The House of Words: the Annex

June 12, I amend my life:
I have been rather naughty
and shown Gary Dietz in playful moments:
this is actually what he looks like.
He rarely looks as he did
in the "Attack of the Killer Inbox"
photo or the button-eye "Elluminate"
photo. Rarely. Honest.
Those of you who came by earlier
were dratted lucky to see them.

I am fresh back from the West Chester poetry conference (more about that later, when I am genuinely "fresh") and thinking about The House of Words again. This time I'm linking to an article by my former student Gary Dietz (the era when I taught is so very long ago that he is quite, quite grown up, a sparkling outside-the-box marketer and a marvelous single dad of Alexander) on his 6by7reports.com. As you can see from the photographs pilfered from his facebook page, Gary has not lost his sense of fun. So take a giant step over there to read his "Middleman be gone!" article.

If you have been following The House of Words, you may be rather amused by his summation of it! And he has a challenge for those of us making art in the 21st century...

The House of Words (no. 31): poet Hannah Stephenson on inspiration

Evidently there are many rooms
in The House of Words.
Today we wander out of the publishing wing
and into the room of the practical muse.
Poet Hannah Stephenson gives advice on
dailiness and inspiration.
Hannah blogs at The Storialist,
where you may find the results
of her advice and much more,
including many links to Hannah-on-the-web.

The Earned Eureka: Locating and Generating Inspiration

Any of us who write or create know that inspiration does not usually occur in one great flood. No angelic choir frantically signals the arrival of brilliance. No solar flare or lightning bolt shakes us by the shoulders, declaring, “WRITE!” And yet, at one point, we have all longed for that magical, triumphant moment in which we are channeling and discovering the world’s truest truths (à la Frankenstein or Einstein or Doc Brown).

Inspiration, fortunately or unfortunately, does not usually visit us in an instantaneous flash. Docs Brown and Frankenstein and Einstein are funny representations of this idea for me. They all came to mind when I thought about lightning-bolt-brand inspiration; intriguingly, none of these doctors are just sitting around, eating Thin Mints by the sleeve when their “Eureka!” moment strikes. If anything, those doctors have been working (and yes, eating Thin Mints) and thinking and researching--it’s just that we (the audience) can’t see this. Indeed, they have earned their Eurekas. The creative process doesn’t just zap and take charge of selected humans, leaving them to exclaim, “Great Scott!”

I would characterize the voice of inspiration as a whisper, a low murmur. Sometimes it is wordless. We barely feel its tug on our sleeve, its tap on our heart.

In order to create in any sustained fashion, we have to learn to listen. Four years ago, to write a poem, I would wait until I felt like I had an interesting idea. Hence, I would write about six poems a year, only two of them surviving my editor’s eye.

This is an example of not listening to myself. I had other ideas throughout that time, certainly--but I quickly dismissed those which did not seem meaningful. What a disservice this was to my writing! These days, I write at least four or five times a week (I post every weekday at my poetry blog, The Storialist, and have since July of 2008). One of the questions I’m asked most often is, “How do you keep yourself inspired almost every day?”

Because I have made the decision to write this often, and to share it this often, I keep writing. I never wait to feel inspired. I focus on generating this inspiration myself (because that’s where it comes from, I think---a conversation between your subconscious and the adventure of life and encounters).

So how do we locate and create inspiration? Delightfully, this is a skill that we can develop (it is not an innate talent we are born with or without). Mostly, it is about noticing our own responses, and realizing that they are already meaningful. What you notice, as opposed to what I notice, is meaningful because we do not observe the world through the same brain or eyeballs or ears.

It’s the same question I ask my students (in first-year composition courses) when they are looking a text, and don’t know what to write. “What do you notice?” I ask. And the next question is, “What is interesting about what you have noticed?”

As artists, those questions are powerful tools for us. I write down ideas in a little notebook (you have one, too, I think), but these ideas are not “ideas for poems.” They are bits of language that are trapped in the drain of my ear, pieces of my day that speak to me. Here’s what one page in my book says: “Your heart, a freeway.” “The LA freeway, the veins of a god.” “What you are desperate for creates a rattle in your core.”  “Whitewater.” “Do something every day that scares you.” “Black cows on a green hill.”

These are scrawled (in my rather hideous handwriting) without editing or evaluation. The moment a thought appears to me like this, I write it down. Not all of this becomes poetry, clearly. But none of it is wasted. This is my practice of being more present in daily life, which is what poetry helps me do. This is me listening to myself.

Black cows on the slope
courtesy of sxc.hu and Clodia Porteous,
who takes pictures near Adelaide, Australia.
She and her husband have a tiny boy named Bodhi,
and Clodia is a part-time architecture student.

The me-of-four-years ago would think, “Black cows? Who the hell wants to read what YOU [I] say about cows in grass,” or “Why do you keep writing about driving? Who else cares about you in the car?!” or “Why don’t I just eat more Thin Mints instead of trying to write anything intelligent--I know it’ll be mediocre.” Now I just write it down. This is my research.

