it may be for me to hear it. I like them to understand what I’m trying to accomplish and to be able to offer honest, but tactful, suggestions for what I need to do to fully realize my intentions. So honesty, insight, a collaborative spirit, a supportive presence, and, finally, a willingness to be a tireless champion of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I see so many young writers who want to succeed immediately. They want to publish, they want to win awards, they want validation. In their desperation to attain that validation, they sometimes forget why they love to write. In every workshop I teach, I pass along a single piece of writing advice. It comes from Isak Dinesen who encouraged writers to, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” We all fall prey to both hope and despair from time to time. Both seduce us into thinking about the end result of the work, and, consequently, we don’t pay attention to the process. If we can write a little with some degree of consistency and without agonizing over how good it will be, who will want to read it and praise it, etc., we can remember how much we love the mere act of putting words on the page. To be in the midst of that love is a wonderful thing. I’m firmly convinced that if we pay attention to the process, our journey will take us where we’re meant to be.
Lee Martin, author of The Mutual UFO Network.
Ten Questions for Christopher Kennedy
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Christopher Kennedy, whose fifth poetry collection, Clues From the Animal Kingdom, is out today from BOA Editions. In the collection, Kennedy sifts through the detritus of the past to uncover the memories, images, and symbols that shape an individual’s consciousness. “There is joy and dread here, in every carefully considered line,” writes Dave Eggers about the book. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, Kennedy offers prose poems that offer, as George Saunders puts it, “a moving portrait of the human heart examining itself.” Christopher Kennedy is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, 2011), and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write anywhere I happen to be at any time of day, though I tend to write first drafts at night and revise during the day. I take breaks, sometimes for months, usually because I’m teaching and want to devote my energy to my students’ work, but when I’m writing, I write every day.
2. How long did it take you to write the poems in Clues From the Animal Kingdom?
There are some lines in the poems that are decades old, but I’d say most of the poems were written between 2007 and 2016. I tend to save old poems and scavenge from them when I’m stuck working on something newer. I trust that it’s all coming from the same source and can be reshaped to resolve whatever dilemma I’m facing.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I was surprised at the relationship between the poems in the collection. It feels as if it’s part poetry, part fiction, part memoir, in the sense that if you read it cover to cover there is a narrative arc, at least in the sense of moving from one emotional/psychological state to another, as well as temporal shifts that feel organic to a plot I never would have imagined would exist.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I have a fantasy that book publishers could find a way to form consortiums that would allow them to open their own bookstores. I miss being able to browse shelves and strike up conversations with knowledgable staff in a place devoted to books.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mostly I’m reading my students’ work, which impresses me on a daily basis, but I was on leave last semester, so I was able to read a lot over the spring and summer. Here’s a short list of books I read and recommend. Poetry: former students Grady Chambers and Jessica Poli’s book and chapbook, respectively, North American Stadiums and Canyons. Short story collections: Samantha Hunt’s The Dark Dark, Rebecca Schiff’s The Bed Moved, and Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Novels: Paula Saunders’s debut, The Distance Home, and Jonathan Dee’s The Locals. I also read some unpublished stories from a collection in process by Sarah Harwell, a wonderful poet and fiction writer. They’re linked stories set in an airport, and they’re fantastic.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
If I had a good dictionary, I’d have everything I need and lots of time to recreate everything I’ve ever read. That seems impractical, though, so I’d bring Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge. It had a profound influence on me thirty-plus years ago, and every time I read it again, it holds up.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I could name several, but Gary Lutz comes to mind immediately. One Gary Lutz sentence is worth a thousand pictures.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I don’t have any impediments other than my own psychology. For me, writing is a constant struggle between thinking I have nothing of any importance to say and believing that when I do have something to say I won’t be able to express it properly. I have three states of being: feeling doubt, manifesting a vague desire to say something that seems important, and writing toward ground zero of that desire.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to dunk a basketball, but I’d settle for writing more poems that are focused on the current socio-political scene. Some of my work has that emphasis, but I’d like to expand that part of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Hayden Carruth wrote this in a letter to me several years ago: “The language of a poem is like a balloon, it must be stressed enough to make its shape full and taut, but not enough to make it explode.”
Christopher Kennedy, author of Clues From the Animal Kingdom. (Credit: David Broda)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for May-Lee Chai
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features May-Lee Chai, whose story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants is out today from Blair, an imprint of Carolina Wren Press. Chai’s collection, which Edward P. Jones calls “a splendid gem” and Tayari Jones calls “essential reading,” is, at its essence, about migration—both physical and psychological, between cities and countries, among families and individuals. The stories are marked by complex and vividly rendered characters, Chinese American and Chinese women, men, and children who navigate relationships and the land, asking important questions about themselves, their families, and their culture. As Lisa Ko puts it, “You won’t forget these characters.” May-Lee Chai is the award-winning author of ten books, including the memoir Hapa Girl, the novel Tiger Girl, and her original translation from Chinese into English of Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and is an assistant professor in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing as a student, I used to write after midnight, after all my work was done for the day. But now I find that too tiring. I can write only on days when I’m not teaching and when all my grading and reading are done. Otherwise, I can’t turn off my editing brain to reach my subconscious, creative thoughts.
2. How long did it take you to write Useful Phrases for Immigrants?
I had been working on some of the stories for four or five years before I decided to put together a collection. Some had already been published. Once I came up with my theme, I knew which ones should go together and how to revise the others.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I received the most beautiful blurb quote from Edward P. Jones. After that I thought, “I will never again receive an endorsement as wonderful, as meaningful, as generous as his. You can put this one on my tombstone!”
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish it were easier for writers of color who don’t come from moneyed backgrounds to be heard and celebrated.
5. What are you reading right now?
Just finished reading Vanessa Hua’s novel A River of Stars, which is so good at taking a story that’s ripped from the headlines and then going deeper into the characters and their motivations, and I’m just starting Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection, A Lucky Man, which is full of heartbreak and longing and exquisitely crafted sentences.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Sei Shonagon. She was a member of the Heian Court in 10th-century Japan and wrote a “pillowbook” of diary-like entries on daily life, rituals, human relationships, all kinds of opinionated, lyric-essay-like observations. Everyone should read her.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My editor at Blair, Robin Miura, has the best editors’ traits: an eagle eye and a light hand.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The current political situation is the biggest impediment to my continued well-being as a woman of color in America, so that naturally impedes the writing. It takes time and energy to resist, and it takes time and energy to heal. That leaves relatively little time for everything else.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Peace of mind.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writer Nona Caspers (The Fifth Woman) just visited my undergraduate class and told the students to learn to trust their subconscious. As an example, she said when something turns up in a writing exercise or in their notebooks, they should be willing to explore and unpack and develop what their subconscious is telling them is important. I thought that was great advice.
May-Lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants.
Ten Questions for Rosellen Brown
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rosellen Brown, whose eleventh book, The Lake on Fire, is out today from Sarabande Books. The novel is an epic family narrative that begins among nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants on a failing Wisconsin farm and follows the young protagonist, Chaya, and her brother Asher, who flee to industrialized Chicago with the hopes of finding a better life. Instead, they find themselves confronted with the extravagance of the World’s Fair, during which they depend on factory work and pickpocketing to survive. The Lake on Fire is a “keen examination of social class, family, love, and revolution in a historical time marked by a tumultuous social landscape.” Rosellen Brown is the author of the novels Civil Wars, Half a Heart, Tender Mercies, Before and After, and six other previous books. Her stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories , and Best Short Stories of the Century. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches in the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Where depends almost entirely on the shifting light in my apartment that, most marvelously, sits sixteen stories up and a couple of blocks from constantly-changing Lake Michigan. So I follow the sun around and sit wherever it’s brightest (often with my cat on my lap). I sometimes wonder if I’d focus better if I had one desk, one room of my own, but I’m light-thirsty and this seems to work out pretty well. As for the “how often,” when my kids were little and I had to take advantage of every minute they were in school, I’ll admit I was a lot more disciplined; I published three books in three years. Like my waistline, I’m afraid things have slackened a little, but I still try to work every day that I’m not teaching and feel like I’m cheating when I don’t at least try, or on a dry day default to reading. It’s interesting that many people worry that reading while they’re writing might influence their work. On the contrary, I’ve always read just enough (of just about anything good) until I find myself thinking, hungrily, “I want to do that!” Then I put the book or the story away and get down to it, energized by envy.
2. Where did you first get published?
This is crazy to remember: The New York Times used to—I’m talking about the fifties—publish poetry, mostly pretty bad, on their editorial page and while I was in high school I sent them, and had accepted, a sonnet on the ghost of Thomas Wolfe. (I’m not talking about Tom Wolfe but the Thomas of Look Homeward, Angel: “Oh, lost and by the wind-grieved ghost...” and so on. A book not to be read when you’re older than sixteen.) In college, I had a few poems in little magazines and one in Mademoiselle and then my coup, never to be repeated: Poetry Magazine took a sestina of mine and published it in my senior year. A sestina is always a sort of tour de force; maybe if I tried that again, they’d take another poem! As for my fiction, I didn’t start writing that until later, moving gradually from poetry to prose poetry to some pretty unconventional fiction because I didn’t really know (or care about) “the rules.”
3. How long did it take you to write The Lake On Fire?
Oh, what a question! I just discovered, via an old letter that I happened upon, that I had begun talking about what became this book as long ago as 1987! I’m horrified. I published four books between that early hint of curiosity and my actually writing and revising it, so I was obviously not sidelined by that early—I’ll call it an itch. Somewhere along the way I wrote a first version that was set in New Hampshire. Of course, Chicago is at the center of the published novel. I could write a lot more than I have room for here about how long it takes me—and, I suspect, most writers—the coming together of two impulses to ignite a story, and that’s what happened when I moved here and learned so much about the city’s history. I sort of (but only sort of) wish I could find the original manuscript that never took fire but I have no idea what happened to it. (Good metaphor, given the name of the final book.)
4. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How wonderfully attentive an independent (read: small but not powerless) press could be, if it’s seriously well-run. I got an almost instant response from Sarah Gorham, whose Sarabande has always been one of my favorites—none of that hanging around the (virtual) mailbox waiting for somebody in New York to say yea or nay because, I trust, she didn't have to run things past an army of marketers and others before she could say “I love it!” And their marketing has been another surprise: Really attentive and responsive, Joanna Englert is all in, efficient, and enthusiastic. Though I had a good experience at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with their publicity and marketing for my book Before and After, this is far more personal and agile.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Respect for my intentions and an absence of the need to prevail. A good ear, not always available even from editors who can talk about structure or motivation and so on but who can’t hear a rhythmically perfect (or imperfect) line. I’ve had two great editors: The first, John Glusman, was just starting his family when I worked with him on Before and After, which raises some hard questions about parental responsibility, and he was deeply attuned to what I was trying to do. And my current editor, Sarah Gorham, is herself a terrific poet and essayist who knows how to listen to the rhythm of my writing, which—as someone who herself began as a poet—I take very seriously.
6. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m hardly alone in saying that—both understandably and unforgivably—the “legacy” publishers look at their numbers, past and projected, far more attentively than I think they consider the quality of books they deem marginal. They are, like their counterparts in the entertainment industry, more sheeplike than daring.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Not under-rated—he gets great reviews and sometimes wins prizes—but I find too few people who know Charles Baxter’s stories and novels. I’m not sure why: Too quiet, maybe? Never brings down the house but writes with exquisite sensitivity and great good humor, with his passion for social justice sometimes stage center, sometimes lurking around the edges. I remember him saying, memorably and better than this, that what we need to do is make people less certain about their certainties.
8. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
This is still a little too much like the “who are your favorite writers?” kind of question. I hate ranking writers because it’s so apples and oranges. Two of my favorite novels, for example, are William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. But then, what about Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, which I consider one of the most satisfying collections of (connected) stories I know? To the Lighthouse? And then, on another day, trying keep dry the suitcase I’d have rescued from whatever boat capsized and deposited me on that island, where do I put Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene or Marilynn Robinson’s Houskeeping, novels so different you might want to find another name for their genres? And then there’s poetry. And then there’s nonfiction, at least half the entries in The Art of the Personal Essay. So many delights! How to choose? I refuse.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a plodding, one-idea-at-a-time writer, unlike some of my friends, who are filled to overflowing with great projects jostling each other to be attended to. Then again, with eleven books behind me, I guess I shouldn’t complain. Entertainment Weekly, of all places, recently chose The Lake on Fire as one of their “20 Fall Books Not To Be Missed,” and they called me some very complimentary things, but it was kind of a backhanded compliment because they said people ought to get to know my name because I’d been flying under the radar. Then again, whoever compiled the list was probably in first grade (if that) when my last book came out so I guess that’s on me!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The only teacher with whom I ever took a fiction class, a fine and much undernoticed writer named George P. Elliott cautioned us, at a time when we young ‘uns were too easily snarky and judgmental, to be compassionate toward our characters. He cited a letter by Chekhov in which Chekhov suggested that, at most, we should admonish people whom we find wanting: “Look how you live, my friends. What a pity to live that way.” Hard to live up to and I fail often because cleverness is so much easier to reach for than sympathy, but I try to remember and, without too many compromises, act upon it.
Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire.
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Amy Bonnaffons
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amy Bonnaffons, whose debut story collection, The Wrong Heaven, is out today from Little, Brown. In this collection of funny, strange, and inventive stories, whose “conflicted characters seek to solve their sexual and spiritual dilemmas in all the wrong places,” Bonnaffons writes about women, desire, and transformation through the lens of the fantastic. Bonnaffons received an MFA from New York University and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia. Her stories have been published in the Kenyon Review, the Sun, the Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and her story “Horse”—which juxtaposes one woman’s journey through IVF with her roommate’s transition from woman to animal—was performed by actresses Grace Gummer and Geraldine Hughes on This American Life.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Ideally every day, for two hours or so in the morning, at home or at a nearby coffee shop. I do my best to stick to that schedule, but interruptions and hiatuses are common—due to the demands of life, work, and school, or the need to replenish myself creatively. I’ve been taking a long break for the past few months, reading and drawing a lot rather than pressuring myself to produce any new writing.
2. How long did it take you to write The Wrong Heaven?
The first story (“Doris and Katie”) was written in 2008; the most recent story is “Horse,” written in 2016. So I’ve been working on these stories for the last decade of my life—while also writing a novel, The Regrets, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How capable and nice everyone has been. I’d heard horror stories about publishing that made me anticipate encountering a lot of incompetent jerks—but everyone I’ve worked with has been really good at their jobs, and also just so darn likable. I want to invite them all over for a potluck where we get drunk and dork out about books.
4. Where did you first get published?
Word Riot and Kenyon Review Online.
5. What are you reading right now?
Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman; Hiromi Kawakami’s Record of a Night Too Brief; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad; Mallory Ortberg’s The Merry Spinster; Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. I just finished Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Myriam Gurba’s Mean, and Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I could read that book forever.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I don’t really like to rate authors, because everything’s a matter of taste, and taste is political, and hierarchy has no place in the creative life. That said, there are some authors I’ve read recently and wondered, “WHY HAS NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THIS PERSON BEFORE? WHY IS THIS BOOK NOT ON EVERY SYLLABUS EVER?” Sometimes I’m just late to the party—but it’s also true that women, people of color, and authors from the Global South have to fight harder to find an audience. This is changing, but we’re not yet anywhere near where we should be.
The books I’m thinking of at the moment are Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, Gentleman Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, and The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy (why did no one make me read her in college?). I’m grateful to my professor Susan Rosenbaum to introducing me to Loy and Loos (check out her Mina Loy project), to Reginald McKnight for turning me on to Tutuola, and to Rivka Galchen’s book Little Labors, which made me run and check out Ingalls.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’d like to say, “being super busy.” If I’m honest, I’m only medium busy, but I really like to sleep. A friend recently sent me a new-age astrology website that claimed to identify, based on birth date and time, “where in your body you generate energy.” When I entered my data it claimed that I am a rare type that “generates no energy,” should only work two to four hours per day, and needs at least ten hours of sleep per night. I’ve never felt so seen.
Seriously, though, aside from just finding the time, I think my biggest problem is pressuring myself to finish something when there’s just no energy in it. That just makes me beat myself up and get depressed. I’ve learned how to strategically take breaks and how to refresh my angle of approach when needed.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Being able to pinpoint where the energy and heat is in the story, and reflecting that back to me. When you’re writing something long, like a novel, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and to forget why you started writing in the first place. A good editor—be it friend, teacher, agent, or publishing-house professional—can show you where your work has pulse and where it doesn’t. It’s helpful sometimes if they have specific suggestions for how to get the rest of the manuscript back on track, but this isn’t always necessary. Usually, for me, once I’ve been re-oriented to what really matters, I can fix the problems myself. The two editors I’ve worked with at Little, Brown—Lee Boudreaux and Jean Garnett—have both been amazing in this respect, as has my agent, Henry Dunow, an excellent editor himself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I’ve gotten many wonderful pieces of writing advice over the years from mentors, friends, and books. Most recently, I’ve been enormously helped by Lynda Barry—in particular by her suggestion to keep the hand moving at all times. Now, when I’m writing, I keep a sketchpad by my desk; when I pause my typing because I’m stumped, or because I need to ponder something further, I pick up a pencil and start doodling rather than staring blankly at my computer screen or looking out the window or checking my phone. I don’t know why this works, other than that it engages the right brain—but it does!
I’m coming to believe more and more that the whole body should be engaged in the writing process, and that drawing is a particularly useful way to connect brain and body and wake up the imagination. My hypothesis—currently being tested in my own pedagogical practice—is that creative writers should be encouraged to draw and diagram as well as to get words down on paper. It also helps to collaborate with folks in other media, as we do at the journal I edit, 7x7. Collaboration can encourage spontaneity and open up fresh perspectives on one’s work.
Amy Bonnaffons, author of The Wrong Heaven. (Credit: Kristen Bach)
Ten Questions for Keith Gessen
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Keith Gessen, whose second novel, A Terrible Country, is out this month from Viking. A literary portrait of modern Russia, A Terrible Country tells the story of Andrei, a young academic living in New York who is called back to Moscow on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis to care for his grandmother. Once there, Andrei sees a country still grappling with the legacy of Soviet Russia and exhausted by Putin’s capitalism. “Gessen’s particular gift is his ability to effortlessly and charmingly engage with big ideas...while still managing to tell a moving and entertaining human story,” says George Saunders. “At a time when people are wondering whether art can rise to the current confusing poliltical moment, this novel is a reassurance from a wonderful and important writer.” Gessen is also the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 2008) and a founding editor of n+1. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or cotranslator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Diaster (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). A contributor to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write A Terrible Country?
