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. 10): Doing what you want to do, 2

Why is The Throne of Psyche today's illustration? No good reason except that books shipped from the mill on the 25th and so pub date approaches. And that I am just as cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof antsy as any other writer with a new book of poetry, worried whether her paper progeny will ever find good homes and readers. Also, I suppose that we can class this publication as one of those alternative markets mentioned below: the university press. There. Reasons. Good enough for me. You?

10. Doing what you want to do, continued

It is unclear to most readers and a great many writers that major publishing houses intend to choose the books that will do well. The house attempts to consult the cloudy crystal ball of the times and point a finger at the books that will sell in good numbers. It then places good money on that bet. They back a very few fiction and nonfiction horses and treat them quite well. The first time I understood this way of doing business was when I learned that an upcoming lead book on a certain list was being pushed by three full-time, full-size bodies called marketers--and it was three months before “pub date.“ Meanwhile, I was adding my bit of luster to the same list and had the hangnail of a body but much closer to pub date, along with some other writers who each had a tidbit of flesh and a jot of attention.

You know that hackneyed expression, “the scales dropped from her eyes?” Think of the author, blinded with layers and layers of eye-scales. Things happen. Scales drop. At last she stands naked-eyed. C’est moi.

Perhaps I should add, in case you've missed this bit of slang, that pub date is nothing like a ploughman’s lunch with a beer but the date scheduled for a book’s launch. At a major house, a launch is either a big whopping party where they break champagne over the bow of your ocean-going boat, or it is something else. At the least, it is when your editor (or her assistant because she has already departed for Somewhere Else) taps your book with her pinkie finger; it tumbles into the well, sending up a trail of bubbles as it sinks and you jump up and down, trying to alert the world. Probably that's not the least. The least is when the publishing houses folds or collapses and re-structures just before your special pub date.

Without a push, you will likely have the sort of sales numbers that mean your publisher will want somebody with better sales numbers next time--or somebody with no sales record for bookstores to track. Without a push, you may find it difficult to move to an equally large and equally prestigious house. Without a push, you might as well be at a smaller house that is willing to give lots of attention and care. Without a push, you might find that you begin to think about alternatives. (We’ll get to some of those later.)

None of this did I grasp early on.

Continued

Curled up, Sunday afternoon...

BLOOM/Korach

It’s easy for women

to identify with Korach.

Why should all the power

Reside in one set of hands?

Why shouldn’t we

be able to speak to God

on our time, lighting

our own smudge-sticks hearts?

Why should our bodies

need concealment, like

faces of the Holy Blessed One

hidden from creation?

Sometimes when we say this

the earth swallows us whole

like Persephone, eater

of pomegranate seeds.

Sometimes we emerge

Like spring itself,

Overflowing with the stories

We learned underground

And the plain walking-sticks

Of everyone around us

Burst into improbable bloom.

This afternoon I finished 70 Faces (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing), the new book by the Velveteen Rabbi, Rachel Barenblat.  I recommend it.  Unlike many contemporary books of poetry, it has a large subject.  As the poet says, “The tradition of responding to scripture with our own creativity—writing interpretive stories which explore questions, close loopholes, and ponder implications—dates at least as far as the third century…”

And these are some of the thoughts and questions I had along the way.

• The whole idea of midrash as imagining what might go in the gaps is interesting—and, after all, gaps are where so many writings come from. I have a whole novel where I imagine what it would be like to be a Depression-era boy who runs away and rides the rails because I don’t know all that much about the times when my father did just that, and I’m curious. And yes, what happens in the Torah that isn’t explained or is off camera is enticing material for a poem. But what I am most curious about is the whole idea of midrash as a kind of alternative history (“Imagine a different story / Avraham and Sarah / setting forth together”): is that traditional or is that her own invention
•       There’s a kind of stairs of challenge in these poems. Lower down are poems that coincide fairly closely with what we find in the text. Up higher are other kinds of poems:  poems that insist on contrasting relationships and social patterns of the past and present times, holding up a mirror, as when Isaac and Ishmael are “not yet the ancestors of enemies / Abraham’s dark eyes in every face; poems that take something dry as dust and often dull or hard to follow like the Levitical laws and bring them to musing life (as in “Gevurah,” where the concept splits the form of the poem in vertical halves); poems that rethink narrative from a new vantage point, often that of a woman like Asenath, barely mentioned in the story; poems that shift elements from the far past into a technological present (the census: / these print-outs piled on the kitchen island / like petals from some vast magnolia scented with toner);
• ·         The poet likes to fool with cliché, leading to humor: “in case of jealousy eat my words”; “please let me live up / to whatever is coming”; “Being up there with God / at the mountain’s peak / was the best thing ever,” “chips off the God block,” etc.  This sort of humor depends on a penchant for simplicity of language and often for setting cliché next to something unexpected.
• ·         Is it possible to look at difficult, grotesque events like the spear-killing of Cozbi and Zimri and bring them into 2011 commentary without shading a bit into the p. c. and multi-cultural? But then there’s the Egyptian Asenath (daughter of Potipherah, a priest of On) in “Instead of Sons,” the way her story darkens as she gives Joseph sons, not the home-loving daughter she longed for but boys who belonged to someone else’s story / which would unfold / without her memory, without her bones.”
• ·         I am wishing that I could compare the form of these poems with those in Rachel Barenblat’s earlier chapbooks. They are, like a great deal of contemporary poetry, floating somewhere between formal and what is called “free,” although of course nothing is quite free They tend toward stanzas of a set length yet eschew metrics and set line length. I am fantasizing that she will make a statement about such things because I find issues of form interesting. (But it might be one of those subjects that only poets find so, and not even most poets.)
• ·         What I like best about these poems reminds me of Joseph Epstein in his grand essay on I. B. Singer, “What Yiddish Says”: “What makes Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction so immensely alive is that its author understood that nothing has successfully replaced this drama, with its sense that one's actions matter, that they are being judged in the highest court of all, and that the stakes couldn't be greater. No contemporary human drama has been devised that can compare or compete with the drama of salvation, including the various acquisition dramas: those of acquiring pleasure, money, power, fame, knowledge, happiness on earth in any of its forms.”

With Paul Digby and "The Birthday Roses" on youtube

I promised a surprise to my facebook friends, and I promised it by midnight. I hope they'll forgive me for the slowness of uploads. I meant it as a bit of a salute to April Fool's Day, but the Day is tricksy and shook me into the 2nd.

So here's the Fool from my ongoing project, The Book of the Red King. And it's all thanks to the composing and photography and video-making of that lovely man, Paul Digby.

You may find the Fool at youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEfrItrLfPA/ or you may look down the right-hand panel of this page and see a smaller version there in the youtube section.

If you would like to see the text of the poem, it may be found at qarrtsiluni as part of Two Poems from the Plant Kingdom: http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/01/24/two-poems-from-the-plant-kingdom.

The illustration is of a painting by my penpal Graham Ward, "The King in Finisterre." I chose it in honor of the Fool's devotion to the Red King. Looking at Graham's fools and kings set me off in that direction once more back in October. I'd fooled with fools before, but never so much and so foolishly as in these past few months.

Thanks, Graham! Thanks, editors of qarrtsiluni! And most of all, thank you to Paul.