In my blog, I also link to art that has somehow sparked each poem; there is a conversation happening between my words and the piece of artwork. Art turns me on. It turns my brain on. I spend so much time sifting through artist’s sites and looking at art in galleries (also glorious research). When I see a piece I am drawn to, I start in on myself. What do I notice? What is interesting about what I have noticed? What is compelling about that specific observation? What does that remind me of? When have I had this thought before? What emotion is linked to this thought? Where else does this idea occur? What is another way to explain this same concept?

This is not an interrogation; it is an effort to locate inspiration. The painting or the cows on the grass---those are speaking to me because I am speaking to myself (about the world). It just sounds like it is coming from out there. We just have to decide to listen, to respond.

A gap in The House of Words + Travels

North Carolina Arboretum
April 23, 2011

I've had a little difficulty with managing out-of-town wireless, family events, and the need to be off for further adventures, so I am going to take a break in The House of Words. I am sorry to break in the middle of Dave Bonta's interesting responses and hope he will forgive me when I meet him on the 3rd of May! 

Tomorrow I will be off to Wales via Asheville, Atlanta, Paris, and Birmingham, and I have a dire need right now to work on publicity for events on the 12th  (City Lights, Sylva, North Carolina) and 26th (The Green Toad, Oneonta, New York.)

Thanks for understanding, and we'll have more of The House of Words after Wales! In the meantime, adventure is singing her siren song...

The House of Words (no. 16): Small presses: Phoenicia Publishing

Halving cherries,

I prie the stones

from their black hearts,

blood pooling

beneath

my fingernails.

Interview with Beth Adams of Phoenicia Press, continued

Marly:  Beth, you live a highly creative life. You draw, take pictures, write poetry, keep a blog, sing in a choir—probably there’s more that I don’t see. All these things are satisfying. A small publishing house is quite a bit of work and expense. In what ways is it satisfying to join the world of publishing?

Beth:  It's funny – when we were moving to Montreal from Vermont, I found a tiny book I had made when I was maybe 7 or 8, with drawings and a hand-written text. I’ve always “published” things, in one form or another, whether it’s been my own stuff, or newsletters for organizations, or elaborate professional jobs for corporations and institutions. I started my career at a time when you literally had to construct the entire job by hand on a light table, with type galleys and x-acto knives and wax and rubylith masks. Computers revolutionized the whole process, starting in the early 1980s – thank God! -- but digital technology for print-on-demand publishing opens up possibilities for someone like me that are almost too fabulous to be true. I hope and expect that e-book publishing will eventually offer the same design quality, and control over formatting, as print, because that is where I think we are headed.

An entrance to Lincoln Inn's Fields, London, 2010
11" x 7" watercolor

And the internet is so great! It’s put me in contact with talented and creative people all over the world – such a far cry from the isolation and frustration of being a creative kid in a small central New York town in the 1950s and 60s, as you can probably imagine, Marly! I’m also fortunate to have been in a long love and work partnership with my husband, who’s both a very talented photographer and an expert on the computer side of things, as well as being my best and most trusted critic. All these relationships make it possible and exciting to put together book projects that I hope are distinctive and worthwhile.

I have a bit more time in my life now. Some of it needs to be devoted to my own work, but I’m not someone who is happy working alone on personal projects all the time. It’s very satisfying to me to help bring a wonderful manuscript into life as a book -- not just because I love books, but because I enjoy working closely with the authors, and it’s their passion and hard work and spirit that should be reflected in what we do together. In a small way, I hope I’m giving something back to literature and to art – both of which have given me so much.

The House of Words (no. 11): One writer's lessons

"Buying a book," courtesy of photographer Herman Brinkman
of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and sxc.hu.

Doing What You Want to Do, continued
Question for the day: Is there something to be learned from one writer's experience?

At this juncture, I am fairly confident that I will continue to be able to publish the books I want to write. I’m not promising where I will publish. I have three books of poetry and three novels forthcoming, and not one is at a major New York City house. I can’t say that I tried too hard to stay in New York, as I have shown exactly one manuscript to exactly two big houses in the past few years. One of the editors liked my books and asked to read a certain manuscript and then wanted to buy. In the end, she gave me the lowdown on the increasing commercialism in New York and her own lack of control over what she could buy. The other gave me a fairly usual rejection. I didn’t bother beyond those two.

Side note about publishing: I find that most book-manuscript rejections are flattering. Don’t let it influence your mind. Don’t get carried away. Nothing in publishing matters until it matters.*

Why have I gone elsewhere? Having parted with my agent, I somehow didn’t want to bother struggling in the city. None of my books to date had received a push. Catherwood was the only one selling wonderfully well at any time.  But that time happened to be just after it had just gone out of hardcover at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and into paperback at Bard, an old literary imprint that had been newly revived. Then HarperCollins imploded and took down many books and whole lines, including Bard. So I was in a situation where it seemed that the big boys had never done more for me than any hardworking smaller house. I was glad to have been on prestigious lists, sure, but my books had remained rather obscure. When I received a flurry of requests for manuscripts from outside of New York, I was ready to accept some of them. More metanoia.