It took eight years. This is a little embarrassing to admit because it’s not like the book is a thousand pages long. At one point during the writing of it a friend who works in finance asked how long it would physically take to type a book if you knew all the words already, and the answer in my case, given how fast I type, was one week. And yet it still took eight years.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
If I’m writing, then the answer is whenever and however I can—in notebooks, on scraps of paper, whatever. I wrote large portions of this book in the Gmail app of my old Blackberry while on the subway. That was a great writing phone. Now I use “Notes” on the iPhone—am using it right now in fact—and of course compared to the old Blackberries the keyboard on the iPhone is bullshit. Progress isn’t always progressive.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
It’s been ten years since I published my first/previous novel, so a lot has changed. One obvious thing is the number of new outlets that do interviews, podcasts, etc.—I thought I would find this annoying but actually I like it. I’ve met a bunch of great readers and writers already just through the various interviews.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first non-student publication was in AGNI. I sent a story to Sven Birkerts through my friend George Scialabba, and he took it. I was just out of grad school and wondering if anyone outside my workshop would ever read anything I wrote, so it was very encouraging.
5. What are you reading right now?
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Tony Wood’s forthcoming Russia Without Putin. Both excellent.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
A classic question but I find it hard to answer. Under what circumstances did I arrive on this island? Will I have an opportunity to seek revenge on the forces that put me here? And how long am I here for? Am I Lenin in Finland, just biding my time until I return, or Trotsky in Mexico, counting the days till my assassins arrive? Is this a difficult island to survive on—is it literally a desert?—or an easy one? Would I find it useful and heartening to read about someone in a similar situation, like Robinson Crusoe, or would I find it annoying because he had it so much easier? Finally, who owns the island? Do I need to pay rent?
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Rebecca Curtis. She should be a household name.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Sloth. Indecision. Inconstancy.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
My editor at Viking, Allison Lorentzen, is amazing. She is brilliant and ruthless and thoughtful, all at once. I guess if there’s one particular trait, at the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s passion. Or commitment, to choose a more respectable-sounding word. Either way, it’s the ability to persevere in a very tough business, living with both constant pressure and constant disappointment. You can’t keep doing it and doing it well if you don’t care.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I once heard George Saunders tell a story about being edited at the New Yorker, where his editor kept asking him to cut a highly precise number of lines—18 lines, 25 lines. And George would go do it each time thinking that the editor had a very specific vision for his story. But then he realized the editor just wanted it to be shorter. And the advice here was: There’s almost no piece of writing that can’t be improved by removing 18, then 25, then 21 lines; i.e. you can almost always make something better by making it shorter. This interview being the rare exception to that rule.
Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country (Viking).
Ten Questions for Alexia Arthurs
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alexia Arthurs, whose debut story collection, How to Love a Jamaican, is out today from Ballantine Books. Drawing on Arthurs’s own experiences growing up in Jamaica and moving with her family to Brooklyn, New York, at age twelve, the stories in this collection explore issues of race, class, gender, and family, and feature a cast of complex and richly drawn characters, from Jamaican immigrants in America to their families back home, from tight-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and small Midwestern college towns. Arthurs is a graduate of Hunter College in New York City and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her stories have been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, and the Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I love lattes and coffee shop ambiance, but whenever I try to write in public, I regret it. Everything and everyone is too loud. I need to be in the privacy and quiet of my home, at my desk with a cup of tea. I drink lots of tea when I write. My magic hours are between 12 AM and 2 AM or until I absolutely can’t keep my eyes open anymore. If I’m working on something, I try to write as often as I can—every day, every other day, whenever I can. I can go weeks without writing if the material isn’t pressing. I can’t decide if my writing is better when I feel inspired, or if it’s the process that feels more pleasant.
2. How long did it take you to write How to Love a Jamaican?
I wrote the first story, “Slack,” during my first year of graduate school—this was late 2012 or early 2013. I finished the last story during the winter of 2017.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Often writers talk about writing in an individualized way, our dreams and failures, but on the other end, it feels like a community project—it’s for the culture, for my culture. How to Love a Jamaican feels bigger than me. A surprising and beautiful realization. I’ve gotten messages from people who tell me that they were waiting on a book like mine.
4. Where did you first get published?
I published a short story called “Lobster Hand” in Small Axe.
5. What are you reading right now?
All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva. It’s incredible. This is such a good year for short story collections.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
The Bible I’ve had since I was a teenager. It’s marked-up and worn, and it is one of the most precious things I own. I’m not religious anymore, or I’m still trying to figure out my relationship with religion, but my family is, and my father was a minister when I was growing up, so Biblical stories still hold personal relevance for me.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Whenever I’m asked this question (if I’m asked this question again—I was asked this question last week) I’m going to name short story collections I love. We need to get more people reading story collections! I really admire You Are Having a Good Time by Amie Barrodale and Are You Here For What I’m Here For? by Brian Booker.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
All of my feelings and daydreaming. It’s hard sometimes to sit still and trust the process. The other challenge is the pain of recognizing myself in my writing because my stories come from such a personal place. I don’t always feel like looking in a mirror.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Kindness. Intelligence is nice, but kindness is lovelier. Andra Miller has both. I respect her as a person and as a thinker.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I took photographs in high school. There was a dark room, which now feels like a small miracle in a public high school in Brooklyn, New York. When I was graduating, my photography teacher, Mr. Solo, gave me a little book—The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He taped one of my photographs in one of the blank pages and wrote a note saying that he hoped I would stay involved in art-making wherever life took me. Not really advice, but encouragement, which for me is the same thing. I still have that book. What he did was one of the most generous things a teacher or anyone has ever done for me.
Alexia Arthurs, author of How to Love a Jamaican. (Credit: Kaylia Duncan)
Ten Questions for Sharlene Teo
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sharlene Teo, whose debut novel, Ponti, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Praised by Tash Aw as “not just a singular debut, but a milestone in Southeast Asian literature,” Ponti is the tale of three women in modern-day Singapore: Szu, a teenager living in a dark house on a cul-de-sac; her mother, Amisa, once a beautiful actress starring in a series of cult horror movies as a beautiful, cannibalistic monster, now a hack medium performing séances with her sister; and the privileged, acid-tongued Circe. Told from the perspective of each of the three women, Ponti explores the fraught themes of friendship, memory, and belonging. A Singaporean writer based in the UK, Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award, the 2013 David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire UK, Magma Poetry, and Eunoia Review.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly at my desk, at home. Thinking best in the morning before the weight of the day and the effluvium of social media and the news cycle settles in. When I’m in the middle of a project I’ll work on it whenever I can. In between projects, or struggling to finish something unpleasant before I can get back to fiction writing (like now), I make cryptic notes that I have trouble decoding later, as often as I can. But I read all the time, which I think is a form of thinking novelistically.
2. How long did it take you to write Ponti?
The first, failed iteration took me two years: from 2012 to 2014. I restarted it and that draft took two years: 2014 to 2016. And then the editorial process.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How gently collaborative it’s been. My editors were exacting but never didactic. Postpublication, my publicist is a life buoy. And everything is out of my control since I handed in the final edits, including (this is hard to let go of) how people respond to it.
4. If you could go anywhere in the world for a writing retreat where would it be?
A really high-tech underwater retreat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean where you can see whales and jellyfish through the glass but any time you like you get taken back up to the surface to crystalline beaches. The food would be really good, fresh seafood, and everything would be sustainable and not exploitative in any way and there would be plenty of pasta available too.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s claustrophobic, terrifying, and has incredible narrative momentum. I know it’s been adapted into a film already, but right now as I read it I’m imagining it as a psychological thriller codirected by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfred Hitchcock.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Mary Gaitskill. I feel like she’s always been fearless, way ahead of the curve.
7. Where did you first get published?
It must have been in a creative writing anthology in Singapore, for teenaged poets.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My crippling self-doubt and imposter syndrome. My Eeyorish tendencies. My over-analysis and constant need for approval and comparison.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
Their perceptiveness, empathy, and patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The Anne Lamott classic: The first draft is the down draft; get the words down. The next draft is the up draft: Fix it up, somehow. Or also (I forgot where I heard this from) to doubt yourself means you’re on to the right thing. I find that reassuring.
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti. (Credit: Barney Poole)
Ten Questions for Jos Charles
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jos Charles, whose new poetry collection, feeld, is out today from Milkweed Editions. Charles’s second book is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech. In an inventive transliteration of the English language that is uniquely her own—like Chaucer for the twenty-first century: “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage,” she writes—Charles reclaims the language of the past to write about trans experience. “Jos Charles rearranges the alphabet to survive its ferocity against her body,” writes Fady Joudah, who selected the collection as a winner of the National Poetry Series. “Where language is weaponized, feeld is a whistleblower, a reclamation of art’s domain.” Charles is the author of a previous poetry collection, Safe Space, published by Ahsahta Press in 2016, and is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and a Monique Wittig Writer’s Scholarship. She received an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in Long Beach, California.
1. How long did it take you to write the poems in your new book?
I began writing many of the poems in feeld in 2014; I had a compiled set of them in 2016 and completed the edited, to-be-published version in 2017.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When writing the poems that make up Safe Space, I was working retail and then an office job. So I would spend, on a productive weekday, one to two hours writing and editing and about two to three hours a day reading, researching, and taking notes. Weekends I was more intensive. With feeld, I was writing during an MFA program, which meant time was a little less discrete. I wrote an hour or two a day, edited for about two hours a day, and spent four or so hours reading and taking notes. I’ve maintained something close to that now. That said, there can be weeks I don’t write and weeks where I’m writing much more. I write at my laptop, phone, or in a notebook, and just about anywhere.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most unexpected thing is how people have found uses to my work. I say this not to self-negate, but to communicate the surprise, the praise, of people coming to find, leave, return to art.
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
If you can get into a funded program, yes—it is better pay, hours, and easier than working retail. If you can afford to pay for an MFA, it seems you have access to most resources the MFA provides and your money would be better spent elsewhere—like paying for someone else to get an MFA. It seems to me not worth going in debt over.
5. What are you reading right now?
I recently reread Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and manuel arturo abreu’s transtrender, both of which are beautiful works. I recently subscribed to the Trans Women Writers Collective, which sends out a booklet of writing by a different trans woman writer each month. If you’re able, you ought to sign up for it.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I frequently have been finding myself recommending Eduoárd Glissant’s poetry. Le Sel noir is a particularly astounding work.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Its problems are many and the same as the problems most everywhere else, just articulated in a “literary” way. I would, ideally, want the conditions that give rise to all these problems to be fundamentally removed. This would include “big” things like the United States government as it exists, has existed; profit, private ownership of public goods and labor. The old socialist hopes. It would also include those “smaller” things like behaviors and words and presumptions. In lieu of this, if not this, until this, I could see, as a kind of coping with these conditions, an extramarket or extragovernmental body that organizes material support for writers. A public fund where writers get together and try to decide what to do with the pharmaceutical, supermarket, and other such kinds of money that somehow found its way—through tax write offs, donations—to “the writing community,” to be distributed to the most vulnerable within that community. Of course, violences are not equal, so there would need to be some sort of weighted system to determine distribution of funds based on “quantifying” larger social exclusions. I imagine there’d be fewer prizes and grants and more public goods and services—like housing for writers without fixed addresses or legal support for incarcerated writers, online or mailed lending libraries. This would require middle-class, largely academic-situated writers to forgo their grants and, many having faced financial and housing instability before, unfortunately, to become adjacent to those horrors again. That’s what is at stake though. It’s a messy thought for a messy time.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I can’t think of any impediments unique to my writing life, only impediments that are obvious, manifold, to life in general that happen to additionally hinder my writing life: money, other people, myself.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would like to one day run a local, worker’s paper. It would include creative work, organizational events, opinion pieces, and lots of collectivizing of labor, goods. It would also inevitably be time-consuming and a financial failure.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Saeed Jones once said—and I may very well be misquoting—poets don’t make money. If they have money, it came from somewhere that wasn’t, at least initially, directly their writing. Maybe support from parents, another job, or, if lucky, eventually and in addition, a grant here and there, an academic or nonprofit job. As someone who had been writing and publishing for close to ten years before making any money off of my writing, and then certainly not enough to sustain myself, it was good to hear at that time. Which is to say, in a system that doesn’t value writing, but only the marketing possibility of the writer and the written object, to write is the “success” itself. It’s both disheartening and astonishing. So you make a market of yourself and keep what you can off the books. Along the axes of familiar identarian violences, this is typical: You cross the street to walk over there, you shut up there to speak over here, you sell your wares to buy some shoes—and if not shoes, a coke; if not a coke, a book; if not a book, a bag of rice. And what isn’t your wares?
Jos Charles, author of feeld. (Credit: Cybele Knowles)
Ten Questions for Jasmine Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jasmine Gibson, whose debut poetry collection, Don’t Let Them See Me Like This, is out this month from Nightboat Books. In poems that inexorably tie the personal to the political, Gibson speaks to the disillusioned in moments of crisis, whether in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or in the long, slow echo of the Syrian civial war. “Reading this collection is like listening to love poems on a dock while watching transnational cargo ships on fire and sinking,” writes poet Tonga Eisen-Martin about the collection. “Here there are no gods of private causes. Just words dashing on our behalf, only a breath’s distance in front of the beast.” Gibson is also the author of the chapbook Drapetomania, released by Commune Editions in 2015, and coauthor, with Madison Van Oort, of the chapbook TimeTheft: A Love Story (The Elephants, 2018). Originally from Philadelphia, Gibson lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Don’t Let Them See Me Like This?
The book was written over the course of three years. It has changed a lot from what it was originally supposed to be. I thought it would only be two years of work, which is what it was at first. Different things happened, choices made, no love lost, and now it’s a three-year-old maenad waiting to be born.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started writing about five years ago, I would go to this specific bar in Manhattan’s West Village and do a whole ritual. I’d get my paycheck, get a book from St.Mark’s Bookstore, then a banh mi, and then four margaritas in I’d start writing in the darkness of the bar. I did this ritualistically: a specific day, a specific time, a specific bar, alone in the dark. I don’t do this anymore. I like writing in the sun, in bed, in the middle or after kissing. I’m a true Leo, I love love, and writing is like love. It’s painful sometimes, but it really burns you in a way that everyday stuff doesn’t really do. It reminds me of this Bobby Womack quote I saw once: “I live for love. I’ve always been tortured by love. I don’t mind the pain. I want to be the king of pain.” And in a way I, too, love to be the King of Pain, Queen of Ache.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
Everyone says time, but babies come when they want to come, that’s what books are like. I’d say the most surprising thing is how the publication process really makes your world smaller and prepares you for postpartum from your book. It gives you a little taste into the way people think about you and your work. It’s really truth telling.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published first by Commune Editions. They were, at that time, the only people to really dig my work before anyone else.
5. What are you reading right now?
Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo terciario / The Tertiary, Reek Bell’s A Great Act, and Claude McKay’s A Long Way From Home.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Authors outside of institutions. That’s where the most interesting work is coming from. With institutions, it’s always this bait-and-switch thing that happens that puts a straight jacket on people’s work.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Myself, sometimes I’m unsure, sometimes I’m hubris. I think when I wrote TimeTheft: A Love Story with Madison Van Oort, I was able to balance out my own thoughts with her level headedness.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
My most genuine response would be that it was more accessible to voices that are pushed to the margins. But also I think this response gets perverted by the publishing and literary community, which is why you have “special”(fetish) issues to talk about subjects that are just normal ways of living for a lot of people. So, I’d say: more incendiary small presses and zine makers to the front.
9. When you’re not writing, what do you like to do?
I like to hangout with friends, drink, talk to my mom and sister, and go on dates with my partner. I like reading about strange factoids and record shopping.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
There is none really, either it’s classicist or unfeasible. I think sincerity is important to the process of writing, because the work really can speak for itself, and no one can pimp that out. So, mine is this: Get in where you fit in, and where you don’t, break it.
Jasmine Gibson, author of Don’t Let Them See Me Like This. (Credit: Sean D. Henry-Smith)
Ten Questions for J. M. Holmes
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features J. M. Holmes, whose debut story collection, How Are You Going to Save Yourself, is out today from Little, Brown. This linked collection follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye, and Gio, four young friends coming of age in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, grappling with the complexities of family history and class; the discovery of sex, drugs, and desire; and the struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as Black men in America. Holmes is, as Rebecca Makkai puts it, “not just a new voice but a new force: honest, urgent, compelling, often hilarious, and more often gut-wrenching.” Born in Denver and raised in Rhode Island, Holmes is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the White Review, and H.O.W. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is currently at work on a novel.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Starting with a simple question and I can’t even answer this one. I used to write at night a lot, very late when everything is quiet. I’m not much of a morning person. Lately, I’ve been writing on my phone at work when it’s slow and we don’t have any tickets in the kitchen—sacrilege, I know.
2. How long did it take you to write How Are You Going to Save Yourself?
Some of the stories are revamped versions of pieces I wrote as an undergrad, so I guess seven years. It pains me to say that since it makes those 250 pages seem really small. The bulk of the collection was written between 2015 and 2016, though.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How little control I have over it. It is a terrifying process to release your literary babies into the world, where anybody can say anything they want about them. Also, just how long it takes from sale to shelf—slowest seventeen months of my life.
4. Where did you first get published?
I got published in some student publications as an undergrad, but the first time I got paid for anything literary was the Paris Review. (Shameless shout out to Anna, my agent. She’s dope.)
5. What are you reading right now?
Currently, I’m reading Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts and Ohio by Stephen Markley. They are very different books. The former is probably in conjunction with my answer to the publication process question. Trying to fill the Zen reserves (even though it definitely doesn’t work like that) before this process really takes off.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
You mean if I couldn’t have any albums? Cause music would be the first piece of art I took with me—probably [Kendrick Lamar’s] Section.80 or Channel Orange. And am I stranded for an indefinite amount of time? Cause if not I’d probably pick something long enough to keep me occupied until I’m rescued. Enough deflecting; tough question. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov. I feel like that book would satisfy my philosophy itch and still give me a plot to escape through. I’ve only read it in its entirety once, but the excerpts I’ve read here and there since then keep revealing new things to me.
7. Who is the most underrated author in your opinion?
Claude McKay or Breece D’J Pancake. The latter cause he took his own life so young and has a small body of work. The former, I don’t really know, maybe because he was writing at a time when there were a lot of literary sharks in the water—Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright. But either way, they both deserve to be on ELA curriculums in the United States.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paying rent.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
Attention to detail. I know it sounds like an obvious one, but Ben George is a meticulous dude when it comes to the written word. We’ve had debates over single words. He was also instrumental in helping me hammer out all the age and time continuities in the book.
10. What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Almost everything Amity Gaige has ever told me probably ranks up there. When I was graduating from college she told me to go get a job and live a little. She said, “Learn how to write and have a job and if you’re still writing and yearning to write, you’ll be fine. You’ll be a writer.” Either that or, “Don’t write drunk too often, you’ll lose the sound of your own voice.” Her husband might’ve said that one, actually. Either way, they both come from her section and they’re both true.
J. M. Holmes, author of How Are You Going to Save Yourself. (Credit: Julie Keresztes)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Catherine Lacey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Lacey, whose new story collection, Certain American States, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lacey’s formidable range as a fiction writer is on full display in a dozen short stories populated by ordinary people seeking the extraordinary, from a young New Yorker trying to decipher a series of urgent, mysterious messages on a stranger’s phone (“ur heck box”) to a nameless man recently fired by “The Company” who wakes up in a purgatory of linens and pillows (“The Grand Claremont Hotel”). Lacey is the author of the novels The Answers (2017) and Nobody Is Ever Missing (2014), both published by FSG. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017. Her novels have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she coauthored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair, published by Bloomsbury last year. Born in Mississippi, she lives in Chicago.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Certain American States?
The oldest story in Certain American States was written in 2012, and the newest was finished in early 2018. But I also wrote two novels during those six years, and I wrote several other stories that I did not include in the collection.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day, usually first thing in the morning until lunch, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Writing regularly has always been the primary way I’ve avoided a nervous breakdown, so it’s unclear to me whether it’s a joyful or medicinal activity. It’s probably both.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Being translated was a shock to me. It continues to be a shock. Based on reception, it seems my novels are better in Italian than English.
4. When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
There are two senses in which a person is a writer; only one of them matters. The more important sense is that you are a person who writes. I don’t recall making the decision to be that writer; I was always writing. The second sense is that you somehow convince other people to pay you to write. I was slow to accept that I wanted to be that sort of writer, or rather I was slow to believe that it was even an option for me, so the moment I realized I had that desire is similarly difficult to track.
5. What are you reading right now?
Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Unfortunately, it’s probably someone I’ve never read. The amount of books that were either not written or not published because the authors did not believe anyone would ever care, or could not find the people who would care, is staggering.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish American publishers would pursue more work in translation, especially from smaller countries.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Wanting to read all the time. Illness. The weather. My own overwrought tendency toward nostalgia.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s always the next book. I don’t think beyond the book I’m writing and I’m always writing one.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You can only do a day’s work in a day.
Catherine Lacey, author of Certain American States. (Credit: Willy Somma)
The Written Image: The Art of the Affair
Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.
Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Emily Jungmin Yoon
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Jungmin Yoon, whose debut poetry collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, is out today from Ecco. In the collection, Yoon explores gender, race, and the history of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on so-called comfort women—Koren women who worked in Japanese-occupied territories during World War II. Yoon was born in Busan in the Republic of Korea and received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She won the 2017 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Ordinary Misfortunes, and has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from Ploughshares, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Yoon’s poems and translations have appeared in the New Yorker, POETRY, and the New York Times Magazine, and she serves as poetry editor for the Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers Workshop. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Korean literature at the University of Chicago.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home, usually late night. I find that poems in my head become louder when everything is quiet. I write rather sporadically now, so there isn’t a fixed schedule, but when I was writing the poems in A Cruelty Special to Our Species, I would write maybe three to five days a week.
2. How long did it take you to write A Cruelty Special to Our Species?
To completion, about four years, but a good chunk of the poems came in early 2015, in the last semester of my MFA program at NYU—that was a very fruitful period.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That time goes by so quickly! It took a little more than a year for the book to be published after the signing of the contract, and I felt like I just couldn't wait. But after rounds of proofreading and editing, a year had already passed.
4. Where did you first get published?
My first magazine publication was the Claremont Review, a Canadian magazine that publishes works by writers and artists in the age range of 13 to 19 from around the world. It was very exciting and encouraging to see my poems in print among others.’ I’m grateful for the space that CR provides young creators.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am reading the complete works of Kim Su-young’s poetry, from 1945 to 1968. His poetry influenced a lot of other poets, and I’m interested in his relationship to language, as he was writing post-liberation and when linguistic nationalism was rampant.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
Maybe an instructive book on how to survive in the wild.... But for joy, Li-Young Lee’s Rose. There are so many amazing books, but Rose was my first love in poetry.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
She’s more unrecognized than underrated, perhaps, but: Ronyoung Kim. She was the author of Clay Walls, which is the first novel written in the U.S. about Korean immigrant experience. Published in 1986, Clay Walls was the first Korean American novel. Not many people now seem to know about her or the book, though it was nominated for the Pulitzer.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Stress from non-writing work, for sure. I have to deliberately and strategically clear out space and time to not think about any of that and focus on reading and writing poetry.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor?
I appreciate Gabriella Doob and Dan Halpern for their warmth, support, and trust. They believe in my vision and are just wonderful people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Jericho Brown said to our class at Aspen Words, “Be your ultra-self.” I tend to be pretty self-conscious when writing; I think it’s good to be concerned and careful about specific words and their implications, but sometimes it disrupts the flow. So I try to imagine what a bolder, wilder, and more carefree me would say. Any part that doesn’t sit right can be edited later.
Emily Jungmin Yoon, author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species. (Credit: Jean Lechat)
Ten Questions for Amitava Kumar
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Amitava Kumar, whose new novel, Immigrant, Montana, is out today from Knopf. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian immigrant who arrives in New York City in 1990 to study post-colonialism. What follows is a series of romantic entanglements, a trip to Montana, and the intellectual and personal awakenings of a young man exploring what it means to be home—or be without one. “In this land that was someone else’s country,” Kailash says, “I did not have a place to stand.” Kumar, who grew up in Patna, India, is the author of several books of nonfiction, including the essay collection Lunch With a Bigot: The Writer and the World (Duke University Press, 2015), and a novel, Nobody Does the Right Thing (Duke University Press, 2010). His journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Harper’s, the Nation, NPR, and elsewhere, and he has received fellowships in literature from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He is a board member of the Asian American Writers Workshop and lives in upstate New York, where he is the Helen D. Lockwood professor of English at Vassar College.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in my study. My house is right across the street from Vassar College but my study is at the back of the house and overlooks a creek. After my kids have left for school, I sit down to write and then go walking beside the water. I write every day and walk every day.
2. How long did it take you to write Immigrant, Montana?
Decades. Or, I wrote the opening scene on a train when I was going to interview for my first job, as an assistant professor at a university. Other books happened. I wrote other scenes and it wasn’t till three years ago, during a residency at Yaddo, that things fell into place.
3. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How easy it becomes once you have an agent. My last agent was sick and in the hospital when I finished my novel. He was dying. I couldn’t bother him, of course, so I sent out the book on my own. There were no takers. One of the editors made me wait for months on end. Another asked a friend whether my agent was really in the hospital. When my agent died, I acquired another agent. I had a book deal within three days.
4. Where did you first get published?
I’m old. I have been writing and publishing for such a long time that it’s difficult to remember. A part of this novel was first published years ago in a newspaper in India. But in terms of my career, to be honest, I felt I had really published when I got into the pages of Granta. Why? Because it had been a dream for so long.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m about a hundred pages into Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young. Taneja is very alert to social hierarchies but one of the other fascinating things about the book is that it is a rewriting of King Lear and set in modern-day India. I’ve just finished reading Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, a fascinating book for different reasons. What intrigued me most was the structure. I’m going to Milan next month, where Halliday lives, and if I bump into her I want to shower her with compliments and questions.
6. If you were stuck on a desert island, which book would you want with you?
I must confess that there are any number of big books that I haven’t read. The enforced stay on a desert island might just be the ticket. I’d be able to finally read Ulysses or Moby Dick or War and Peace.
7. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
You know, one of the writers I always want to tell my students about is David Markson. This is Not a Novel is a masterpiece of formal invention. I’m surprised that when the world discusses Indian writing, the name of A. K. Ramanujan doesn’t come up more often. His poetry as well as his translations should have earned him a place in the pantheon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Not what but who. Mark Zuckerberg. I’m kidding—but not really.
9. What trait do you most value in your editor or agent?
In my editor, the talent for seeing things whole: You are entering a room, or stepping on a stair, but you know always where you are in the house. And in my agent, who moves very fast, the ability to remind me about the virtue of patience.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
This isn’t very original. But I can’t tell you how often I’ve been consoled or encouraged by that old line from E. L. Doctorow: “Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You only see as far as your headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana. (Credit: Michael Lionstar)
Ten Questions for Idra Novey
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Idra Novey, whose new novel, Those Who Knew, is out today from Viking. Set in an unnamed island country, Those Who Know is the story of Lena, a college professor who knows all too well the secrets of a powerful senator whose young press secretary suddenly dies under mysterious circumstances. It is a novel about the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a divided country—a dramatic parable of power and silence and an uncanny portrait of a political leader befitting our times. Novey is the author of a previous novel, Ways to Disappear (Little, Brown, 2016), winner of the Brooklyn Eagles Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, as well as two poetry collections: Exit, Civilian (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008). Her work has been translated into ten languages, and she has translated numerous authors from Spanish and Portuguese, most recently Clarice Lispector. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I have the most clarity writing at home on the sofa in the early morning. Sometimes it is only one silent hour before everyone else in my apartment wakes up. On weekdays, if I’m not teaching and don’t have any other commitments, I try to get in another long stretch of writing after my children are off at school. Usually, I return to the same spot on the sofa and try to trick myself into focusing the way I did sitting in that same spot earlier in the morning.
2. How long did it take you to write Those Who Knew?
Four years. My earliest notes for the novel are from 2014 and I’ve written endless drafts of it since then.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
I started this novel long before a man who bragged about groping women became president and the silencing of victims of sexual assault became an international conversation. It was startling to see the issues around power imbalances and assault I had been writing about every day suddenly all over the news, especially during the Kavanaugh hearing, when the patriarchal forces that protected Brett Kavanaugh mirrored so much of what occurs in Those Who Knew.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Translated authors are often relegated to a separate conversation in the United States. The number of translated authors reviewed and published in this country has steadily increased since I began translating fifteen years ago, but there remains an “America First” approach to how literature is discussed in this country, which is such a disservice to writing students and readers, especially now. To see how writers in other languages have written about deep divides in their countries can illuminate new ways to write and think about what is at stake in our country now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and alongside it The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham, translated by Ulrike Stark and Jason Grunebaum. I love juxtaposing reading at night from very different books and seeing what they might reveal about each other.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Of the many I could name, Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel is among my favorites. He has an extraordinary novel available in English, The Tender Matador, translated by Katherine Silver. Every time I include The Tender Matador in a class, students end up clutching the book with both hands and commenting on how crazy it is that more readers don’t know about Lemebel.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
An openness to communication. I value so many of the strengths that my editor Laura Tisdel brought to Those Who Knew and also to my first novel, which she edited as well. But on a daily basis what I treasure most about our relationship is her willingness to talk through not only changes to the novel itself, but also the cover design, and all the decisions that come up while publishing a book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Paralyzing doubt. I doubt every word of every sentence I put down. And when I manage to convince myself a sentence can stay for now, the next day when I reread it, I’m often overcome with doubt all over again about whether it’s necessary and whether what goes unsaid in the sentence has the right sort of tone and resonance.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
To get through even half an hour of writing without feeling paralyzed with doubt would be a welcome experience in this lifetime.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
A teacher once scribbled on a piece of writing I handed in, you should be optimistic. Optimistic about what? The note didn’t say, but that vague advice has stayed with me because it’s true: To sit down and write requires a degree of optimism. You have to trust that there is relief to be found in placing one word after another.
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew.
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Oyinkan Braithwaite
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Oyinkan Braithwaite, whose debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, is out today from Doubleday. A novel of violence and sibling rivalry, My Sister, the Serial Killer follows Ayoola, the murderer in the book’s title, and quiet, practical Korede, a nurse who cleans up her younger sister’s messes. (“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood,” Korede says in the novel’s first pages.) The pair work reasonably well together until Ayoola sets her sights on a handsome doctor who has long been the object of Korede’s desire. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called My Sister, the Serial Killer “as sharp as a knife...bitingly funny and brilliantly executed, with not a single word out of place.” A graduate of London’s Kingston University, where she earned a degree in creative writing and law, Braithwaite works as a freelance writer and editor in Lagos, Nigeria.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Most of the time I type on my laptop, lying on my bed. Generally, I like to write when everyone is asleep and everywhere is quiet. But if I have to, I will write on my phone, standing up, in the middle of a party. I try to write every day. It is a fantastic practice, but not an easy one.
2. How long did it take you to write My Sister, the Serial Killer?
The entire writing and editing process took about seven months.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
What has surprised me the most is how much takes place before a book is released. And how much of a book’s success is dependent on the publishers’ faith in the book. I have enjoyed far too much favour, warmth, encouragement and kindness from my agents and publishers, and from strangers—booksellers, book bloggers, etc.—people who do not know me, but are going out of their way to make sure that My Sister, the Serial Killer is a book that is read.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The publishing business is a business at the end of the day. The literary community, however, I believe could make a bit more of an effort to bring to the spotlight books that were well written and engaging but were, for all intents and purposes, unknown.
5. What are you reading right now?
We and Me by Saskia de Coster.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
It surprises me when I mention Robin Hobb’s name and people don’t immediately know who she is. Clearly, I don’t know the right people. The right people would know who Robin Hobb was. Also, her books should have a TV series, and/or a movie.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Frankness. And perhaps kindness. I worked with two editors on this book—Margo from Doubleday and James from Atlantic Books—and it seemed to me that they were conscious of the potential difficulty of having two different views and stances; so they went out of their way to make the process smooth for me.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Social media! Social media is distracting and it invites too many voices into your head. The world is in the room with you and it can be difficult to stay true to yourself and to your creativity.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I would love to be involved in the writing and animating of a feature length animated movie. But I am still honing my skills, especially as far as animation goes; I am not very good yet!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“If I waited till I felt like writing , I’d never write at all.” —Ann Tyler. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” I have learned that it isn’t wise to wait for inspiration; inspiration will meet me at my desk writing.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. (Credit: Studio 24)
Ten Questions for Nuruddin Farah
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nuruddin Farah, whose new novel, North of Dawn, is out today from Riverhead Books. Inspired by true events, the novel follows a Somali couple living in Oslo, whose son becomes involved in jihadism in Somalia and eventually kills himself in a suicide attack. When the son’s wife and children move in with his parents in Oslo, the family finds itself confronted with questions of religion, extremism, xenophobia, displacement, and identity. Farah, who the New York Review of Books calls “the most important African novelist to emerge in the past twenty-five years,” is the author of four previous novels, most recently Hiding in Plain Sight (Riverhead, 2014), which have been translated into more than twenty languages and have won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born in Baidoa, Somalia, he currently lives in Cape Town.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write less and less when I am on the road, travelling, or in upstate New York, teaching. But when I am in Cape Town, where I reside for much of the year, I write daily for no less than six hours.
2. How long did it take you to write North of Dawn?
It took a lot of time—two years to do the research, and nearly a year and a half to whip the text into shape. I suppose that is the nature of research-based literary fiction.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes up to a year or more for a book to be published after the author has submitted it.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It saddens me that the shelf life of literary fiction has been drastically reduced to a few months after publication, unless the said novel becomes a commercial success or is made into a movie or the author gains some notoriety.
5. What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, which is on the syllabus of a course about journalism and literature I am teaching at Bard College this semester.
6. Would you recommend that writers get an MFA?
Having never taken an MFA, I am in no position to speak to this.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
My favorite editors have been the editors who have shown me the weaknesses of the draft texts I submit and I am grateful to them when they do.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I have found traveling away from Cape Town, where I do much of my writing, has proven to be an impediment.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Taken as a whole, I am content with the body of work I’ve produced.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That no writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.
Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn. (Credit: Jeffrey Wilson)
Ten Questions for Andrea Gibson
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Andrea Gibson, whose new poetry collection, Lord of the Butterflies, is out today from Button Poetry. Exploring questions of gender, identity, love, loss, family, and politics, the poems in Gibson’s book “seamlessly spin hopelessness into hope, fire back at social norms, and challenge what it means to be human,” writes Them magazine. An LGBTQ activist and one of the most celebrated spoken-word poets in the country, Gibson (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) began their career in poetry in 1999 with a break-up poem performed at an open mic in Boulder, Colorado; since then they have gone on to win four Denver Grand Slam titles and in 2008 won the first-ever Woman of the World Poetry Slam. Gibson has performed on stages throughout the country, is the author of four previous books of poetry, and has released seven spoken-word albums. They live in Boulder.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I tour quite a bit and struggle to find time to write on the road. When I’m not touring I write constantly, sometimes up to ten hours each day as it’s the most fulfilling and nourishing blessing in my life. I write at home, in any room where I can close a door behind me and have privacy because I most often write out loud, sometimes yelling, sometimes whispering at the walls, and that’s an awkward (and comical) thing to have anyone witness. I very rarely write sitting still. I pace and pace until the poem finds its way to the page.
2. How long did it take you to write Lord of the Butterflies?
It was written over the course of two years, the first poems sparked by the massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and others by the election of Trump. Like many writers, I’ve never in my life created so much as I have in response to our current political climate. I actually had to contact the editor several times to see if I could add one more poem to the book, as I was writing so much up until the final due date.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This is my first book published with Button Poetry and it’s been fascinating to watch what goes into putting out a book with a publishing company that has such a large online/video/social media presence. I’d admired Button’s model for quite a while, specifically because of how many youth have fallen in love with poetry because of them, and I’ve been mesmerized by all of the different mediums they highlight in the release process.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’ll speak to something I’ve seen significant positive changes in over the years, something I’d like to see continue to keep changing for the better—and that’s the publication of writers who might have been previously classified as “slam poets” or “spoken word artists.” To be skilled in the art of performing one’s poem doesn’t negate how powerfully that poem can live on the page. Great poets like Danez Smith are proving that both spaces can be mastered by an artist, and it’s been beautiful to watch more and more people recognize that.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry—currently Jeanann Verlee’s Prey and Lino Annunciacion’s The Way We Move Through Water. I also just finished Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, which I picked up after reading it was one of Hanya Yanagihara’s favorite books. And I’m finally, after many recommendations, reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
The first who comes to mind is Donte Collins, mostly because I think this author could win every prize there is to win and still be deserving of more. When I first heard Donte read I was stunned, pummeled by beauty, like that twenty-minute reading would be enough light to sustain me for a year.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to be blunt. As harsh as it may sound it’s really important for me to know I have an editor who is willing to say, “Take this entire poem out of the manuscript.” And that’s not to say I don’t have feelings when that happens, but that kind of honesty helps me feel significantly more solid about what I’m putting out.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I’m a very slow writer. Some wouldn’t think so because I put out new work quite often, but that’s only because of the number of hours I spend writing. It’s not rare for me to spend twelve solid hours going over and over a single stanza.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
It’s a dream of mine to one day write a musical. When I’m writing poems I almost always write to music, and I collaborate with musicians often during live performances. I’ve always been hyper focused on how the words and rhythm live out loud, and I’m constantly writing songs in my head. I think it would be a magical experience to collaborate on a production that features so many different artists.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Write what you are terrified to write.” When I was first given that advice I struggled to write for almost a year because I wasn’t yet ready to write what I was afraid to write, and I didn’t want to waste my time writing anything else. These days, I consider that advice every time I begin a poem. I pay attention to what requires courage to say, and I do my best to try to say it.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies.