A side note about publishing with a house: expect bumps. Expect disasters, small or large, because your book depends on a publishng and distribution machine and other people who have lives and goals of their own. Also, it is part of time and our human calendar—events that appear to have nothing to do with books affect the visibility and selling of books.

Should I be pleased about where I am? I have a book of poetry and a novel forthcoming at a rising university press that has decided to build a literary line. One of them was given a prize by an outside judge. The Throne of Psyche will appear shortly, and I was very taken with the design. Three books are forthcoming in the UK, where I hope to have more of a presence than I do now. I can reprint those later on in the U. S. And I have a book forthcoming in Canada. The only thing that I’ve ever published there prior to this is a translation of one of my books.

All of these books (and other requests, some that didn’t quite fit me) came out of editors and publishers liking my work and asking to see more or inviting me to submit. I love that. I just plain love it.

What are the worst things about where I am now?

A lot of the older books are out of print. Right now I'm working on obtaining a reprint of Catherwood. Because I haven't experienced that old-fashioned publisher's effort to build a readership for a writer and because I have worked in many different forms, I tend to feel a little uncertain about whether my readers will follow me into new or more unusual territory. (I tend to move about a lot in both subject matter and form, a thing publishers do not love, though it makes life more interesting. And alas, poetry seems to be unusual territory for many people these days!)

What’s the best thing about loving it and where I am now?

I wrote the stories and novels and poems that I wanted to write and gave me joy in the act of writing.

I wrote what I wanted to read.

As a result of a clear prior track in the world, I managed to be lazy about placing books and yet everything turned out fine.

All anybody can say about publishing comes from experience. My experience has been mixed. But most people’s experience is mixed. That's from the simple and inevitable fact that most writers don't have lead books, and therefore they are not at the forefront of the publisher's concern.

What can we take from one writer's experience, as readers or writers?

If you are a reader and you buy a book that is not a lead book and not perched anywhere near the bestseller list, you are making a statement and placing a vote that will affect both writer and publisher. Every book purchase counts. Every book purchase says you want to read a certain writer and that the publisher should have confidence in him or her. In the case of poetry, a modicum of readers voting this way may even mean that a house decides to retain its poetry line rather than jettisoning it. I was told that if each poetry book in a certain smallish house had managed to sell 300 copies, the house would not have gotten rid of the line. 300! Skip lunch out once, and you can vote for a book.

If you write and publish, be prepared for things to go otherwise than dreamed or planned.

If you are a writer passionate about words and storytelling rather that "product" and "market," hang onto your heart and soul. Don’t sell them down the river. Because if you do, a day may just come when you wish with all your being that you had written exactly what you wanted to write and wanted to read.


*The very same thing goes for movie rights. Does not matter until it matters. You sell rights? Still doesn’t matter, though the spare change is welcome. Set to film? I have a friend whose book was six weeks from shooting with a major star signed on for the lead. Six weeks out, the whole thing fell apart. Does not matter until it matters.

The House of Words (no. 8): Doing what you want to do, 1

8.  Doing what you want to do

"Late 19th-century bookseller's sign
in one of three languages on the Rokin, Amsterdam."
Courtesy of Herman Brinkman
of Amsterdam, the Netherlands and sxc.hu.

Is there been a cost to doing what you want to do? Yes, there is a price, particularly if you pursue your own path, and even more particularly if your path takes you down various windings--in my case, to novels on a variety of subjects and set in various eras, formal poetry, Southern fantasy marketed to a "young adult" audience (I still hate labels), epic poetry, and a whole lot of uncollected short stories that are not bunched in one place on the continuum that runs between what is called realistic and what is tagged as surreal, irreal, etc. For practical reasons having to do with business, a great many large publishers find consistency more valuable than exploration and change. 

So about that price: I’m not the least bit unhappy about it, although when I was young, it disturbed me. Came to terms with it, you see. I willingly pay that price because I just don‘t measure success in the same way that the marketplace measures it. In fact, success is a word that sits uneasily with beauty and shapeliness and art. 

* * *

The big houses of New York City and elsewhere are increasingly commercial, as their editors openly admit to writers. I’m afraid this is no longer a brave thing to assert. It is the stuff of casual conversation between writers and editors and is the subject of many posts and articles. The days of literary-minded gentlemen who wanted to contribute to making the high culture of their country and make a modest 3% profit are long gone. (For that matter, their beloved houses are all owned by overseas investors.) 

Anybody of reasonable intelligence and patience with a willingness to revise may attempt to write a commercial novel. If you are one of those who wishes to do so, I leave you to the field and to any pots of rainbow gold you find along the way, with the reminder that most competent commercial books aren't rainbows and don’t actually lead to a leprechaun pot spilling over with money. You might do better with scratch-off tickets.