Ten Questions for Wesley Yang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Wesley Yang, whose debut essay collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is out today from W. W. Norton. A mix of reporting, sociology, and personal history, The Souls of Yellow Folk collects thirteen essays on race and gender in America today. Titled after The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic 1903 collection, Yang’s book takes the reader “deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse,” novelist Karan Mahajan writes. In addition to essays on race and whiteness, The Souls of Yellow Folk includes profile pieces on Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed more than two dozen people at Virginia Tech in 2007; political scientist Francis Fukuyama; historian Tony Judt; and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. Yang has written for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, New York magazine, the New Republic, Tablet, and n+1. He lives in Montreal.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write every day at one of two public libraries in Montreal.
2. How long did it take you to write the essays in The Souls of Yellow Folk?
The essays collected in The Souls of Yellow Folk were written over the course of ten years.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
This was the first book I’ve ever published so I had no expectations. I just took everything as it came and accepted it just as it was.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
See above.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
Really hard to say. I’m a big fan of Heinrich Kleist, who isn’t universally taught and known.
7. Where was your very first publication?
I worked for a weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, New Jersey, when I graduated from Rutgers. My first publication that wasn’t straight news for a New Jersey local paper was a review of a biography of Albert Speer for Salon.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Family life and raising a child requires a writer to organize his workflow in a way that is at odds with the way writing happens, at least for me. I’ve made partial strides in this direction but many remain to be made.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
This collection is a miscellany of previously published essays. Still haven’t written a book that is a single free-standing work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Writing is a form of manual labor and should be approached in that spirit.
Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk. (Credit: Rich Woodson)
Ten Questions for Claire Fuller
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Claire Fuller, whose third novel, Bitter Orange, is out today from Tin House Books. A literary mystery, Bitter Orange is the story of Frances Jellico, who, in the summer of 1969, takes a job researching the architecture of a dilapidated mansion in the English countryside and finds a peephole underneath a floorboard in her new bathroom that gives her access to her neighbor’s private lives. Novelist Gabriel Tallent calls it “a twisty, thorny, darkly atmospheric page-turner.” Fuller, who didn’t start writing until she was forty, is the author of two previous books, Swimming Lessons (2017) and Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), both published by Tin House Books. She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband and two children.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I worked for so many years in a nine-to-five-thirty job that I can’t get out of that habit. I’m at my desk most days for most of the day, doing bits of novel writing, in between other bits of writing, answering e-mails, and reading. I try to keep weekends free of writing, but depending on where I am in the cycle of publishing that doesn’t always work.
2. How long did it take you to write Bitter Orange?
Almost exactly two years, and then some additional time for edits and so on. I keep a writing diary, just a line a day with my word count and whether the day has gone well or badly. Mostly it’s badly, but that helps to look back on when I’m writing the next one.
3. What was the most surprising thing about the publication process?
How long it can take from a publisher buying a novel to that book being on the shelves in bookshops. I’m not a very patient person and having to wait so long —nineteen months in one case—is not easy.
4. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d like there to be less focus on one lead book a season by large publishers, and instead for them to spread their publicity and marketing budgets more broadly. Industrywide it seems that only a few books get a massive push, while lots of many brilliant novels that publishers have bought are left to either sink or swim by themselves.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a sinister and strange story so mixed up and feverish that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Reading it is a wonderful distraction.
6. Who is the most underrated author, in your opinion?
I think Barbara Comyns could be better known. Her novels are wonderfully quirky, full of people who levitate or go mad from ergot poisoning. It’s hard to know whether she’s underrated—there are a lot of people who know her work, but probably lots more who don’t.
7. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I’m lucky to have two amazing editors: Juliet at Penguin in the UK, and Masie at Tin House in the US. They both work very differently, and although sometimes I’m sitting in the middle trying to sort out differing advice, I value hugely what they both have to say. Juliet is very good at the high-level view of a novel, while Masie and I will have long Skype conversations about whether a ‘sleeveless vest’ is actually a thing, whether US readers will have heard of Fuzzy Felt, or if Americans eat cauliflower cheese or cauliflower with cheese sauce. I love getting into the nitty-gritty of a novel, right down to the sentence and the word level.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My own procrastination. Reading all my reviews (and no, it’s not possible to stop). My untidy writing room. My cat, who I got in order to have a writer’s cat, but who loves my husband more than me. Reading other people’s brilliant novels (and no, I’m not going to stop).
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
Finish my fourth novel? Or just write the next damn sentence. When I’m only at 11,000 words all of it feels like an insurmountable task.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write like “none of it happened, and all of it is true,” which, if I’ve got my source correct, is something Ann Patchett’s mother said.
Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange. (Credit: Adrian Harvey)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Sarah McColl
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sarah McColl, whose memoir, Joy Enough, is out today from Liveright. “I loved my mother, and she died. Is that a story?” From the first sentences of her memoir, which Megan Stielstra calls “a stunningly beautiful and meditative map of loss,” McColl captures what it means to be a daughter. Through vivid memories, Joy Enough charts the dissolution of the author’s marriage alongside the impending loss of her mother, who is diagnosed with cancer. A book about love and grief, Joy Enough attempts to explain what people mean when they say, “You are just like your mother.” Sarah McColl was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. A MacDowell fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, her essays have appeared in the Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Joy Enough?
For a long time I didn’t think I was writing a book. I thought I was writing essays, and then I was writing a thesis, and then I started thinking of it as my weird art project. I was so afraid to call it a book because I was afraid it wouldn’t be published, and then I would be a writer with an unpublished book in a drawer. Now I think at least one book in a drawer is a good thing. It means you’re doing the work. But I must have known there was something like a book there, whatever I called it, because I kept working on it, and I kept sending it out. That process of writing and revising took three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I didn’t know how to make memory conform to a narrative arc. There were discrete scenes and moments that were very vivid to me, but I struggled with how to connect one to another in some linear, continuous way. I remember expressing this frustration to one of my professors. She said, “Write the scene, hit return a few times, and keep going.” So that was my solution in the end. The return key.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I participate with a group of writers in what we call “the 250s.” We have a shared Google doc with the days of the week marked out and a column for each writer. The goal is to write 250 words five days a week. The low word count is a mind trick to get you to sit down (it’s all about the mind tricks!) and then, hopefully, sail past 250 words. But if the writing is going badly, and you stop at 250, you still have some sense of accomplishment (again, mind trick). That’s the goal, mind you, and I do not consistently achieve this goal. Sometimes I walk around thinking about an essay for six months and then sit down and write a draft in one burst. I like the fuzzy, quiet quality of the mornings and the night. I have a small studio above the garage, but I also tend to write in bed a lot.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I had no idea just how much buy-in a book requires. It’s not enough to have an agent champion a book and then for an editor to fall in love with it. The editor has to get everyone on board—sales, marketing, publicity. If your book finds a publisher, then it takes all those same people working on your behalf for a book to find its way in the world. Writing is such a solitary activity, but publishing is a completely different animal. I didn’t realize that at the outset. Sorry to get all “it takes a village,” but it really does, and I have pinched myself many times at how grateful I have felt in Liveright’s hands.
5. What are you reading right now?
I have a predictably overambitious new year’s resolution to read a book of poetry, a novel, a book of short stories, and a book of nonfiction each month. Right now I’m reading People Like You by Margaret Malone, which is dark and funny and sublime; Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange, which feels marvelously escapist and lush and has been keeping me up too late; Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, who needs no adjectives; and I’m anxiously awaiting Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Discovering and falling in love with an author is such a private activity. When you meet someone who loves the same writer you do, it becomes a kind of shorthand for a shared aesthetic or philosophical worldview. I nearly knocked over my wine glass with excitement when I met a woman who wanted to talk about Canadian author Elizabeth Smart as much as I did. That’s not wide recognition, but it’s a form of literary community, and that’s probably more lasting in the end.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Getting my MFA was the best decision of my adult life, and I loved my program at Sarah Lawrence. I wanted to be able to teach at the college level, I knew what I wanted to work on, and I had some money saved to pay for part of it. But I think it depends what a writer is looking for in their creative life (structure, guidance, encouragement, time), the package offered by the school, and their long-term career goals. If you have the resources to devote two or three years to the world of language and ideas, I found it a powerful and blissful experience.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The mental space daily life demands. Buying a birthday present, calling the insurance company, grocery shopping, dishes, e-mail. This was captured so well in the comic The Mental Load, which focuses on parenthood but applies equally to keeping the lights on and the toilet paper replenished, if you ask me. This is why I love residencies. I honestly cannot believe how much more space I have in my brain when I am not thinking about how and what to feed myself three times a day.
9. What trait do you most value in agent?
I trust my agent, Grainne Fox, to always tell me the hard thing. That she does so with a soft touch and incomparable charm is proof she’s for me. I trust her implicitly, and we get on like a house on fire. That’s the foundation for any great relationship.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
You must find pleasure in the work itself—doing the work. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough. (Credit: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)
Ten Questions for Hala Alyan
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Hala Alyan, whose fourth poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is out today from Mariner Books. In wild, lyrical poems, Alyan examines the connections between physical and interior migration, occasioned by the age of twenty-nine, which, in Islamic and Western tradition, is a year of transformation and upheaval. Leaping from war-torn cities in the Middle East to an Oklahoma Olive Garden to a Brooklyn brownstone, Alyan’s poems chronicle a personal history shaped by displacement. “Alyan picks up the fragments of a broken past and reassembles them into a livable future made more dazzling for having known brokenness,” writes Kaveh Akbar. “This is poetry of the highest order.” Hala Alyan is an award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist as well as a clinical psychologist. Her previous books include the novel Salt Houses (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and the poetry collections Hijra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), FourCities (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), and Atrium (Three Rooms Press, 2012).
1. How long did it take you to write The Twenty-Ninth Year?
I wrote it in bits and pieces over a year, and then stitched it together into a coherent collection in a few weeks, which is usually how I work with poetry.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Much of it was written from a state of pain—psychic, emotional grief, a time in my life that involved a fair amount of evolution and “lying fallow,” as my friend put it. At times I found it difficult to write about an experience I was still in the middle of, which is why I had to wait to iron out the narrative until things felt more settled.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m not picky about location. I make sure to write thirty minutes a day, though that generally is for fiction, which I have a harder time being disciplined about. In terms of poetry, I usually wait until I need to write, which makes for a really thrilling, cathartic experience of creation.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how involved and long the process can be! How many beautiful, moving parts have to work together just to create a book, and how much you need dedication and love for the process from every single person involved.
5. What are you reading right now?
At the moment, I’m rereading Virgin by Analicia Sotelo as well as The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
That’s such a difficult question, because I wish all good writing (especially by writers of color) had equal recognition—an impossible want, I know. There’s several books coming out or recently out by women of color that I’m really hoping soak up a ton of recognition: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal, To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari and A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish the different parts of the community were more integrated. Starting off, I knew virtually nothing about the publishing industry, for instance, which seems like an oversight. I would love to have more interaction with different members of the writing, reading and publishing community—to know more about what publicists do, to talk to more booksellers and libraries, to really be reminded that we’re all in this together!
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My easily distracted nature: laundry, walking the dog, making oatmeal. Although I also think that these are necessary parts to a writing life, as is work (for me) and procrastination and daydreaming.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
A combination of honesty and empathy, which I’ve been lucky enough to find both in my agent and the editors I’ve worked with so far. I also like a bit of tough love, because it brings out the eager student in me.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I like to toss Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird at anyone who is even remotely interested in writing. In particular, I love her approach to breaking down a massive writing task into small, digestible pieces, and finding joy in those pieces.
Hala Alyan, author of The Twenty-Ninth Year. (Credit: Bob Anderson)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Juliet Lapidos
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Juliet Lapidos, whose debut novel, Talent, is out today from Little, Brown. Talent is the story of Anna Brisker, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in English who is uninspired by—and desperately struggling to finish—her dissertation: an intellectual history of inspiration. But when she strikes up a friendship with the niece of Frederick Langley, the legendary short story writer who suffered from a supposedly fatal case of writer’s block, Anna finds a perfect case study for her dissertation. Helen Oyeyemi calls Talent a “deliciously funny, sharp, and sincere inquiry into the factors underpinning our valuations of art, labor, ourselves, and each other.” Juliet Lapidos is a senior editor at the Atlantic. Previously she was the editor of the op-ed and the Sunday Opinion sections at the Los Angeles Times, a culture editor at Slate, and an editor of the New York Times Opinion section. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the websites of the New Yorker and the New Republic.
1. How long did it take you to write Talent?
About six years, though in my defense I had a full-time job (as a journalist) that whole time. Mostly I wrote on weekends.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
When I started, I thought I knew how to write. Turns out, I was wrong. I basically taught myself as I went. I found it especially difficult to figure out how to make time move. In an early draft, I wrote a dinner scene in which I described everything—making plans, sitting down to eat, the waiter’s arrival, looking over the menu, ordering…. It took me a while to understand what I could leave unsaid.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly from home, mostly from bed, on weekends, as often as I can. But since starting a family, “can” is quite rare.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The book industry gets a lot of flak but I found everyone at Little, Brown (and Borough Press, my U.K. publisher) both kind and dedicated.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Uncle Silas is creepy, sophisticated, and memorable, yet oddly overlooked in classrooms. Or, if we’re talking living authors: Monica Youn. Blackacre is a masterpiece that—IMHO—can convince people who think they don’t like modern poetry that they do, in fact, like modern poetry.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
Subservience to Hollywood. Too many people seem to aspire to have their books “optioned.”
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My job and my child compete for first place on the impediments list.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
I suppose the real answer is honesty, but that’s dull, so I’ll say: Tolerance of ambiguity. I think a lot of contemporary editors, myself included, push too much for clarity when sometimes a little muddiness is just the thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It’s actually a corporate slogan: Just do it.
Juliet Lapidos, author of Talent. (Credit: Lauren Pisano)
Ten Questions for Laura Sims
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Laura Sims, whose first novel, Looker, is out today from Scribner. “A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment,” in the words of Idra Novey, Looker descends into the increasingly unhinged mind of a woman whose obsession with her neighbor unravels after an altercation with the beautiful actress at an annual block party. Earning comparisons to the voice of Ottessa Moshfegh and the psychological fascinations of Paula Hawkins, Sims’s novel dissects our image-obsessed, media-saturated culture while offering a compelling story of a sympathetic character on the edge. Sims is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Staying Alive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), and the editor of Fare Forward: Letters From David Markson (powerHouse Books, 2014). She lives outside of New York City with her family.
1. How long did it take you to write Looker?
About three years, off and on. I wrote the first sixty pages or so by hand, in a kind of frenzy, after hearing my narrator’s voice speak what would become the novel’s first line. Then I wrote it in bursts whenever I could. I was juggling it with teaching, library science grad school, and other writing projects at the time, but towards the end of that period it became my focal point.
2. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I try to write every weekday morning, when I have the most energy, from about 8AM to 11 AM. I write at home, in my upstairs office/guest room, at the library, or at a local co-working space. I like mixing it up to stave off tedium…and the threat of sleep. Working from home can definitely be dangerous in that regard; sometimes I need to leave the house to keep myself focused and motivated.
3. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How much happens before the book comes out, and how it requires an incredibly dedicated team of people to bring a single book into the world. My own experience with publishing poetry in the small press world hadn’t prepared me for that; publishing with an indie press is also reliant on a team but that team could consist of one or two (motivated, saintly) people, wearing all sorts of hats. But in the case of commercial literary fiction, you have an agent, an editor, a marketing team, a publicist, proofreaders, lawyers, and so on, and things start to wind up at least six months before the book’s publication date. It’s a whirlwind!
4. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
This is a tricky question for me. I have an MFA, and I’m very grateful to have it because it “certified” me to teach at the college level, as I’ve done for many years. But when my students ask me that same question, I pause and consider the individual. If it’s something they feel they absolutely have to do, and I can see that it feels necessary to them, then I tell them to go for it. If they see it as a way to spend two years focusing on their writing and it won’t put them into massive debt, then I say go for it. If they think it will secure some sort of future path as a writer and/or writing professor, though, that’s a longer discussion. It’s hard to get published, and teaching jobs are scarce even if you publish well. I don’t think an MFA is necessary, but at the same time it can be a good way to connect with other writers, get regular feedback, and grow as a writer. You can also do that out in the real world, though, through community workshops and just plain old life experience.
5. What are you reading right now?
Kudos by Rachel Cusk. I love this trilogy of hers so much, I wish it would go on forever. I don’t know what she’s going to do next, but those last three books are gorgeous and important and also, somewhat magically, fun to read. I also recently read Circe by Madeline Miller, I have to add. Another beautifully written, wonderfully entertaining book, just as good as her first, Song of Achilles. I’ve been recommending all three of these to everyone I know lately.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
The novelist David Markson. He’s been something of a cult figure for many years, but he’s never had a breakthrough moment in the way that other “difficult” writers like W. G. Sebald have. In any case, his last four books, This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel, form a combined masterpiece of formal innovation and emotional resonance that have informed and influenced my writing (and life) since I began reading him in 2004. Reading Markson was a truly life-changing experience for me, and I can’t say that about many novels, even ones I’ve dearly loved.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The one thing I’d change is, I think, changing already: the insularity of the literary and publishing world. Thanks to the advent of social media, blogs, etc., more of the reading public participates in a discussion that was once controlled by a select few. Booksellers, bloggers, librarians, and bookstagrammers now have a lot of say in how a book is received, and mainstream publishers have had to adapt in response. I was impressed, during the pre-publication process for Looker, at how skillfully the marketing team at Scribner used Instagram and Twitter, multiple giveaways on Goodreads and elsewhere, and good old-fashioned hand-to-hand and face-to-face marketing to get the word out about my book.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, just before my novel’s due to come out, the biggest impediment is…the novel that’s about to come out! No, it’s actually all of the necessary business and noise that swirls around having a book come out, all of which I’m happy to do and grateful for, but all of which is also distracting me from the essential business of sitting down and working on my next novel-in-progress. I want to blame my smartphone, but really the impediment is me.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I’d like to finish my MLS degree before the year is out! I’ve been inching along towards that goal for several years now, and am currently on hiatus, but I just have a few classes to finish before I can join the corps of working librarians.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
At one point in my life, when I was juggling more things at once, trying to “do it all,” the best piece of advice came from the aforementioned novelist David Markson, who was a dear friend and told me, “Do your own fucking work!” By that he meant I should stop spending my time on smaller, largely self-assigned writing pieces, or class prep, or other things, and devote myself more fully to doing my own writing. It really did help me take a look at how I was spending my time—this advice came from someone at the end of his life, mind you. I started to say “no” to things when I could, and because of that my life is more streamlined now than it was, say, five or ten years ago. It helped me really zero in on Looker and finish it, in fact. Another excellent piece of advice was something that Richard Ford said to my husband when he met him after a reading: “Be at your station.” The two quotes go well together, actually: Butt in chair, do the work. It’s the most basic and important writing advice there is.
Laura Sims, author of Looker. (Credit: Jen Lee)
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Paige Ackerson-Kiely
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Paige Ackerson-Kiely, whose third poetry collection, Dolefully, a Rampart Stands, is out today from Penguin Books. Set primarily in the rural northeastern United States, the poems in the new book explore poverty, captivity, violence, and the longing to disappear. Employing a range of different forms, from free verse to long prose poetry, the book considers the question of who our captors might be and examines the universal search for connection and freedom. As Michael Robbins writes at the Chicago Tribune, these poems “remind us to be absolutely shot through with anxiety and uncertainty and desire.” Ackerson-Kiely is the author of two previous poetry collections, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007). She lives in Peekskill, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Dolefully, a Rampart Stands?
Once I saw the shape the poems I’d been fiddling with were making, not that long. Maybe six months? But some of the poems go way back—the earliest were written in 2010, the latest in 2018. The conversation between them was revealed to me in 2016, or thereabouts. I write a lot of stuff I end up scrapping.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I’m a slow-burn kind of person. It takes me a long time to commit. That doesn’t mean that I’m not working or feeling something in the intervening months or years, but it means that giving up is always within reach. The most challenging thing always is trusting that something is real / possible / important / will happen. So, in short, the length of time it takes to make a thing is always a challenge for me. The slow climb without much of a view. Trusting you will look out over the valley when you finally get there, breathless and exulted and maybe in love for a second.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Since there are so few opportunities to experience a feeling of freedom in my life, I do not allow rules and regulations to dictate my writing—it’s one thing I can control. I’ve always been a striver, and it just hasn’t brought me the satisfaction I thought it would. Also, my livelihood has never depended on a publication record. So, I’m trying to be done with striving when I have the ability to make that choice. Listen, I am middle-aged, I’m not trying to be a big deal, why should I make writing poems, something I love (and how many things do you really get to love in this life?), into another opportunity to suffer? I write when I can, wherever I am, and I am trying to accept this commitment to lawlessness.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Doomsday prepper that I am, it felt like a surprise that it happened at all! And of course, lucky. And the help of those involved—from first readers to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin—that attention and kindness has been amazing in ways that make me feel awkward and blushy and like doing better next time.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I am savoring an advanced copy of Allan Peterson’s new and selected, This Luminous. He is one of the great love poets of our time, and I will fight anyone who disagrees. I’m also rereading Nicholas Muellner’s The Amnesia Pavillions, an elegant and modest book I cannot learn enough from.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I mean, besides every living contemporary poet? God, I am enthusiastic about so much of what I read! It’s a great time to be alive, and all that. I return to Kerri Webster’s poetry often. Reading her makes me want to join a coven—to learn how to cast a spell like she does.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish I’d had more access as a kid, and I was a library kid through and through. My own kids were library kids. So the thing I’d want to change isn’t a function of the free market or the problem of any specific community. What I’d like to see is the U.S. government purchasing 1,500 copies of every book published in any given year (large presses and small), and distributing those copies among public and school libraries in every state. I can’t even begin to imagine how differently my life would have gone, as a confused teenager in rural New Hampshire, if I’d had access to contemporary poetry. I didn’t. And that’s criminal. It’s not just about me, but many other folks (especially in poor rural communities) interested in art. There just wasn’t anything. My parents worked hard and did their taxes by April 15th and paid for wars they didn’t agree with. Everyone I care about spent too many years looking for something else, some kind of external inspiration. It felt so good early on, like we would suss it out. But some gave up, and who can blame them? It was so hard to find, and the business of living can take everything from you. Wouldn’t it be great if, as a country, we could support our writers and artists in meaningful (by which I mean financial and otherwise) ways? To think of how that war money could be diverted to makers and others who need it to meet basic needs? To get the work of contemporary writers and artists into the hands of people who are hungry for it? They totally exist, they will always exist, and it is critical they are served.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
I need to be kind of exhausted—I don’t know how else to put it—in order to steady myself on the page. I am curious about so many things! The Internet is a problem for a person like me. It’s like I need to get to the end of everything before I can plant myself. I have to know how mussels are harvested, I have to see all of Franky Larouselle’s work available online, walk the perimeter of my town four times, and feel some big feeling for someone (these are a few examples from today), before my mind is relaxed enough to do its own business.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Oh, the human ones! Curiosity, devotion to beauty, vigorousness, humor, love of the underdog, an ability to call bullshit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember when I was in my MFA program, a few of my mentors told me the most important part of being in a program would be the lasting friendships I would make. I’m sure that, jerk that I was/am, I disregarded this advice as pat. Guess what? It was totally true, for me at least. And you don’t have to go to a program—attending an MFA program is not part of this advice, though programs are great for many of us—but finding your writing soulmate: that is the best advice I ever received. And all the best writing advice since has come from my soulmate, Allison Titus. From figuring it out together. That creative relationship has been like a wish for a thousand wishes—I could not write or live without her. As I was advised.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, author of Dolefully, a Rampart Stands.
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Shane McCrae
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shane McCrae, whose sixth poetry collection, The Gilded Auction Block, is out today from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Employing and subverting traditional meter and form, the poems in the new book confront the 2016 presidential election in the United States from both personal and historical perspectives. The poems interrogate issues of identity, freedom, racism, oppression, and inheritance, using inventive line breaks and spacing to create a sense of disruption and shift, fissures in both text and feeling. McCrae is the author of five previous books, including most recently In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award. McCrae lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gilded Auction Block?
I started writing the oldest poem in the book in 2014, and I wrote the newest poem in the book in 2018—so, four years. As with all my other books, I was revising it until the very last possible moment, which in this case was, I think, November 2018.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Maybe not giving up on the long narrative poem—“The Hell Poem”—that takes up a third of the book. I’m a poet! What do I know about narrative? Nothing! But I want to learn.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write everywhere I can, whenever I can, and as often as I can—I don’t have a set place or time.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The Gilded Auction Block is my first book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I wasn’t expecting how many opportunities—for readings, interviews, etc.—working with a press that size would enable. I’m grateful for every one of them.
5. What are you reading right now?
Oh my gosh, kind of a lot of things? I’ll narrow the list down to one book of poetry, one book of fiction, and one book of nonfiction. I’m reading Vahni Capildeo’s Venus as a Bear, Kathryn Davis’s The Silk Road, and Thomas Dilworth’s David Jones: Engraver, Solider, Painter, Poet.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
G. C. Waldrep. I think he’s one of the best poets in America.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would get rid of Twitter.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Fear, I suppose. I’m always trying to do something new, which is usually something I’m afraid of. But for the most part the new things I’m trying to do are only new in a small way—like “The Hell Poem.” I had never written a narrative poem before, so that was new to me. But it’s still strictly metrical, as all my poems are. Writing in free verse would be new to me in a big way, and I’m terrified to try.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Honesty and kindness.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The construction “there is/are” is weak. Lex Runciman gave me that advice.
Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Lindsay Stern
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Lindsay Stern, whose debut novel, The Study of Animal Languages, is out today from Viking. A book that Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney calls “exuberant, wise, and darkly funny,” the novel follows a married couple of professors at an elite New England college who, while brilliant—he’s a philosopher, she’s a rising star in the emerging field of biolinguistics—barely seem capable of navigating their own lives. A send-up of academia and a psychological portrait of marriage, the novel is a comedy of errors that explores the limitations of language, the fragility of love, and the ways we misunderstand one another and ourselves. Lindsay Stern is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Watson Fellowship and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature at Yale University.
1. How long did it take you to write The Study of Animal Languages?
I wrote the novel’s long-abandoned first scene in September of 2013, in a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, and sent the final draft to my editor in late March of 2018. But I wasn’t writing continuously over those years. The first draft took about six months, and then—because I was teaching and applying to graduate school at the time—I set it aside for about a year, and picked it back up during my two years at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa. Once my agent sold it, I worked on it in spurts for about another year and a half with my editor. I remember exactly where I was when she e-mailed us saying she thought it was ready: a Metro North train to New York. It pulled into Harlem’s 125th street station, and I practically floated out onto the platform.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Realizing I had to rewrite it. The nadir of the process came the morning after my first workshop at Iowa, after the brilliant Paul Harding had had his gentle but uncompromising way with my first draft. Light was coming through my window. I had that moment of bodiless amnesia. Then the memory of our two-hour discussion came trampling back, and all the air went out of my skull.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Anywhere I can find a room of my own, green tea, and frozen peas. When I’m in the thick of a project it gets me up and to my desk by 7 AM. Because of other commitments I’ve had to take a break from that rhythm over the last few weeks, which is frustrating for me but not fatal to the work, as long as I keep the embers going internally.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Its length. There’s a phenomenon in journalism that Nick Davies has called “churnalism”—you get the point—which has not infected book publishing, thank god. I had close to two years with my editor to wrestle The Study of Animal Languages into its final form.
5. What are you reading right now?
Nicholson Baker’s Vox.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
She’s already a legend in Japan, but I think everyone should read Taeko Kono. Her story “Toddler Hunting” is a marvel of psychological exploration.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The fee to access Publishers Marketplace.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
A tendency to forget that I have a limited time on earth to do it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Clarity of thought. I was wildly fortunate to land an agent, Henry Dunow, who is both a gifted editor and mensch. My brilliant editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, also lavished attention on the manuscript. Because of them The Study of Animal Languages is a stronger, clearer book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Go there. When the work takes you somewhere deep, it can be difficult not to swim back up out of fear or squeamishness. I did that in early drafts of the book. It took great teachers to show me that the novel was avoiding its true subject matter. So: Always go there.
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Brian Kimberling
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Kimberling, whose second novel, Goulash, is out today from Pantheon. A book that Tessa Hadley calls “a quirky, funny, melancholy portrait of a significant European moment,” is the story of Elliot Black, who escapes small-town Indiana by moving to Prague in the late 1990s, just as the Czech Republic is moving out of the shadow of communism, and Amanda, an English teacher from the United Kingdom with whom he falls in love. The couple explore the dark history and surprising wonders of their adopted city, eventually learning that the forces reshaping Prague are also at work on them. Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent several years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 2010. Snapper, his first novel, was published by Pantheon in 2013.
1. How long did it take you to write Goulash?
Goulash took me three and a half years. I swore up and down three years ago that there was no such thing as a “second novel” curse, that I didn’t feel under pressure, that everything was going to be alright. (My first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013). Yet many people take eight or ten novels to complete a second book if they complete it at all, and now I can see why.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Goulash is set in Prague, and although I lived there for four years, it is not my place or my culture or my people, and I didn’t want to be a brash, clumsy American stepping on all the pretty local wildflowers or the dead bodies underneath them. Goulash is being translated into Czech, which I hope is a sign that I got something right.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In the kitchen, late morning or early afternoon, and sporadically. I write everything by hand, so later I have the dreary job of typing it all up and discovering that my word count is about half what I estimated.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That it happened at all—twice now.
5. What are you reading right now?
Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
All of them! But to a select few we will also grant cash aplenty: Tessa Hadley, Lauren Z. Collins, the fearless Samantha Harvey.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
The literary community is too small—I’d create lots more thoughtful and appreciative readers like the ones who read interviews in Poets & Writers Magazine.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My other life: the one comprising fatigue, childcare, rent, etc.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Is this a trick question? It’s like asking me to choose between children. I have one editor in the U.S. and one in the UK as well as an agent in the UK. All three of them have, I think, taken risks on my behalf. I can go months without hearing from any of them, but I never doubt their commitment.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Don’t shine. Don’t seek to shine. Burn. (Richard Mitchell)
Brian Kimberling, author of Goulash. (Credit: Chris Banks)
Ten Questions for Helen Oyeyemi
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Helen Oyeyemi, whose novel Gingerbread is out today from Riverhead Books. The story of three generations of women and the legacy of the Lee family’s famed gingerbread recipe (“devised by a person who became Harriet Lee’s great-great-great grandmother by saving Harriet’s great-great-great grandfather’s life”) Gingerbread follows its characters through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate. Ron Charles of the Washington Post calls the novel “a challenging, mind-bending exploration of class and female power heavily spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with molasses.” Helen Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, winner of the PEN Open Book Award, along with five novels—most recently Boy, Snow, Bird, which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award and a 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists.
1. How long did it take you to write Gingerbread?
About six months—two of them mostly fuelled by Honey Butter Chip consumption, and I think if those first two months were measured out in terms of daily portions of Honey Butter Chips recommended for a healthy lifestyle, that would adjust the writing time to six or seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting started. I feel like I always say that, but this time around there were four false starts as opposed to the usual one or two.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
For some reason during my first reading of this question my brain added an additional word: ‘why’ do I write as part of the question...how scary. I usually write in bed, daily, until I’ve finished writing the book. But a good portion of Gingerbread was written sitting on the floor, in a chair with no legs but excellent back support, with a very low standing desk for my laptop. I’m still not sure what it was about the posture and the position that made some act of imaginative grace feel more possible—and I’m not saying I ended up pulling any off—but it might work for others, so I’d recommend it.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How pretty the finished copy of the book looks, and how good it is to hold.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Carleton Bulkin’s quicksilver-fine translation of Vladislav Vančura’s Marketa Lazarová, and you should read it too! It’s difficult to describe the narrative tone—tones, really—but this book’s combination of earthiness, the sublime, the infernal, and the wryly metafictional is the most involving I’ve come across in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Kuzhali Manickavel! Prose like a thrown knife with gossamer wings. Funny, tender, piercing, marvelous.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I don’t see either as being in stasis; I suppose the best you can hope for are that the changes are the ones necessary for continued survival.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The thought of having to explain what I’ve done. Or have what I’ve done explained to me, ahhhhh.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
An acute sense of the absurd.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
To pay no attention to writing advice?
Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread. (Credit: Manchul Kim)
Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi reads from her new novel, Gingerbread, published in March by Riverhead Books. Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio.
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Bryan Washington
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bryan Washington, whose debut story collection, Lot, is out today from Riverhead Books. Set in Houston, the stories in Lot spring from the life a young man, the son of a Black mother and a Latino father, who works at his family’s restaurant while navigating his relationships with his brother and sister and discovering his own sexual identity. Washington then widens his lens to explore the lives of others who live in the myriad neighborhoods of Houston, offering insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life. “Lot is the confession of a neighborhood,” writes Mat Johnson, “channeled through a literary prodigy.” Bryan Washington’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appetité, American Short Fiction, GQ, Fader, the Awl, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Lot?
Three years-ish.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Description is always tricky for me, and that held up in every story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I can edit wherever, but I prefer to write new stuff in the mornings. And I write most days, if I’ve got a project going. But if I don’t then I won’t.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Hearing back from folks about the galleys was really rad.
5. What are you reading right now?
Xuan Juliana Wang’s Home Remedies, Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro, Pitchaya Sidbanthad’s It Rains in Bangkok, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, and Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light. Then there’s Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous, which is probably going to change everything.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
More folks in the States should know about Gengoroh Tagame and My Brother’s Husband.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
It’d be nice if the American literary community’s obsession with signal-boosting the optics of diversity were solidified into a tangible, fiscally remunerative reality for minority writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Living.
9. Would you recommend writers attend a writing program?
If you can go for free? Sure. But there are other ways.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mat Johnson taught me a lot, and one of the most profound things he said was to just relax. Readers can sense when you’re tense.
Bryan Washington, author of Lot. (Credit: David Gracia)
Ten Questions for Ed Pavlić
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ed Pavlić, whose novel Another Kind of Madness is out today from Milkweed Editions. The epic story of Ndiya Grayson, a young professional with a high-end job in a Chicago law-office who meets Shame Luther, a no-nonsense construction worker who plays jazz piano at night, Another Kind of Madness moves from Chicago’s South Side to the coast of Kenya as the pair navigate their pasts as well as their uncertain future. Of the novel Jeffrey Renard Allen writes, “In these pages, Black music sounds and surrounds experience like a mysterious house people long to live in but can’t find, a quest where they find themselves ever more deeply involved.” Widely published as a poet and scholar, Ed Pavlić is the author of the collection Visiting Hours at the Color Line, winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, as well as ‘Who Can Afford to Improvise?’: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture.
1. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’ve always written in and around the gifts and demands of family, parenting, etc. I have no real literary credits that pre-date my life as a father and husband. In fact, often I’ve worked while pretty confused about which aspects of all of that were “gifts” and which were “demands,” demanding gifts in any case. I’ve also written in and around the work as a professor and administrator in universities. For many years I found I could compose and revise poems in the momentary midst of all of that overlapping life and labor. Most likely poems were the way I survived those overloads, kept track of enough of the mind and body, all those minds and bodies, so that I didn’t go permanently off the rails. So I could at least find my way back to the tracks when wrecks and crack-ups did—and they did, of course—occur.
Maybe writing was and is a way to address the displacements of an upwardly mobile, cross-racially identified, working-class man amid waves and undertows in an intensely segregated, hyper-racialized, and hierarchical bureaucratic world. Or maybe, for a working class consciousness like mine, writing is just another wave of displacement? Most likely it’s both. I guess we could file most of these thoughts under the “where” I write part of the question.
2. You write both poetry and prose; does your process differ for each form?
Essays and other longer works weren’t as immediately about or out of that tumble of pleasure and trouble, of placement, displacement and replacement, of the startling novelty and bone-bending drudgery of, say, early parenthood, or of showing up to work in the unbelievably bourgeois and indelibly white halls of academia. At least that work wasn’t doused in the texture of my tumbles and pleasures in the same way. So, I’ve written what might pass as prose, and lots of it, in times when I can work for extended periods, on days—at times weeks or even months—when I don’t have to totally leave that space tomorrow, where I didn’t arrive fresh to it today. So, if I’ve got four days “off” from the rest of the work-world, I can work away at what’s called prose on the middle days.