But if you are mad to write and mean to hew to making the books you are meant to write, those books that will change you as if by alchemy and, one hopes, bring deep pleasure to others, then you may well have to relinquish any delusions of a publisher hoisting you toward raging popularity. This is a concession that must be made if you refuse to make other concessions to the marketplace. In fact, unless you are among the lucky souls whose creations are anointed as a lead book to a major house--that particular gold ring is another matter, although even it comes with no guarantee--you will probably not have to worry about what to do with any raging popularity.  Instead, you will be busy trying to let the world know that your book exists. And if you haven't done so already, that might be a good time to give up measuring success or beauty or shapeliness or art by worldly means.

 

To be continued...



The House of Words (no. 6): Lucky

This post may seem a little odd to those who have been with me through many editorial departures and books that were timed in some unlucky manner. Nevertheless, I shall simply vow with Emerson that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

* * *

I don’t regard myself as “special” or think that the world owes me any rewards. I am quite glad when it does toss me a gold star, but I do not wish to beg for one or demand one. This preserves me from a great deal of anguish.

Instead, I think that I am lucky.

I think this despite the fact that I am the absolute Beggar Queen of Orphaned Books (“Orphaned” book? That’s when your editor leaves before or during the launch period of your book. And then the poor offspring of your mind wanders the halls and offices, homeless, sitting in corners with the Little Match Girl, desiring only to be taken up to the bright and shiny Paradise of Readers.) You see, I now realize that a writer cannot do one blessed thing about randomness, a thing that includes editors seeing greener grass and unexpectedly jumping the fence, etc., and so these problems no longer concern me.

As I am capable of considerable dark denseness, it took me some time to grasp another little idea: I was given a gift. This gift is a great gift that makes me laugh and feel thrilled and sometimes weep. I jig as a partner to readers I will never meet. Sometimes I encounter people I become fond of because they have danced with me. Yet I did nothing to earn or win or deserve the gift. It is a free gift. You see? I am thankful. I am lucky.

That gift plus life events made me a maniacal reader in childhood and an obsessive writer later on. Also, I grew up in a family with many books, too, and with parents who cared about reading and writing. More luck!

I am nothing but happy that I was given this gift, a thing that has even transformed the tragedies and sorrows of childhood and adult life: those grits that can become pearls in the sea of words. In fact, I have a strong sense that it is while writing that I find the thread of path that allows me to escape the labyrinth--to move toward a sunlit redemption of my own bumblings, sins and errors, and the random "black swans" of life.

* * *

The circle rainbow was photographed by the appropriately-named Joy Butler (wish I had a joy butler in my butler's pantry, but there are only dishes and cleaning supplies) of Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia. Courtesy of Joy and sxc.hu.

The House of Words (no. 5): Diana Wynne Jones

Death interrupts us in the midst of life, and just so it interrupts The House of Words. Here is Rebecca Beatrice Miller, my daughter, on the death of Diana Wynne Jones. I just imagine that this will remain for me the most beautiful and meanngful fan letter I know because it is a wonderful letter and because it is tied so tightly to the childhood of my middle child. Rebecca (along with her friends Jin and Lauren) was home on spring break when Diana Wynne Jones died. She wrote this letter shortly after returning to school.

* * *

Dear Diana,

This is the letter I’ve been meaning to write to you for--years now, I guess. But mostly since this August, when I heard that you were going off of chemo. I thought then that I’d write you a letter, and maybe, if it was you I was writing to, I’d finally be able to explain to someone just how important you’ve been to me. But I waited until it was too late. I know it’s a cliché, but I even remember saying to someone that I felt like by putting off that letter, I could stretch out your life, because you couldn’t die before I sent it to you. For the past eight months I kept thinking about how sad I’d be when it finally happened. But I think that I didn’t really believe that it would. I definitely didn’t realize how sad I’d really be.

When you’re a kid, it’s not like you don’t think about death. But you’re running on insufficient knowledge, and it’s puzzling and kids don’t tend to dwell on things that confuse them. Up until a certain age, I just kind of assumed all the writers I was reading were dead. Weird, since I live with an author--one who is perhaps more alive than most people. Like you were, Diana. That’s why when I read Howl’s Moving Castle for the first time, I wanted to remember your name. I guess that was the age when I started thinking about writers, their lives and writing processes. That’s when I started wanting to write seriously. I think I wrote my first real short story in third grade, the same year I read Howl’s Moving Castle. I remember something vague about a child in a big house, something about being caged. A cliff by the sea, and a boy who turns into a bird.

So I remembered your name, and I talked to my mom (who gave me the book) about you, and she brought me more books. Charmed Life and the rest of the Chrestomanci quartet (because it was just a quartet back then), the Dalemark sequence, Dogsbody, Eight Days of Luke. I still think that The Homeward Bounders is one of the most devastatingly sad books I’ve ever read, and the characters all seem so ancient and real. But there’s one book that I always go back to--of course, it’s Howl’s Moving Castle. I’ve read it so often. I don’t own a copy, I always check out the same old one from the library next to my house. The first time I read it, I was so tense and excited that my fingers tore little arch-shaped holes in the bottom edges of the pages. I like to read it again and look at the holes I made in the library copy so long ago--more than ten years ago--and wonder if anyone else read the book and touched the holes and wondered who made them.

From then on my childhood was a romance with the weird and wonderful, and I couldn’t get enough of your stories. Diana, you had this incredible way of saying so much with so little, so that as I read I had these little “oh” moments that were unlike anything I found anywhere else, and still are. You trust the reader in a way so few writers can: cleverly, yet modestly, with an unaffected enthusiasm that sweeps us away.

I don’t know if you’d remember this, but I sent you a letter once. More of a card, really--it was a piece of paper all folded up, with a picture of Tony from Magicians of Caprona dressed like Punch, with a big red nose. I’m not sure how old I was, but I’m thinking the drawing wasn’t too great. I don’t remember what was inside. I think I was too shy to write very much. It must have been when I was about eleven or twelve, a little before I first heard that Howl would be made into a film--a Miyazaki film, no less, of whom I was already a fan. (I was ecstatic, to say the least; at first I thought it couldn’t be real.) I think it was then because my mom was sending letters to you, and that’s when The Curse of the Raven Mocker was being written. I remember you read it, and you said you loved it, you loved how different it was next to the majority of the children’s fantasy genre. I remember that letter. I remember you saying that my picture was on your trophy shelf. I wonder how long it stayed there, and I wonder how crowded your shelf was then compared to later, when you must have gotten letters in floods. I was so happy though.

Diana, when people asked me who my favorite author was, I always hesitated, even though your name was the first one to come to mind. The truth is that you were more than a favorite author to me--you were not even in the same realm as other authors any more. You had a shrine in my heart where I placed the memory of the first moment that I opened one of your books, frozen, inviolate, forever. Your stories became a part of me in a way no other stories ever did. They spoke to me about loss and loneliness and helplessness and frustration, but they also made me laugh and sigh with happiness. You told me that childhood and life are hard, but things aren’t always what they seem and you find reasons to keep on going. Your books were a whisper of darkness and a dream of adventure. When I was happy or sad or sick of life I wanted to read Diana. Each time a new book came out, I had to have it. I brought five of your books to college with me, because I couldn’t stand not to have your words with me--a place without Diana doesn’t feel like home. You taught me a certain special kind of writing philosophy, the kind that said that children’s books don’t have to be dumbed down, that the best books are loved by adults and children alike, and by other authors. But most importantly, your books said loud and clear that you only ever wrote what you wanted to write. Remembering that freedom in thought that you had, the cheerful way you trampled expectations, makes me sadder than anything else. You weren’t merely a childhood favorite author; you were unique in all the world.

When I heard you had died, I didn’t just shed tears. I cried like a baby, helplessly and with abandon. I cried for about an hour, hiccuping until I couldn’t breathe. I was shocked at how I cried; I still can’t really fathom it, but in a DWJ sort of way I understand perfectly how I could have been touched and changed so much by a woman 57 years my senior, in a country I have never visited, who I never met.

Authors have a special kind of relationship with their readers. As creators, they have a tiny sort of godhood: a reader of stories usually never sees the writer’s face, or speaks with him or her, except maybe through letters. Likewise the author’s fate is led by a faceless mass of unknown number, sometimes buoying their spirits with letters and pictures. There is love between these two halves of the equation, a kind of devotion or loyalty that I feel doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the world. And I think it’s because of the nature of writing. When you read a book, you’ve got a direct line into someone else’s head; you’re literally reading their thoughts, even if they were refined and crystallized into this form.

Diana, thank you so much for giving me your thoughts, for teaching me so much, for helping me, for lending me your dreams and nurturing my hopes. Whenever I felt disgusted with the world, frustrated at life, or simply helpless, your words comforted me. This is the bitterest goodbye I’ve yet had to make, because at times I’ve thought that you were a sort of guardian angel to me.

I think you must view the afterlife in a funny way, so I won’t say too much--but hopefully, someone nice is paying attention and will make sure that you see this. If nothing else, Diana, just know that you made a little girl smile.

Love,
Rebecca

Diana Wynne Jones, 12 August 1934 - 26 March 2011

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Illustration: The cover to Howl's Moving Castle shown here is the same as the library copy Rebecca mentions.

All-But-the-Kitchen-Sink-Updates

The House of Words

The new series is getting lots of reads and some interesting comments. I can see that I definitely ought to do a "best of comments" post in the end. I am going to keep the series to Monday through Friday postings, so it will be back in a couple of days.

The Throne of Psyche

Hardcover and paperback books shipped from the mill to Mercer University Press on Friday, so they will be available at independent and chain bookshops and for order in the near future. That means pre-orders are about done, so if you are a pre-ordering discount (amazon or bn.com etc.) sort of person, you had better order soon (more accurately known as now, perhaps--I am unsure when such things stop.)