3. How long did it take you to write Another Kind of Madness?
I wrote Another Kind of Madness in a way unlike anything else I’d ever written, or done. I worked on the novel only in spaces where I had at least a month in which I could be with the work unencumbered by the demands of life and employment. I began it in the summer of 2009 when the kids were old enough (and my in-laws young enough) that they could be with the grandparents in Maryland for six weeks during the summer. Stacey went to work and I turned the front porch in Georgia into a writing retreat. Working “at home” in this way was something I’d almost never done. After that summer, I worked on the book in similar breaks of a month or two, but never again at home. Instead, I worked in rented, borrowed, or gifted spaces in Montreal, at the MacDowell Colony (twice), in Istanbul, in Mombasa, and in Lamu Town on the coast of Kenya, in France, and in the West Farms section of the Bronx, a few blocks south of the Bronx Zoo one summer.
During these strange times I floated by myself in mostly urban, unfamiliar spaces, writing a few hours a day and then spending the rest of the days and nights accompanied by the story on walks, at meals, in dreams, on errands, in reading books I found in those places, etc. I found that the story wouldn’t reveal itself amid the tumble of my life, would only appear when I could really sit, walk, and sleep with it, where it could accrue its reality in a textured and present—but also most often in a peripheral and angular—region of my attention. The pressure of my daily worlds seemed to obliterate that nimble angularity, but my comings and goings in those unfamiliar urban spaces allowed this story to happen. I remember showing up after eight months away from the book, opening a blank, unlined (yes, unlined: “free your lines, the mind will follow”) notebook and waiting for Shame, Ndiya, Junior, Colleen and them to let me know what had been happening since we last saw each other and, in return, I tried to be as honest with them as I could be about what had been happening with me. It was always as if, unknowingly, we had, in fictional-fact, been at some of the same parties.
4. What has been the most surprising thing about the publication process?
That it takes a village.
And, with this book, a novel, with this novel, how dense the space between the lines is with things (references, inferences) that I don’t remember creating. So many things that never appeared to me until the ARC came between the covers. At that point I could see it as a thing outside my body, and I noticed all kinds of new things there. That was a surprise, for sure; the book was a stranger to me in a way I didn’t expect. The poems aren’t that way, essays either. I’ve left copies of the ARC around the house and, when I walk past them, I’ll pick up the book and turn to a random page and begin reading at the first new paragraph, halfway trying to catch it actively changing, as if I can catch it coming up with something else it hadn’t told me about.
5. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more recognition in and between writers of what happens in and around Black music, where singers are singing in an organic kind of tandem with tradition, in which songs bristle with depths and complexities quite beyond the capacities of any particular singer. And audiences seem to roll with that, we almost insist upon it. I don’t think we insist upon or even at times allow a similar kind of dimensionality with our sense of writers and writing. It happens in contemporary writing, of course; but I think it’s less obvious to readers than that similar dynamic is to listeners. Maybe readers even refuse it. Maybe I’m saying that I’d love the community of contemporary writers to read each other with the freedom and rigor (vigor) we bring to hearing the music we love the most. I struggle to do this myself. Maybe singers need to listen to each other with the freedom they read with? I don’t know.
6. What are you reading right now?
I’m always reading multiple books, always accompanied by music in the background and foreground. Right now I’m reading Singing in a Strange Land, Nick Salvatore’s biography of C. L. Franklin (Aretha’s father); David Ritz’s Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin; Eve Dunbar’s Black Regions of the Imagination; and I just finished rereading Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. My rereading of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped begins today. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to five discs in the changer (Aretha’s double disc set, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Marvin’s What’s Going On, and Coltrane’s Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album) on endless loop for weeks. I’m working my way into writing something about the recently released film, Amazing Grace, that was made while Aretha was recording the album with James Cleveland and his choir in Los Angeles in January 1972. Aretha performs with absolutely stunning, epic power. It’s incredible. Easily the most powerful thing I saw / heard / felt on film in 2018.
I listen to and stream contemporary music mostly in the car. The latest song I’ve been repeating all around town is Summer Walker’s newly released “Riot,” from her EP Clear. So good. It’s like Sade’s “Is It a Crime” for the 21st century.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Well, so many of course. The word “author” almost means “deserves wider recognition.” Though not always. I’d say Christopher Gilbert, his Turning Into Dwelling. Also the second half of Adrienne Rich’s career, especially: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) and Midnight Salvage (1999). Adrienne Rich is obviously a widely recognized writer, but the woman who wrote these books—meaning those poems—is mostly unknown. Also I’d say the Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing, his masterpiece Search Sweet Country.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Racial terror. A feeling that—like how the finest silt settles on every plane in a space and then somehow constitutes an immobilizing weight—one is operating in a prison to which we’ve been trained to accommodate (meaning obliterate) ourselves. But, you can’t really write—at least not very well—about that, or at least I can’t. I need to catch it when it flashes into view, before it becomes something it’s not, which is usually all we know. The need to arrest that unknowing, at times excruciating yet still unfeeling, state that takes our steps elsewhere to where we’re walking.
So all of that and, I think, a kind of impatience that masquerades as procrastination.
9. What’s one thing you hope to accomplish that you haven’t yet?
I need to write my mother a letter.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
In 1976, when James Baldwin told a writer’s group in the women’s prison at Riker’s Island: “One can change any situation, even though it may seem impossible. But it must happen inside you first. Only you know what you want. The first step is very, very lonely. But later you will find the people you need, who need you, who will be supportive.”
Over the last twenty-something years, I’ve found that to be absolutely true. I come back to that statement all the time.
Or maybe the best is, in 1970, when Baldwin told John Hall: “Nothing belongs to you...and you do what you can with the hand life dealt you.” I think if we can proceed with that in mind we can figure a few profiles of the ways, we do, in fact, belong to each other. I’m not talking about holding hands at sunset, I’m talking about a sense of mutual consequence that moves with the power (redemptive) of accuracy.
Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness. (Credit: Suncana Pavlić)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Kenji C. Liu
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kenji C. Liu, whose second poetry collection, Monsters I Have Been, is out today from Alice James Books. Using an invented method he calls “frankenpo” (or Frankenstein poetry), Liu takes an existing text and remixes it, resurrecting older work to create new poetry that investigates the intersections between toxic masculinity, violence, and marginalization. A book that Douglas Kearney calls “sharp, protean, dextrous, and discontent,” Liu’s collection “shows where the bodies have been buried, and that many won’t stay dead. No doubt, this book is alive as hell.” Kenji C. Liu is the author of a previous poetry collection, Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016), winner of the 2015 Hillary Gravendyk Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Apogee, Barrow Street, the Progressive, the Rumpus, and other publications. A Kundiman fellow and an alumnus of the VONA/Voices workhop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program, he lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Monsters I Have Been?
It took about three years, coming on the heels of my first collection. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and received some great advice from Jaswinder Bolina while at the Kundiman retreat. He suggested I pick a line or idea from my first collection that still felt juicy and go all the way down the rabbit hole with it. I did, and Monsters I Have Been is a direct result.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Since the book looks at various types of masculinities, I had to seriously reflect on how to write responsibly about gender. Toxic and conventional masculinities were easier, considering that there are always fresh examples in the news ad nauseam, though I did also try to give them some complexity without excusing away their violence. Unconventional masculinities were more challenging because I didn’t want to replicate dominant forms of representational violence. So I decided to approach these via some of the ways I’ve experienced being racially gendered, misgendered, and sexualized as an Asian American man.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
What’s kept me going is a semi-underground, e-mail–based writing accountability group where you sign up to write every day for a month. Recently I haven’t had time for it, but for many years I joined in for months at a time. When I participate, I write everywhere and anytime, often just a sentence or line per day. I might be at work, in transit, or even stranger places. After doing this consistently for years, writing feels like a habit, something you do every day like brushing your teeth. Writing becomes less “special,” which I consider to be a good thing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
There wasn’t anything in particular about the publication process, but the DIY digital marketing campaign I undertook to promote the book ahead of publication created some unexpected results. Drawing on my experience in design and marketing, I decided to focus on an Instagram account (@monstersihavebeen) dedicated solely to the themes of the book, which cross-posted to Facebook and Twitter. I found this created a lot of advance interest, and really helped me gauge the book’s audience ahead of time.
5. What are you reading right now?
The Inheritance of Haunting by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, 2018 winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; I Even Regret Night, poems of Lalbihari Sharma, an indentured Indian servant in the Caribbean, translated by Rajiv Mohabir; American Sutra, on religious freedom and Japanese American Buddhists imprisoned in U.S. concentration camps during World War II, by Duncan Ryuken Williams; and Oculus by Sally Wen Mao.
6. Which authors, in your opinion, deserve wider recognition?
Vickie Vértiz, Muriel Leung, Sesshu Foster, Angela Peñaredondo, Mia Ayumi Malhotra.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I experience my corner of the poetry community as very generous and caring, but I have many issues with professionalizing poetry as a career with certain prizes and residencies you “have to” achieve—it can make people greedy, competitive, and encourage a perception of the world based on lack. I think the poetry community works better when it is cooperative and generous. Poetry shouldn’t be just another capitalist product.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Money and time.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I need to sense that they understand what my project is trying to do at a fundamental level. Alice James Books seems to have had that understanding immediately, which I’m grateful for because Monsters I Have Been might take some time for the reader’s brain to adjust to if you have conventional expectations of poetry. If an editor, press, reviewer, or anyone else doesn’t seem to understand the project, it’s clearly not a good fit.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
What I actually think of is a writing prompt I received from the poet Suheir Hammad many years ago. She asked us to write about a traumatic experience, and also to find something in the environment of the memory that was beautiful. For me, I think this has translated into ongoing writing advice—to look for beauty and grace even in the challenging material, whenever possible.
Kenji C. Liu, author of Monsters I Have Been. (Credit: Margarita Corporan)
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Gala Mukomolova
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gala Mukomolova, whose debut poetry collection, Without Protection, is out today from Coffee House Press. Mukomolova, who arrived with her family in New York when she was ten years old as a Jewish refugee from Russia, weaves together personal narrative and fable in her poems to interrogate ideas of identity, family, sexuality, and violence. Taking inspiration from Slavic folklore, several of Mukomolova’s poems reimagine the story of Vasilyssa, the young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga, to explore the ways in which a queer immigrant woman situates herself in a new country, navigating trauma, homophobia, displacement, and desire. Mukomolova earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and is the author of the chapbook One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations (YesYes Books, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, PEN American, PANK, and elsewhere, and in 2016 she won the 92 Street Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She also writes horoscopes and articles on astrology for NYLON.
1. How long did it take you to write Without Protection?
Without Protection took me anywhere between four and six years to write. Primarily because the Vasilyssa poems were originally from a separate project. Although, in hindsight, I can see how they were gathering together like a coven that would eventually conjure up the rest of the book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Living through it was the most challenging thing. I wrote this book through some of the hardest, darkest moments in my young life. I wrote it through dealing with my father’s death and my long-term girlfriend’s departure. I wrote it through the pain of opening my heart again and through the inevitable heartbreak that resulted. Sometimes writing these poems was a reminder that I was still alive and sometimes I resented the reminder.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write all the time but I often do it for work which, if you don’t know, really gets in the way of what some might call the poet’s call. My astrology writings are a place where I exercise my creative freedoms, and I write articles sometimes twice a week. I’m surprised at what lyricism NYLON lets me publish. I’m grateful for it. Otherwise, when I’m avoiding admin work or emotional work, a poem will come to me. Sometimes every week or so, sometimes nothing for months.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
How I stopped being able to see the book. I felt almost blind to it. I had to look at each edited line individually like a bird fallen from the nest that I had to tenderly brush off and return.
5. What are you reading right now?
Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Yanyi’s Year of Blue Water, Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart, Agnes Martin’s Writings, Melody Beattie’s The New Codependency, and Jessica Dore’s Tarot Card of the Day Twitter posts.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
francine j. harris is a poetic genius with a smoky quartz for a heart and she should have many awards and many readers and possibly a temple devoted to her where one leaves sweet little offerings.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’m not in the publishing business and don’t feel I have enough information to speak to that but in terms of the literary community, one thing I would change is the obsession people at large seem to develop with that one good white man. The moment one good white man appears to exist, people are ready to tattoo that man’s poems all over their bodies and eat their words like holy wafers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Coming from financial precarity, living without a net, and spending most of my time hustling to makes ends meet is a pretty huge impediment. That and all the dissociation—but sometimes it does work in my favor, like when the paper swallows me like a genie bottle.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
The ability to approach the poem, not as they would want it but as they have perceived you, the writer, aiming to approach it. An editor who crafts a new lens for each writer they work with.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
If what you’re writing begins to scare you, don’t stop—it’s about to get real good.
Gala Mukomolova, author of Without Protection.
Ten Questions for Emily Skaja
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Emily Skaja, whose debut poetry collection, Brute, is out today from Graywolf Press. The winner of the 2018 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets—an annual prize for a first book of poems that includes $5,000, publication, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy—Skaja’s debut is an elegy to the end of a relationship that confronts love, loss, violence, grief, and rage. “What do we do with brokenness?” asks prize judge Joy Harjo, who selected the winning manuscript. “We document it, as Skaja has done in Brute. We sing of the brokenness as we emerge from it. We sing the holy objects, the white moths that fly from our mouths, and we stand with the new, wet earth that has been created with our terrible songs.” Emily Skaja grew up in rural Illinois and is a graduate of the MFA program at Purdue University. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Memphis.
1. How long did it take you to write Brute?
Five years. I started writing the poems in Brute in 2012. About three years into it, I had a book-length manuscript, but it felt incomplete to me. I wound up cutting or revising more than half of it, and then I spent another two years rethinking, rewriting, and rearranging it before I fully understood what shape it should take. In that time, I changed so much as a person that the manuscript began to feel closed off to me. Trying to write back into it was like being in conversation with a ghost of myself—a voice that draped itself in my clothes and spoke about my experiences, but from the point of view of someone who was a few steps removed from me. I found that in order to keep working on the book, I had to write my way back into it in a way that honored the time and distance that separated the new self from the ghost. As a result, there are a lot of poems in the book in which I address my younger self and try to reassemble her memories with the wisdom of recovery.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
There’s a lot of mystery in my writing process, and I have the suspicion that I’m doing all the steps out of order. At the outset, I never know where any project is going. I start with a pile of drafts and look for signs of my own obsessions, and then I try to understand why I keep returning to a particular idea, feeling, or image. No matter how many times I reassure myself that I am, in fact, in charge of this process, I always feel as if I’m the last person to understand what I’m writing toward. It’s only in revision that I can see how consistently I’ve written about a particular idea, and then I can revise and cut and rework the poems as needed. Writing Brute was a painful process of self-discovery because my analysis of the obsessions in the manuscript required me to address parts of myself and my past that still felt raw. Initially, I believed that I was just writing a series of sad love poems, and then about halfway through drafting the book I realized that I was writing about grief and power and self-abandonment and rage. The poems are about my own experiences with abusive relationships, so changing my mind about the book also meant changing my mind about my life, and that proved to be very difficult.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write late at night at a big table I once painted bright orange during some heady HGTV-evangelist period of my life. I go through irregular seasons of writing. Something will trigger a writing cycle and I will work on fifteen poems in a row, and then I’ll experience a long, fallow period where I have no impulse to write at all. My strategy is to feed the fallow period with heavy reading. I try to be patient with myself when I’m not writing, but I’m much less forgiving if I’m behind on reading.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The most surprising and gratifying part so far has been gaining a community of sympathetic readers. For a long time, I was writing these poems from a place of shame, so it has meant so much to me to hear from other people who have shared the same experiences or felt an emotional resonance with these poems.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, and Build Yourself a Boat by Camonghne Felix. I recently finished Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, which I loved so much I know I will read it a second time. I also loved The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh and Milkman by Anna Burns.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, whose brilliant essay “All Good Science Fiction Begins This Way” I have admired and taught for years, and who recently published a novel I also loved, Fruit of the Drunken Tree.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I would like to see more widespread initiatives to support writers of color, especially women and nonbinary writers.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing process?
I think my own brain is my worst impediment. I spend a few hours every day so consumed by dread that I can’t make myself do anything, so I sometimes daydream about all the amazing projects I could finish if I could reallocate those dread hours.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I love to work with editors who can look at a line or a poem that isn’t quite right and help investigate what its curiosities are or what ideas it’s trying to find its way into.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
The wonderful Don Platt once advised me to “go hard into the weird and stay there.”
Emily Skaja, author of Brute. (Credit: Kaitlyn Stoddard Photography)
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from his new collection, Deaf Republic, published in March by Graywolf Press.
Read “Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky” by Garth Greenwell in the March/April 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Julie Orringer
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Julie Orringer, whose third book, the novel The Flight Portfolio, is out today from Knopf. Based on the true story of Varian Fry, a young New York journalist and editor who in 1940 was the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee, designed to protect artists and writers from being deported to Nazi concentration camps and to send intellectual treasures back to the United States, The Flight Portfolio returns to the same territory, Europe on the brink of World War II, that thrilled readers of Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge. Andrew Sean Greer calls it “ambitious, meticulous, big-hearted, gorgeous, historical, suspenseful, everything you want a novel to be.” Orringer is also the author of the award-winning short story collection How to Breathe Underwater, which was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives in Brooklyn.