Videos for The Throne of Psyche (thank you, Paul Digby!)

Paul Digby, that saintly fellow, is finishing up a number of videos on poems from The Throne of Psyche. Music and photography by Himself. Thank you so much, Paul--I am glad you are a friend of Psyche.

Watch for links soon!

The Palace at 2:00 a.m.

I have added the most-popular-posts gadget, and that means that a list with clips can be found below the archives. Bemusing: qarrtsiluni is very, very popular, far more so that I realized. Not only does "16 Reasons" lead all posts, ever, but right now several other qarrtsiluni-related posts are in the top ten.

Moreover, two from the recent Advent/Christmas series are in the top ten as well; that is especially helpful to note because it suggests that one doesn't have to do a formal review to attract people--just an introduction to the person and an excerpt appears to please. Jeanne Larsen's book of poems makes the top ten, and as a fellow poet-novelist I find that encouraging. Makoto Fujimura is also interesting to people: not surprising, as Mako is a fascinating person. Now-librarian-historian-teacher Susan Leberman is also high on the list, a thing I find curious and rather wonderful, as she is full of pep and feels things deeply and wears wonderful hats. That she is not a champion speller only adds to the charm.

What I hadn't paid any attention to is the popularity of palace characters, particularly the Pot Boy, who has not made an appearance in a long time. He has several posts in the top ten. If anybody wishes to write him with requests for posts or with "Dear Pot Boy" questions in the realm of advice for the lovelorn or on in-laws, and other pesky difficulties, feel free. He has long fancied himself as a sort of castellated Dear Abby.

Marly on the road

Tomorrow I make the swoop to Bard College, returning three rambunctious and well-fed college women to their proper places at school.

Pax tecum, Diana

Late addition: There have been some tears around here for Diana Wynne Jones, our daughter's very favorite writer. We remembered her books and the marvelous blurb she gave me--so generous--and the time when my daughter sent her an illustration...

The House of Words (no. 4): Persistence (Peggy Leon)

4. Persistence

Here’s Peggy Leon on persistence. Peg just published her second novel, A Theory of All Things, with a fine small house, The Permanent Press. I bought mine after her reading at The Green Toad in Oneonta, but you can get yours almost anywhere--and look for her first book, Mother Country, as well.

"Five wildly creative siblings are drawn back into each other’s orbit during a crisis. Along the way, Leon lets each character take turns telling the story and stitches together their collisions via e-mails, texts and telephone conversations, maintaining a healthy balance between tart humor and touching drama. Quirky, funny and eminently readable." —Kirkus

Hear that? Eminently readable. From the famously grumpy reviewers at Kirkus.
And now, Peggy Leon on that curious quality, persistence . . .

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Peggy Leon's first novel
from Permanent Press.

Persistence is always admirable in oneself and annoying in those around us. For me as a writer, it's the nagging inner voice, the "are we there yet, are we there yet" that keeps me barreling down the interstate to the end of a writing project, no matter how doomed the trip seems along the way. I am much more willing to listen to the inner voice than I am to the two voices piping from the back seat on the long drive to spring break in warmer climes. Persistence keeps me sending out manuscripts, shrugging at rejections, and sending out a few more. In the endless job of trying to be published, I hear my mom's voice, circa my teenage years, Sunday afternoons: Did you pick up your room? Yes. Did you empty the dishwasher like I asked? Yes. What about the plants? Watered. The living room needs to be dusted. *Pause* Okay, I'm on it. There's always one more task, one more place to send some writing out to . . . and then after that, there's still another.

I'm not sure I could be a writer without a higher than average level of persistence; it's the only way to balance the impressive amounts of procrastination that I seem to also possess. Every time I sit down at the computer, an interior battle rages, angel (persistence) on one shoulder, devil (procrastination) standing on the other, just like a 1950's cartoon. The moment my fingers hit the keys, procrastination whispers in my ear, the siren song of laundry to be folded, of kitchen drawers that suddenly need to be sorted by function or material, of grouting begging to be mined and refilled. Gentle persistence soothes, "A line or two. You'll see. You'll feel so much better. Laundry? You hate laundry . . ." Then, procrastination rears its little, horned head, "What about the kitchen drawers? Plastic is mixing promiscuously with metal! It's an assault on decency!" Who will win the field today?

There are so many voices in my head, it's a miracle I ever accomplish anything. But, wait. Here's another little voice, Marly's... "Remember you promised to write a couple of paragraphs on persistence for my blog." It's the third reminder. That woman is persistent.