1. How long did it take you to write The Flight Portfolio?
Nine years, more or less. While researching my last novel, The Invisible Bridge, which also took place during the Second World War, I read about the American journalist Varian Fry’s heroic work in Marseille: His mission was to locate celebrated European artists who’d fled to France from the Nazi-occupied countries and arrange their safe passage to the States. The job was fraught with moral complications—given limited time and resources, who would Fry choose to save?—and the historical account seemed to miss certain essential elements, particularly those surrounding Fry’s personal life (he had a number of well-documented relationships with men, a fact that historians elided, denied, or shuddered away from, as if to suggest that it’s not acceptable to be a hero of the Holocaust if one also happens to be gay). Researching Fry’s life and mission took the better part of four years—a time during which I moved three times and gave birth to my two children—and writing and revision occupied the five years that followed. Which is not to suggest that no writing occurred during the initial research, nor that there was ever a time when the research ceased—it continued, in fact, through the last day I could change a word of the draft.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Undoubtedly it was the research into Fry’s work in Marseille, a detailed record of which exists in biographies, interviews, letters, ephemera, and even still in living memory: Fry’s last surviving associate, Justus Rosenberg, is a professor emeritus of languages and literature at Bard College, and was kind enough to speak to me about his experiences. Twenty-seven boxes of Fry’s letters, papers, photographs, and other writings reside in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at Columbia’s Butler Library; I spent many hours immersed in those files, learning what I could about what kept Fry up at night, what obsessed him by day, what he struggled with, how he triumphed, and how he thought about his own work years later. I spent a year at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where Fry studied as an undergraduate; there I had the chance to examine his recently unsealed student records, which include not only his grade transcripts and his application, but also letters from his father, his professors, the dean, and various close associates, many of them arguing either for or against Fry’s expulsion from Harvard for a variety of infractions that included spotty attendance, raucous partying, destruction of school property, reckless driving, and, ultimately, the placing of a For Sale sign on Dean Greenough’s lawn. Then there were the dozens—hundreds, ultimately thousands—of Fry’s clients, whose lives and work I felt I must know before I wrote the book. And of course I had to go to Marseille, where I visited the places Fry lived and worked, at least those that still exist (the marvelous Villa Air Bel, where he lived with a group of Surrealist writers and artists, was razed decades ago). The nearly impossible task was to clear space among all that was known for what could not be known—space where I could make a narrative that would honor Fry’s experience but would move beyond what could have been recorded at the time.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write five or six days a week at the Brooklyn Writers’ Space. I’m married to another fiction writer, my former Iowa MFA classmate Ryan Harty, and, as I mentioned, we have two young children; we have a carefully worked-out schedule that allows each of us a couple of long writing days each week (eight hours or so) and a number of shorter ones (five hours). Often I write at night, too, especially if I’m starting something new or working on a short story or a nonfiction piece.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
The inestimable benefit of sharing a very early draft with my editor, Jordan Pavlin. Jordan edited my two previous books, but I’d never before shown her anything that hadn’t been revised six or seven times. This novel involved so much risk, and took so long to complete, that I felt I needed her insight and support long before I’d written three or four versions. Did the novel strike the right balance between history and fiction? Had I captured the characters’ essential struggles clearly? How to address problems of pacing, continuity, clarity? Jordan’s exacting readings—not just one, but three or four—echoed my own doubts and provided necessary perspective and reassurance. And her comments pulled no punches. She was scrupulously honest. She was rigorous. She challenged me to do better. And my desire to meet her standards was, as it always is, fueled as much by my ardent admiration for her as a human being as by my deep respect for her literary mind.
5. What trait do you most value in an editor?
See above.
6. What are you reading right now?
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which cuts a little too close at times to my own 1980’s experience in a high school drama group—one that took itself at least as seriously as Choi’s Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts. She hits all the notes with dead-on precision: favoritism toward certain students by charismatic teachers, intrigue surrounding highly-charged relationships, endless quoting of Monty Python, jobs at TCBY, the dire importance of having a car and/or friends with cars, etc. But the true brilliance of the book is its structure: A first section in which the subjective experience of high school students is rendered with respect and utter seriousness; a second section that brings a questioning (and revenge-seeking) adult sensibility to bear upon the first; and a third section that sharpens the earlier sections into clearer resolution still, suggesting the persistent consequences of those seemingly trivial sophomore liaisons.
7. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Here are three new writers whose work I’ve found risk-laced, challenging, and full of fierce delights: Ebony Flowers, Rona Jaffe-winning cartoonist and disciple of Lynda Barry, whose brilliant debut short story collection, Hot Comb, will be published by Drawn and Quarterly in June; shot through with tender and intelligent humor, it’s an incisive examination of cultural and familial tensions in black women’s lives. Domenica Phetteplace is another of my favorite new writers; her marvelous short story “Blue Cup,” a futurist skewering of commerce-driven life in the Bay Area, involves a young woman whose job requires her to deliver tailored social experiences to clients at an exclusive dining club; the story is narrated by the artificial intelligence software that co-inhabits her mind. And Anjali Sachdeva’sAll the Names they Used for God is a story collection that merges the real and the supernatural with genre-breaking bravery, employing a prose so precise that you follow her into marvelous realms without question: Ice caves, exploding steel mill furnaces, an ocean inhabited by an elusive mermaid whose fleshy, tentacle-like hair still haunts my dreams.
8. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I’d love to see more works in translation published in this country—for more publishing houses to commit seriously to the cultivation and dissemination of international literature. I admire the work of New York Review Books, Restless Books, and Europa Editions in this arena. I loved, for example, Restless Books’ recently published translation of Marcus Malte’s The Boy, a Prix Femina-winning novel about a young man who spent the first fourteen years of his life in mute isolation in the wilds of France. The story of this young man’s entry into the early twentieth-century world—first into a rural setting, then Paris, and finally the battlefields of the First World War—is the story of what makes us human, and casts our world in a stark new light. Even stories as place-specific as The Boy have much to reveal about all our lives; and, just as importantly, they illuminate and particularize the vast array of human experiences different from our own. One of literature’s great powers is its ability to act as a tonic against xenophobia; there’s never been a moment when that power has been more urgently needed.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The finite nature of the twenty-four-hour day. But places like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, seek to explode that limitation by removing barriers to creative freedom. At MacDowell, where every artist gets a secluded studio, meticulously prepared meals, and unlimited uninterrupted time to work, there’s a kind of magical speeding-up of the creative process. You don’t necessarily fail less often; you fail faster, and recover faster. The people who dedicate their professional lives to the running of those programs are literature’s great guardians and cultivators.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It would be impossible to identify the best, because I’ve been the fortunate recipient of much wonderful advice from writers like Marilynne Robinson, James Alan MacPherson, Tobias Wolff, Elizabeth Tallent, and John L’Heureux, for more years than I care to consider. But I can tell you about a piece of advice I chose not to take: A prominent writer once told me, at a barbecue at a friend’s house in Maine, that if I wanted to take myself seriously as a writer, I’d better reconsider my desire to have children. For each child I had, this writer told me, I was sacrificing a book. Now I can say with certainty that my writing life has been immeasurably enriched and transformed by having become a parent. And if parenthood is demanding, both of time and emotional energy—as of course it is—life with children reminds me always of why writing feels essential: At its best and most rigorous, it illuminates—both for writer and reader—the richness and complexity of the human world, and forces us to make a deep moral consideration of our role in it.
Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio. (Credit: Brigitte Lacombe)
Ten Questions for Geffrey Davis
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Geffrey Davis, whose second poetry collection, Night Angler, is out today from BOA Editions. The book, which won the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, is both a love letter to a son and a meditation on parenthood, family, race, and loss. “The poems in Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler sing in both ecstatic joy and tremendous lament,” writes Oliver de la Paz. “Poetry and prayer have never shared so close a breath.” Davis is the author of a previous poetry collection, Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), which won the 2013 A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Davis has won the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Angler?
It took me almost four years to have a full first draft of this book—and then another year or so of revisions and restructuring to get it ready for production.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
In the middle of drafting the poems that would become this collection, I realized I was essentially working on a book-length love letter to my son, though not all the pieces address the child directly—one that chronicled and questioned and sometimes intervened upon certain (parental) desires for breaking cycles and discovering new rituals for family. While the stakes and timeliness of the book’s address meant that I couldn’t have waited to write the book, I had no idea of when/how to place it into my son’s hands once it was finished. However, just days after advance copies of Night Angler arrived, as sometimes children have the grace of doing, he simply took that impossible in/decision out of my hands. I was taking a late afternoon nap and woke to him reading aloud to my wife from the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried that hard to fight back tears so that the voice across from me would keep speaking.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
My writing practice tends to be pretty unpredictable, pretty sporadic, and is usually dictated by a particular image, observation, question, etc. seeming louder or more urgent than the general noise of the day—or than the night. Lately, I’ve been writing more often in the middle of the night.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That the ending of it rang so clear—to me, anyway. With my first book, Revising the Storm, although I was submitting it to prizes, I still felt like someone had tapped me on the shoulder while in the middle of working and asked to publish it. I was so grateful to Dorianne Laux, who selected it for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and to BOA Editions for inviting me to recognize that book’s doneness. Who knows what would have happened to its shape and voice had I been allowed to keep at it like I was prepared to!? Because I deeply needed that collaboration the first time around, I wasn’t expecting to feel the ending of Night Angler for myself, and definitely not as unmistakably as I did.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’ve been reading more graphic novels and science fiction lately. I loved Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and am finishing N. K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky, the third book in her Broken Earth series.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I’m always excited to put a Julia Kasdorf book into people’s hands, especially her collection Poetry in America, and I love talking with new people about Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s Open Interval.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I appreciate interviews like this for the opportunity to discuss process and reveal struggles, but I wish our books, as art objects, had better ways of showing more of the practice and work and failure that go into making them.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. And presence—in particular, distinguishing between the importance of staying present in moments of lived connection and the urge for investigating new possible poetic connections.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
Articulating precisely what about a piece of writing they believe in, and why.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As an undergraduate writer, the poet David Biespiel invited me to understand that there are things a poem needs that will not feel poetic.
Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler.
Ten Questions for Alison C. Rollins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alison C. Rollins, whose debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s fascination with the library, Rollins uses the concept of the archive to uncover and investigate ideas of loss, progress, and decay. As Terrance Hayes writes of the book, “The small and large darknesses catalogued here make this a book of remarkable depth.” Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis and currently works as a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship.
1. How long did it take you to write Library of Small Catastrophes?
The poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written over a three-to-four-year span. However, I would venture to assert that the book has taken a lifetime to write in terms of the necessity to live, experience, read, and hone my craft over time. Robert Hayden in the poem “The Tattooed Man” has the phrase: “all art is pain suffered and outlived.” While I don’t hope to glorify suffering in the service of artistic practice I do think it is important to celebrate living, awareness, observation, and the act of being present in the world. Many of the poems in this book are based on experiences that I have witnessed or been a part of and I had to live them and be present within them to in turn translate them into poems. I want to equally highlight time and labor because this sort of question can in some ways place greater value on Library of Small Catastrophes as a product rather than on the living required to make the physical object of a book. I don’t seek to glorify suffering but living requires exposure to both joy and pain (in often highly unbalanced ways for certain bodies in the context of the United States). I wish to celebrate living and to do so not always in relationship to measured productivity or a finished product such as a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
It was challenging to accept that with the birth of the book all the other seemingly limitless possibilities for the project in turn died. There is a certain finitude to publishing a book that makes me a little uncomfortable in the sense that the work becomes a fairly static thing. I can’t continue to edit, reorder, change the cover art, etc. To go back to question one, I try to privilege the concept of being in process over something that is finalized. In Parable of the Sower Octavia Butler writes, “The only lasting truth is change.” If Butler is right, which I think she is, we all need to work towards increasing our tolerance to change.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
A large majority of the poems in Library of Small Catastrophes were written during the day at work in libraries. I don’t have a daily writing practice or formal schedule. I read on the bus ride to work and I write in stolen moments while at work. Much of my writing is in direct contact with other forms of labor that I am directly engaged in. Writing retreats have been especially helpful to me to carve out writing-intensive periods where I can focus.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Having to contextualize the book from a marketing and press standpoint was something that was not initially on my radar. I hadn’t really thought of the skill necessary to step back and frame the work within the context of a blurb or a synopsis. It is a really interesting and rather separate endeavor from writing the actual individual poems that came to make up the collection. To articulately explain what you see the overall project as functioning to do can be oddly challenging and unexpected at the end of the publication process.
5. What are you reading right now?
I just finished Marian Engel’s Bear, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy. I’m currently reading Renee Gladman’s Juice, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. I am a librarian and voracious reader so this literally changes every other day.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
This question depends a lot on context, realities about how literary canons function, systemic inequity, as well as how “wider recognition” is being defined and measured. This is a very difficult question to answer but I will offer in response the names of three poets: CM Burroughs, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dawn Lundy Martin. I will also say Phillis Wheatley for good measure.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I am probably a lofty romantic but I wish people in the “literary community” extended more grace to one another and more often than not embraced curiosity and awe as lifestyles. I wish that people read more widely and embodied a belief that there is space at the table for everyone—and in turn found this notion to be freeing rather than threatening. While I realize sales-driven approaches and the economics of the publishing industry are arguably necessary evils, I wish that as an industry we didn’t underestimate readers and their capacity or desire for strong innovative writing. I would argue that all people are hungry for access to beautiful words, fresh ideas, and moving storytelling. Lastly, I am surely imperfect but I genuinely strive on a fundamental level to be a kind person. I don’t think extending grace to myself and others should result in my being viewed as any less talented, intellectual, and critically rigorous. We could all use more kindness.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time. In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee writes, “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time.” I could not agree more.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor?
I value most an editor with an expansive imagination. More specifically, I appreciate an editor that does not succumb to a limited imagination in terms of my identity/subject/position in the world and what that means in relationship to my writing and the potential readers of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Terrance Hayes relayed the Thelonious Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself” during a craft talk at a writing retreat that I attended a few years ago. It truly resonated with me because without sounding cliché I think writing should be connected to the constant ever-evolving work of discovering, (re)imagining, and (re)claiming one’s own selfhood.
Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes. (Credit: Maya Ayanna Darasaw)
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Sara Collins
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Sara Collins, whose debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, is out today from Harper. Both a suspenseful gothic mystery and a historical novel, Collins’s debut tells the story of a slave’s journey from a Jamaican plantation to an English prison, where she is tried for a brutal double murder she cannot remember. “With as much psychological savvy as righteous wrath, Sara Collins twists together slave narrative, bildungsroman, love story, and crime novel to make something new,” wrote Emma Donoghue. Sara Collins grew up in Grand Cayman. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Cambridge University, where she was the recipient of the 2015 Michael Holroyd Prize for Creative Writing. She lives in London.
1. How long did it take you to write The Confessions of Frannie Langton?
My agent signed me with only a partial manuscript, and I had to write feverishly in order to finish it in just under two years. But the novel had been simmeringfor all the decades I’d spent wondering why a Black woman had never been the star of her own gothic romance. My dissatisfaction about that state of affairs grew so strong over time that it finally nudged me in the direction of writing my own.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
At times there was nothing more terrifying than the distance between the novel in my head and the one making its way onto the page. I had to force myself to accept the failure of my first attempts. I’m always terrified that the rough and rambling sentences that come out first, as a kind of advance party, will be all I can manage. They trick me into trying to polish them as I go. And that slows me down.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Either at my desk overlooking a quiet canal patrolled by iguanas in Grand Cayman or at my kitchen table in London overlooking my courtyard garden, and now sometimes in bed, to avoid the intense back pain I get after sitting for long periods. When working on a novel, I write every day, 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM, following very strict routines: starting and finishing at the same time, and aiming to get a certain quota of work done. Over time I’ve developed a Pavlovian response to my rituals: When I take the first sip of coffee at 8:00 AM, my brain flips a switch and I’m in writing mode.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wrote the novel in isolation, but I’ve now done numerous radio and podcast interviews, panel and bookshop appearances, essays and columns. Writing requires withdrawal, publishing demands engagement. It’s the shock of wandering out of a tunnel onto a stage.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Clarie Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. The writing feels electric and alive, crackling with anger, which I think we should have more of in novels. One of my top reads of recent months was André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name. I’m going to start John Banville’s The Book of Evidence next.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
James Baldwin. He is unparalleled: as a writer, as an intellectual, as a man. Yes, he’s fairly widely recognized, but it should be wider.
7. What is one thing you’d do differently if you could have a do-over?
I would definitely take more days off.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I’m so immersed in a project that I don’t want to look up, let alone talk to anyone, I feel like I’m being pulled between novel and family. What many people won’t admit is that it’s impossible to write a novel without a pinch of selfishness, and you have to beg your loved ones to forgive you for it.
9. What trait do you most value in an editor (or agent)?
Each of my editors, and my agent, saw straight through my manuscript to the novel I wanted to write, not the one I’d written.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I often quote Annie Lamott quoting the coach in Cool Runnings (a film I dislike, but which apparently produced this great line): “If you weren’t enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough afterwards.”
Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton.
Ten Questions for Xuan Juliana Wang
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xuan Juliana Wang, whose debut story collection, Home Remedies, is out today from Hogarth. In a dozen electrified stories, Wang captures the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth via characters that are navigating their cultural heritage and the chaos and uncertainty of contemporary life, from a pair of synchronized divers at the Beijing Olympics on the verge of self-discovery to a young student in Paris who discovers the life-changing possibilities of a new wardrobe. As Justin Torres writes, Wang “is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and grew up in Los Angeles. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and earned her MFA from Columbia University. She has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Cite des Arts International, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence and teaches at UCLA.
1. How long did it take you to write the stories in Home Remedies?
All of my twenties and the early part of my thirties.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I would have to say the loneliness of falling out of step with society. When I’m out celebrating a friend who has just made a huge stride in their career, someone would ask me, “Hey how’s that book coming along?” Then having to tell them that I have a desk in an ex-FBI warehouse and I’ll be sitting there in the foreseeable future, occasionally looking out the window, trying to make imaginary people behave themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I keep a regular journal where I describe interesting things I’d seen or heard the day before as well as random plot ideas. That’s something I like to do every day, preferably first thing in the morning or right before bed. My ideal writing environment is a semi-public place, like a shared office, or a library as long as I can avoid making eye-contact with people around me. When I’m really getting going on an idea I am capable of sitting for eight hours a day, many days in a row. I was forced to play piano as a child so I have no trouble forcing myself to do anything.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
It made me feel a deep kinship with anyone who has ever published a book. I want to clutch them, look into their eyes and say, “I understand now.”
5. What are you reading right now?
King of the Mississippi by Mike Freedman. I just picked up Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires and it’s great! I’m putting off finishing The Unpassing by Chia Chia Lin because it’s so gorgeously written I am savoring it.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Wang Shuo. He’s like the Chinese Chuck Palahniuk. I wish he could be translated more and better.
7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business?
I wish publishers would open up their own bookstores, or sell books in unexpected places, so people could interact with books in-person. There isn’t a single bookstore within a fifteen-mile radius of the city where I grew up in LA.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Health insurance.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes. But choose wisely.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Victor Lavalle gave us a lot of practical advice in his workshop. The one I use the most often is: Take the best part of your story and move it to first page and start there. Challenge yourself to make the rest rise to the level of that.
Xuan Juliana Wang, author of the story collection Home Remedies. (Credit: Ye Rin Mok)
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Domenica Ruta
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Domenica Ruta, whose novel, Last Day, is out today from Spiegel & Grau. The fates of three sets of characters converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday anticipating the planet’s demise. A bookish wunderkind looks for love from a much older tattoo artist she met at last year’s Last Day BBQ; a young woman with a troubled past searches for her long-lost adoptive brother; three astronauts on the International Space Station contemplate their lives on Earth from afar. Last Day brings these characters and others together as they embark on a last-chance quest for redemption. Domenica Ruta is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013). A graduate of Oberlin College, Ruta received an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. Her short fiction has been published in the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, and Epoch. Her essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, New York magazine, and elsewhere. She reviews books for the New York Times, Oprah.com, and the American Scholar, and works as an editor, curator, and advocate for solo moms at ESME.com. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write Last Day?