The House of Words (no. 3): Metanoia: Marsha Parker

3. Metanoia: Marsha Parker

Marsha Parker is a grand example of someone who turned away from publishing and made a different sort of creative life. The passage below is as she wrote it, minus one lovely compliment now marked by an ellipsis. (Thanks, Marsha!) At the start she is referring to a request she made for a very particular sort of poem; I wasn’t sure I could fill the request. The only other cryptic thing is a reference to her life in England. I would guess that her memory may be slightly off in what she says about her agent—yes, they get a cut, but the more painful slash from her paperback rights would have been the customary 50% to the original publisher.

Marly: I’d like to know why you quit the world of publishing, how you switched the focus of your creative life, and what you think about it now, looking back.

Marsha: You . . . warned me that poems don't just happen--neither does prose, least of all digging into those ancient opaque glass jars full of spiders, nettle, coon droppings. Seeing my young face peering back at me from the back cover of the book [Ghosts] only reminds me of where the photo was taken. I was scrubbing freshly dug carrots in the sink at my old farmhouse. A friend, Bruce Williams, a photographer, took the photo. In the first shot I had a big brown egg balanced on top of my head. I wish that Dutton had used that photo. Egghead, trying to hatch a new life.

I wrote two novels after Ghosts, submitted both to my agent, Ellen Levine; her response was tepid. She presented one to Jane Rosenman at Dutton, equally tepid response, so I decided to cut my losses, and found work as a journalist, until The Scarlet Letter took off. It provided a steady income, and I enjoyed designing without anyone else telling me how to tweak this or that. One of my worst memories of publishing was having to be told to put sex into my book. I doubt that my mother ever read it because of that (my father died in 1975, before it was printed in 1982. Thank goodness.)

I've never ever returned to the novel-writing part of my brain once I realized that I could survive off the grid and didn't need New York or Oxford to get by. I felt so awkward in NYC. When Ghosts was published I was back in Wisconsin living on a small farm, feeling a bit high and full of myself, 28 years old, still poor, recently divorced, yet feeling so free and flush with the $10K advance, and then the sale of the paperback to Berkeley for $25K (agent got most of it). I found an old log house to restore, and previous passions for architecture, art history, textiles (love to touch and feel what others touched and felt centuries ago) re-emerged.

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Photograph: I found this picture of Marsha holding newborns Antioch and Lebanon in a letter from 2006.

The House of Words (no. 2): To persist or not to persist

2. To Persist or Not to Persist

Hey, there’s a reason that most books are not about writers! Oh, there may be a coming-of-age novel now and then—covering that period of a writer’s life when he or she is not yet a writer, and therefore packed with homely and interesting non-writer events. Often these are events (or people--parents, often--those people who love us and attempt to save us from the garret)that get in the writer-protagonist's way and stand as mighty obstacles that must be opposed or crossed or circled in order to go forward.

Once the heroic act of evading or battling these opponents is past, writers spend a lot of time sitting in the corner and typing. Many of them spend hours in the corner clutching their respective malfunctioning heads and wasting perfectly good afternoons of sun and frolic.

Is this interesting from the outside? I shall tell you.

No, it isn’t.

No matter how absorbing the work is, the act of making it is probably not what we as readers want to read about. So books about writers tend to stop where the writer catches a glimpse of the promised city of garrets glimmering in the distance. Soon he or she will be sitting in his or her own poky corner and scribbling away--or perhaps clutching the recalcitrant head. And that ending, combined with the thought of the many books writers make that are not about writers, may possibly suggest to you that there is a world packed with lively pursuits, out there.

So if you decide to quit the word trade and do something else entirely, never feel bad about it. Life awaits you.

After Ghosts, Marsha Parker left the world of publishing despite the fact that she had a fancy agent and was touted as extraordinarily promising, and then she built a very different world for herself. Now she had met some setbacks, but all writers meet setbacks of some sort. Why did she take her toys and march away to the West? She wasn’t crazy about the publishing scene. Not crazy about it in the least, in fact. It occurs to me that she probably wasn't crazy about the fact that a movie appears to have been made (roughly based on the book and with the same title) without any mention of the fact to her--and therefore without any author royalties. And she certainly wasn’t fond of what people said she needed to add to her books.

What did she do?

She and her then-husband built the marvelous Smoke Ham Farm (with restored Finnish and Scandinavian outbuildings, full of charm and character and history.) Marsha raised obscure, finicky breeds of sheep that were always trying in the most exciting manner to flop over and die or to give birth in the middle of the night, and she established a regular menagerie of other animals (and peacocks! I want some!) She started a business that allowed her to travel, write, and use her creativity in ways that would have surprised her younger self. She runs an online site called The Scarlet Letter where she sells, among other curious and interesting things, her own museum reproduction needlework samplers based on work from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, books, and antique European and American needlework samplers. I admire the fact that she didn’t like the publishing scene and therefore just strode away; I admire what she has done since.

That admiration doesn’t keep me from respecting and admiring friends who made another choice. In fact, I know people who wrote book after book before the first—or sometimes the second—came along. Those are brave, persistent souls with a touch of the Mad Hatter that allows them to stay on at the great Tea Party, moving round and round until they find a small or large piece of buttered luck.