I started playing around with it immediately after my memoir, With or Without You, was published, but I was also writing another novel at the same time, trying to see which one would win my full attention. When I found out I was pregnant, I began pounding the keys of my laptop every day for a couple of hours to force out an ugly first draft before I became a single mother. In the first six months of my son’s life I wrote nothing. After that I worked a little at a time whenever I could, meaning whenever I could afford childcare. So the short answer is five years, but not continuously.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing for me as an author of this and probably any book I write is the way publishing is a performative act of maturation. Writers grow up in public. If you compare the first book written by your favorite author with one they wrote fifteen or twenty years later the difference in quality is almost always astounding. And this is the same human using the same tools. So it is challenging for me to let go of a work and set it free into the world when I am positive I could still make it better, if only I had a few more decades. But that’s what the next book is for, and the one after that.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly in bed, with occasional commutes to my kitchen table. I try to write every week, sometimes every day, sometimes not. As a mother of a small child, there is no set schedule. I write when I can, usually when the kid is at school, and other pockets I can find.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
When my publisher and editor, Cindy Spiegel, lost her incredible imprint Spiegel & Grau after a banner year, just a few months before Last Day was published—this was not something I ever expected would happen.
5. What are you reading right now?
In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Secrets We Kept by Kristal Sital.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Why doesn’t the Octavia Butler estate have ten different Netflix specials in the works right now?
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Last Day, what would say?
I wish I had something that would create the mystique of myself as a precious artist, alchemist of verbs and nouns, thinker of Big Thoughts, but to be perfectly honest, if I could go back in time before this novel I would advise myself to get savvy about the whole social media game. It is so important for authors to market themselves and their work in this way, which I was totally oblivious to until very recently.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Self-doubt, self-hatred, self-sabotage; I love more than anything to be alone in my imagination, but sometimes it is a dangerous place.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Not unless it is fully funded. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone without a trust fund or wealthy no-strings-attached parents/patrons go into debt for a degree in the arts. Read every single interview in the Paris Review instead; you will learn there are as many different ways to write a book as there are writers. Read widely across genres and write terrible drafts of things you are ashamed of. But if an MFA program is fully funded, then definitely go. Being a professional student is the most fun job I’ve ever had.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Anne Lamott said something along the lines of “write a shitty first draft.” This is the only way I can summon the courage to write anything. I am human and flawed and this is never more evident than when I see it spelled out in my words on a screen or a sheet of paper. But as bad as that first draft may be—and sometimes it’s not as bad as my first impression of it is—I have a chance to make it better one day at a time. That is the craft. That is what makes a writer: the willingness to rewrite a thousand times if necessary.
Domenica Ruta, author of Last Day. (Credit: Charlie Mahoney)
Ten Questions for Mona Awad
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mona Awad, whose new novel, Bunny, is published today by Viking. A riveting exploration of female relationships, desire, and the creative and destructive power of the imagination, Bunny is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in the MFA program at New England’s Warren University, a scholarship student who prefers the company of her own dark imagination. Repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort, who call one another “Bunny,” Samantha is nevertheless intrigued when she receives an invitation to the group’s fabled “Smut Salon” and she begins a descent into the Bunny cult and their ritualistic off-campus workshop, where the edges of reality start to blur. Mona Awad is the award-winning author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The recipient of an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, she has published work in Time, VICE, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
1. How long did it take you to write Bunny?
Two years. Three months to write the first draft and then a year and a half of revision
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Not giving up on it. I had a blast writing the first draft of Bunny and just let myself take risks and go down rabbit holes, but in the revision, I had to really reign it in and flesh it out. That took time. It didn’t help that every time I described the novel to someone, I burst out laughing because the story sounded so crazy to me. And then I’d panic. I’d think: what I’m writing is clearly insane. Pushing through that and continuing to embrace the madness of it was scary.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I’m working on a book, I try to write every morning for at least a few hours. I work in bed, at my desk or in the Writer’s Room of Boston. I’m pretty rigid about it, just because it really does help build momentum with the story and the voice to work on a story every day. Once I feel I’m emotionally inside the world of the story, I begin to work at night too. Towards the end, I work whenever I possibly can.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
Just how much people are interested in reality when we’re talking about fiction, in which parts of the story actually literally happened to you (the author). In some ways, I get it. Fiction is a reflection/refraction of reality, in some ways fiction is the ultimate form of memoir so it makes sense for people to be curious about how much of the writer’s actual life is mirrored in the story, but to me the most exciting things are always the things I make up. In my view, that’s the most telling stuff in the novel, not the stuff that literally maps to something that literally happened.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m reading Tea Mutonji’s Shut Up, You’re Pretty and John Waters’s Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. I’m enjoying them both immensely.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Russell Hoban. I love the way he weaves the magical into the everyday and I love the way he writes loneliness. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz is a brilliant work of fabulist fiction, but it’s also a real meditation on the bond between a father and a son, and the desire for and cost of personal freedom. Turtle Diary is wonderful too. It’s just about two lonely people who decide to free a turtle at the London Zoo, but the characters are handled with such empathy, nuance and depth.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Bunny, what would say?
Trust yourself more.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Depends on the writer, the program and the project. I was very fortunate. My MFA was fully funded and when I started it, I was already halfway finished with my first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which I completed there and turned into my MFA thesis. There was also a writer on the faculty, Brian Evenson, whom I admired deeply and was very keen to work with. So I knew exactly what I planned to do while I was there, I just needed time and space to work, and some guidance and encouragement from a community I could trust. I was also older—in my thirties—when I did it. So although I had lots of growing to do as a writer, I’d already found my voice, knew what I was going to work on and I’d lived a little. I think all of those factors contributed to why it was such a successful experience for me. It might not be the right thing for someone else and I don’t believe that you need it to write.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Me. My own insecurities and impatience and shortcomings that show up when I write. Also my difficulty getting a routine going. My best work comes out of a sustained, daily practice of writing and sometimes that isn’t possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Write the shitty first draft. A finished story is better than a perfect story that just lives in your mind. And be curious. So much can come of being willing to shut up and pay close attention to the world around you.
Mona Awad, author of Bunny.
Ten Questions for Nicole Dennis-Benn
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose second novel, Patsy, is out today from Liveright, an imprint of W. W. Norton. The novel tells the story of two women, Patsy and her daughter, Tru. After leaving behind Tru for a life she’s always wanted in New York, Patsy ends up working as a nanny caring for wealthy children while Tru rebuilds a faltering relationship with her father back in Jamaica. Jumping back and forth between narratives in New York and Jamaica, Dennis-Benn has created “a stunningly powerful intergenerational novel,” as Alexander Chee writes, “about the price—the ransom really—women must pay to choose themselves, their lives, their value, their humanity.” Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she teaches at Princeton and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Patsy?
For me, the process begins way before I put pen to paper. Patsy was conceived in the fall of 2012, when I started as an adjunct at the College of Staten Island. I was writing Here Comes the Sun at the time, but would scribble notes about my early morning travel on the subway and the Staten Island Ferry while commuting with other immigrants going to their various jobs. I began to wonder about these peoples’ lives—what versions of themselves they brought to America and what they left behind in their countries of origin. Here they were in America, hustling to get to their jobs on time, their heads bowed underneath vacation ads displaying white sand beaches in places some once called home. Struck by this irony, I began to write. The character of Patsy came to me and refused to leave, even through the publication of my first novel and well after. So, this book has been with me for seven years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Writing the story of a woman, a mother who defies cultural and societal norms by abandoning her daughter in her quest for personal freedom, and by choosing to love the way she wants to love with her childhood best friend, Cicely. It took me some time to get comfortable with that angle of the story, but I realized early on that I couldn’t judge Patsy the way other people might. I had to be open to telling her story and portraying her as authentically as possible, knowing that there are women who grapple with this very same dilemma—feeling forced into motherhood by societal pressures, unable to live up to the high standards of the maternal role. Patsy didn’t have the opportunity to explore her own identity before becoming a mother. Her greatest desire is to find her place in the world, trying to define herself in a world that already defines her. Once I started to listen to that, I no longer found it challenging to step into her shoes and walk the miles with her.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Lately, I’ve been writing on the New Jersey Transit during my commute to Princeton, where I’ve been teaching this past year. But I mostly write in my study. Early morning and mid-afternoon are the perfect times for me. I try to write every day. If that isn’t possible—since we’re human and we need breathers—I read, watch television, and spend time with my loved ones. I find that the majority of my inspiration comes from just living my life, so I take my non-writing time as seriously as I do my writing.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I was once that reader who devoured books without ever thinking about the process of how those books got to me in the first place. I didn’t know the sheer amount of work it took behind the scenes for a book to get on my bookshelf. I’m grateful for the team I have and for the opportunity to reach so many people.
5. What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a while.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
There are so many authors who I think deserve wider recognition. There’s Sanderia Faye, author of Mourner’s Bench; Tracy Chiles McGhee, author of Melting the Blues; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, author of Blue Talk and Love; JP Howard, an exceptional poet and author of Say Mirror; and Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has written several collections of poetry, including my favorite, Arrival.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing Patsy, what would say?
I would tell myself to relax, breathe, and trust the process.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
When I was first published, I used to read reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. But a very good mentor, who happens to be a renowned author, told me never to do that since reviews are really conversations between readers—that an author has no business being in that conversation unless she’s invited. That made perfect sense to me. Once I was able to block out that extra noise—both good and bad—I was able to completely focus on my next project.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
That would be diversifying the gate keepers, not just in terms of race, but also class and culture. Expand the industry so that we have all different types of people of color; that there would be no such thing as a model minority of the year, but a celebration of everyone. Though I’ve been lucky to be surrounded and championed by people who understand me and get what I’m doing, deep down I question my belonging. I know that many writers of color who are in the game are anxious that the door might close soon—that our time might be up when the industry yawns and moves on to the next thing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Elizabeth Strout once told me to keep my head down and write. That’s the greatest advice I’ve ever gotten. At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves why we write and why it’s important for us to tell these stories. The universe will take care of the rest.
Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of the novel Patsy.
Ten Questions for Catherine Chung
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and SanFranciscoChronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.
Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. (Credit: David Noles)
Ten Questions for Chanelle Benz
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Chanelle Benz, whose novel The Gone Dead is out today from Ecco. As the novel opens, Billie James returns to the shack she inherited from her father, a renowned Black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old, in the Mississippi Delta. As she encounters the locals, including the McGees, a family whose history is entangled with hers, she finds out that she herself went missing the day her father died. The mystery intensifies as “the narrator and narrative tug at Mississippi’s past and future with equal force,” Kiese Laymon writes. Chanelle Benz has published short stories in Guernica, Granta, Electric Literature, the American Reader, Fence, and the Cupboard. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco Press and was named a Best Book of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It was also longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. It won the 2018 Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Fiction and the Philosophical Society of Texas 2018 Book Award for fiction. She lives in Memphis, where she teaches at Rhodes College.
1. How long did it take you to write The Gone Dead?
About five years, though some of that time I was also working on finishing my story collection.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Getting the voice of the main protagonist right. I tried different points of view, dialing it up and down, but it wasn’t until I shifted my attention to developing the voices of the characters around her that she finally came into relief.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write in bed, at the dining room table, and occasionally in my actual office. When I’m on a deadline, I try to dedicate some hours late morning/early afternoon, or every other day if I’m teaching. I also write at night if need be—I have a small child so I can’t afford to be particular. But I’ve always tried to be flexible because I came up in the theatre which demands you come onstage whenever and however you may be feeling.
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
That some readers see the book as a thriller or mystery, which I’m totally comfortable with, but it was unexpected. I felt that I was structuring the novel the only way it could work. But then so many of the stories I am drawn to are mysteries, whether existential, psychological, or the more classic murder mystery.
5. What are you reading right now?
Casey Cep’s The Furious Hours and Daisy Johnston’s Everything Under.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Jennifer Clement’s work is so fantastic, so luminous, so cutting that I don’t understand why she’s not wildly famous.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Gone Dead, what would say?
Don’t be careful; definitely not in the first draft. I was so worried when I began the book about doing the time and its people justice that for quite a while I didn’t let my imagination take the lead, which can happen when grappling with the dark side of history.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Student loan debt.
9. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
Yes, as long as it doesn’t put them in debt. I found that the time and space to write was an incredible, powerful gift.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
That’s impossible for me to narrow down! But I often think of something the theatre director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski said: “Whenever the ground shakes beneath your feet, go back to your roots.” (I may be paraphrasing there.) I interpret this as whenever you fail or meet with rejection or some experience that saps your heart, that you remember why you started writing, what you fell in love with reading, whatever it was that first inspired you.
Chanelle Benz, author of the novel The Gone Dead. (Credit: Kim Newmoney)
Ten Questions for Catherine Chung
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Catherine Chung, whose second novel, The Tenth Muse, is out today from Ecco. Growing up with a Chinese mother (who eventually abandons the family) and an American father who served in World War II (but refuses to discuss the past), the novel’s protagonist, Katherine, finds comfort and beauty in the way mathematics brings meaning and order to chaos. As an adult she embarks on a quest to solve the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, and turns to a theorem that may hold the answer to an even greater question: Who is she? Catherine Chung is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her first novel, Forgotten Country, was a Booklist, Bookpage, and SanFranciscoChronicle Best Book of 2012. She has published work in the New York Times, the Rumpus, and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write The Tenth Muse?
From when I first had the idea to when I turned in the first draft, it took about five years, with many starts and stops in between.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
My mind! My mind is the biggest challenge in everything I do. I write to try to set myself free, and then find myself snagged on my own limitations. It’s maddening and absurd and so, so humbling. With this book, it was a tie between trying to learn the math I was writing about—which I should have seen coming—and having to confront certain habits of mind I didn’t even know I had. I found myself constantly reining my narrator in, even though I meant for her to be fierce and brilliant and strong. She’s a braver person than me, and I had to really fight my impulse to hold her back, to let her barrel ahead with her own convictions and decisions, despite my own hesitations and fears.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write where I can, when I can. I’ve written in bathtubs of hotel rooms so as not to wake my companions, I’ve written on napkins in restaurants, I’ve written on my phone on the train, sitting under a tree or on a rock, and on my own arm in a pinch. I’ve walked down streets repeating lines to myself when I’ve been caught without a pen or my phone. I’ve also written on my laptop or in a notebook at cafes and in libraries or in bed or at my dining table. As to how often I write, it depends on childcare, what I’m working on, on deadlines, on life!
4. What was the most unexpected thing about the publication process?
I wish it didn’t turn me into a crazy person, but it does. A pleasant surprise is just how kind so many people have been—withdrawing from the real world to write can be very isolating; it was lovely to emerge and be reminded of the community I write to be a part of.
5. What are you reading right now?
Right now I’m reading Honeyfish—an absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry by Lauren Alleyne, and the wonderful The Weil Conjectures—forthcoming!—about the siblings Simone and Andre Weil, by Karen Olsson. I’m in love with Christine H. Lee’s column Backyard Politics, which is about urban farming, family, trauma, love, resilience, growth—basically everything I care about. It’s been a very good few year of reading for me! I’m obsessed with Ali Smith and devoured her latest, Spring. I thought Women Talking by Miriam Toews and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi were both extraordinary. Helen Oyeyemi is one of my absolute favorites, and Gingerbread was pure brilliance and spicy delight. Jean Kwok’s recent release, Searching for Sylvie Lee, is a stunner; Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes broke me with its tenderness and humanity; and Tea Obreht’s forthcoming Inland is magnificent. It took my breath away.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Ali Smith and Tove Jansson are both widely recognized, especially in their home countries—but I feel like they should be more widely read here than they are. I didn’t discover Smith until last year, and when I did it was like a hundred doors opening in my mind at once: She’s so playful and wise, she seems to know everything and can bring together ideas that seem completely unrelated until she connects them in surprising and beautiful ways, and her work is filled with such warmth and good humor. And Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is so delicious, so sharp and clean and clear with the purity and wildness of nature and childhood. Ko Un is a Korean poet who’s well known in Korea, but not here—he’s incredible, his poems changed my idea of what poetry is and what it can do. I routinely e-mail his poems to people, just so they know. Bae Suah and Eun Heekyung are Korean fiction writers I admire—I really like reading work in translation because the conventions of storytelling are different everywhere, and I love being reminded of that, and being shown the ways my ideas of story can be exploded. Also, how Rita Zoey Chin’s memoir Let the Tornado Come isn’t a movie or TV show yet, I don’t know. Same with Dan Sheehan’s novel Restless Souls and Vaddey Ratner’s devastating In The Shadow of the Banyan. And Samantha Harvey is a beautiful, thoughtful, revelatory writer who I’m surprised isn’t more widely read in the States.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started writing The Tenth Muse, what would say?
I’d say, “Hey, I know you’re worried about things like finishing and selling this book, and also health insurance and finding a job and not ending up on the street, and all that will more or less work out, but more pressingly, here I am from the future, freaking out because apparently I’ve figured out time travel and also either bypassed or am creating various temporal paradoxes by visiting you now. Clearly we have bigger issues than this book you’re working on or the current moment you’re in, so can you take a moment to help me figure some things out? Like how should I now divide my time between the present and the past? Am I obligated to try to change the outcome of various historical events? Should I visit the distant, distant past before there were people? Should I visit the immediate future? Do I even want to know what happens next and if I do will I become obsessed with trying to edit my life and history in the way that I edit my stories? Help!”
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I don’t see it as a one-size-fits-all situation—I think sure, why not, if it’s fully funded and you feel like you’re getting something out of it. Otherwise, no. The key is to protect your own writing and trust your gut as far as what you want and need.
9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
My mind, always my mind! Related: self-doubt, self-censorship, and shame.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Back in my twenties, when I was writing my first book, I was eating breakfast at the MacDowell Colony, and this older writer asked me where he could find my published work. I said nowhere. I had an essay coming out in a journal soon, but that was it. He was astonished that I’d been let in and made a big production out of my never having published before, offering to read my forthcoming essay and give me a grade on it. It was weird, but it also sort of bounced off me. Anyway, there was a British poet sitting next to me at that breakfast named Susan Wicks, and some days later, as I was going to fetch some wood (it was winter, we all had our own fireplaces and wood delivered to our porches—have I mentioned MacDowell is paradise?) I opened the side door to my porch, and a little letter fluttered to the ground. It was dated the day of the breakfast, and it was from Susan Wicks. It said: Dear Cathy, I was so angry at the conversation that happened at breakfast! If you are here, it is because you deserve to be here. And you should know there is nothing more precious than this moment of anonymity when no one is watching you. You will never have this freedom again. Enjoy it. Have fun! And have a nice day! And then she drew a smiley face and signed her name. Susan Wicks. I think of her and that advice and her kindness all the time.
Catherine Chung, author of The Tenth Muse. (Credit: David Noles)
Caite Dolin-Leach, author of We Went to the Woods. (Credit: Dominique Cabrelli)
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