At many points I could see three choices in front of most of the other young writers I knew—persist and take joy in the work, be a bit of a melancholic looney (the worst choice but often taken, depression being one of the substances swirling in the writer's magic ink bottle), or give up and do something else.

Why did I persist?

Let's ignore my raging obsessiveness for a moment. Let's ignore a rather mad ability to dream while in the middle of mayhem, quite helpful to a writer-mother of three. Those slightly abnormal qualities assist, but they don't explain. Let's also ignore the fact that I'm not irreplaceable in any of my working capacities except as the writer of my particular books and as the mother of my particular children. And in both of those areas, perhaps I could do better. In fact, I hope to do so.

Why did I persist?

Because I am in love with playing with words and learning to make (for a writer is always starting over) stories and poems. Very simple.

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Illustration: Sampler by Susan Singleton, kit for sale at The Scarlet Letter. "Designed after a mid-eighteenth century New Hampshire sampler, this piece is delightfully naive with its oversized animals, insects, and birds. Around 1760, the New-Hampshire Gazette began publishing advertisements for girls' schools, placed by female instructresses, emphasizing a curriculum of practical as well as decorative needlework. While this sampler is atypical of most of the recognizable schools of New Hampshire (i.e. the bird and basket designs of Canterbury, the dark green linsey-woolsey grounds on samplers of Dover, and the house and barn samplers of Portsmouth), it is significantly stylized to suggest that it was taught by a particular teacher, who could have been advertising for more pupils at that time. Stitches used in the sampler are cross, back, and satin. Stitched on 35 count linen, it will measure approximately 15" x 22-1/4", and is recommended for intermediate level needleworkers."

The House of Words (no. 1): On writng and publishing

The House of Words: On Writing and Publishing

In which Marly-and-friends answer questions that readers and writers young in the craft often ask, with musings on persistence, giving up, luck, doing what you want to do, home and the writer, print publishers, the internet, and other topics of interest…

1. Print publishing: persisting and giving up

Much in the print publishing world is random. Good things are “black swans,” highly unusual events. So are bad ones. This element of being a writer is impossible to control and is a given of the vocation.

My most memorable good black swan? It ought to be winning a national award, I suppose. Probably more dramatic was parting with my second agent, being entirely too busy to look for another, and then receiving requests for books from seven publishers in quick succession. I was being lazy, and yet fruit kept dropping into my lap. I could say that it was a reward for my persistence, but I could also say that it was luck and coincidence. My most memorable bad-swan example: The Wolf Pit came out right at a major historical event (9-11), its editor departed before pub date, and it was on the very same list at Farrar, Straus & Giroux as The Corrections, that air-eating monster of a book by a man who shoved his foot in his mouth in a way that entertained the nation whenever said nation was not busy reading books about terrorism (in consequence of that same major historical event.)

To combat the truth and the mighty power of randomness, a writer can only persist. Write what one cares about in one’s own way and ignore the randomness of the publishing world. Write for joy. Ignore the scene and trends and keep writing because a writer is only a human being who is writing, and to stop means that one is no longer a writer. Alternate possibilities: become a frothing lunatic (bad, but it happens); give up (better.)

People don’t talk much about quitting, and that’s exactly what I want to talk about here. Because a question that comes up often for a writer of any age is whether it is the hour to cease, give up, pack up the toys, and flee the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (i.e. that pesky randomness again.)

I would like to play devil's advocate and praise flight for a moment. Giving up is good in some ways--more time for other pursuits, more time to chase something else with end results that are not as aggravating as what happens after the writing (which involves publishing, which can involve various agonies, and also marketing, which often involves keen frustration.)

Giving up writing is easier than persistence because--surprise!--nobody much will mind if you give up. It's not like giving up a job with a salary; there are few reproaches, and in fact many of your near-and-dear will heave great buffalo sighs and snort with relief. People will be glad to think that you may be a solvent person some day, rather than a struggling writer with the usual garret, heaps of foolscap, and bargain Toshiba laptop.

When I was much younger and shot through with despair and anguish and other black humors, I often thought of giving up as a writer. But giving up turned out to be hard; I just wasn't any good at it.

Nevertheless, I approve of turning one’s back on something and walking away in style. Since I approve, you can guess that that’s exactly what I did, long ago. That's human nature for you, a stuff that tends to look kindly on its own wayward decisions. I turned my back on achieved tenure-and-promotion at a time when such prizes as professorial salary-with-bennies were rare--right about the scarcity of hen's teeth, and everybody knows those little gleamers are hard to find. Nobody thought I was doing the right thing. In a worldly sense, it was definitely not the right thing. My luck was that I had both some hard-earned savings and a pronounced unworldly streak.

Turning one’s back on something can mean to face something else, to go somewhere new, to have a transformed outlook. Metanoia. It’s not the end.

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Stay tuned for 24 more posts on persisting, giving up, and other topics. Photograph courtesy of sxc.hu and Jenny Rollo of Sydney, Australia.