The Circuitous Tale of a (finally) Successful Book (Part 2)

[Readers: This is a continuation of a post I started last week in which I tell the tale of how a short story collection was finally accepted by a publisher, something like twelve or thirteen years after it was begun.]



The hardest part of the writing life is not the writing itself.  Not that the writing is easy.  It certainly isn't, but it's also uniquely entertaining and deeply nourishing.  Writing really is its own reward--which is why so many people are called to do it, even in our supposedly post-literate society--even if it's not done perfectly well, but especially when it is done perfectly well.  No, the hardest part of the writing life is not the writing but all the infernal roadblocks between what you've written and the audience it might move.  The hardest part is knowing that what you've produced is solid, very solid, as solid as you are capable of making writing be, and yet you still hear a seeming unending series of "no"s from publishers, editors, and agents.  To be honest, often times, those "no"s end up being terrifically helpful.  They force you back to a project and make you reexamine a project, and as a result you realize weaknesses you just didn't see the first time around.  Now having seen them, you can properly address them.  Reexamining your work and making it better is almost always a valuable expenditure of time.  But then there are the occasions when you've already spent so much time on a project, months or years or even decades, when you've already reexamined it a hundred or a thousand times over, when you finally say to yourself: No, this is how the manuscript must be; this is how it should be published.

I reached that point with the manuscript of Island Fog a year ago.  An earlier version of the book (see my last post) I had circulated among small presses and entered into contests, all to no avail.  But now I knew why.  That earlier book was never the real book. This one was.  It had a lot going for it: Its stride spanned four different centuries of Nantucket history, realistically (I think) evoking those different periods; it had engaging dramas; and it contained some of the best writing I've ever produced, including my favorite piece of fiction I've ever written, the novella that is the title story of the collection.  That story is set on 21st century Nantucket and is introduced as a realistic story with a realistic setting, but it quickly spins into something else, something I won't call magical--because it isn't--but is certainly mysterious and probably indebted to John Fowles's spectacularly disorienting novel The Magus.  Its smoke and mirrors effects, its purposeful air of mystery, its thoroughly confused young protagonist, its borderline inexplicable and never exactly explained developments might remind one of Fowles's 1966 masterwork.  An editor at a magazine I once submitted it to wondered if the story was science fiction, which at the time astounded me because at no point during the creative process did I have science fiction in mind.  I guess she took literally a comment the narrator makes that the protagonist Doug had entered a kind of alternative Nantucket entirely cut off from the other, more familiar Nantucket he once knew, even more cut off from the familiar world of his college life and his family.  No, it's not sci-fi; it's just weird.

While still trying (and succeeding) to publish individual pieces of the collection, and reading from the stories at two different international writing conferences, I also tried to find a home for the book as a whole.  I got very serious at the last AWP, circulating among the tables rented by various small presses, describing the book and inquiring about their submission policies.  I also consulted some extremely helpful databases, the most helpful being the Poets & Writers database of small and alternative presses.  In that way, I educated myself on the small presses that publish fiction in this country, and I began to sort out which ones might be good fits for my book.  I submitted to several included in the P and W database as well as to a few that I learned about at AWP.   It's a great feeling to place your manuscript directly into the hands of someone who can make a decision about it, independent of an agent.  One frustration for the literary fiction writer, however, when dealing with small presses is that they tend to emphasize poetry and academic nonfiction, because these genres are largely ignored by mainstream publishers.  "You fiction writers always get those huge deals from the New York presses," I've had said to me by small press editors on several different occasions.  Huge deals?  Who are you talking about?  Most fiction writers are lucky if a person at a NYC press actually reads a single page of his book much less offers him a "huge deal."  No, the truth is that for many literary fiction writers the small press is just as much the inevitable fit as for poets and critics.  Because as with poetry and criticism, that's where the best, most daring work gets done.

I received many positive comments about the collection from various presses.  I got very very close with one, but finally they wanted the stories to be linked even more they are, linked in the manner of a novel-in-stories, which my book isn't and can't be.  With palpable regret they declined taking on the manuscript, but they did encourage me to try again another time with another book.  (I probably will.)  The positive responses I was getting told me I was on to something, that this new version of Island Fog was holding its own, bearing weight, if you will.  I just needed to keep trying.  One of the presses I tried at was Dialogos/Lavender Ink, run by Bill Lavender, a man I'd met two or three times at readings and at AWP, but no one I could say I actually knew.  I followed the same protocol everyone else must who submits to his press and I hoped for the best.

And then it happened.  Bill sent me a tidy little email one morning in late September, about six months after I'd submitted, inquiring if the book was still available.  Because his press was considering publishing it.  I responded immediately: Yes, it is still available; thank you for your interest.  Another month or two went by as I busied myself with all the usual activities of my writing and teaching and family life and tried not to wonder too much what Dialogos/Lavender Ink was thinking.  Finally, in mid-November I shot an email to Bill asking him if the press was still interested in my book.  I didn't expect an immediate reply.  And I had several errands to run just then. As it turned out, I didn't check back on my email until the next day.  When I did check I saw that Bill had replied within an hour of my emailing him.  His reply: Yes, we want it.  And in a followup message he had sent me a contractual agreement.  Just like that, early on a Saturday morning, sitting on my living room couch, the wait was over.  Island Fog the book was no longer an idea but an actuality--not a potential project anymore but a real one with an established publisher.

Afterword: At the moment I am seriously editing each of the stories in the collection.  (Bill needs the final version by February.)  This is crucial and very satisfying work.  You have no idea how good it feels just to worry about the writing itself and not selling the writing.  Of course, all that other kind of work awaits me when I put my next book on the market. : )

London here we come

I mentioned in a post several months ago that I will be reading at the Great Writing Conference, held at Imperial College, London at the end of June.   Well--after bureacratic delays that made the U.S. government look like a comparative bastion of efficiency--my university finally figured out how to extend a contribution toward the total cost of the trip, and so our travel plans were finalized just last Friday.  While we're paying more for our tickets than if we'd made the reservations back in October, when I submitted my funding request to the university, I'm excited that the trip is finally real.  We're actually going.  As I wrote in my previous post about the conference, I haven't attended or spoken at Great Writing since 2007, when it was held at Bangor.  While I'll always remember that trip as a lovely one--and certainly one I'd love to make again--there's no matching London as a summer destination.  (Well, so okay, there is Paris.)  Best of all is the conference itself, which in the past has always featured smart discussions, diverse topics, and plenty of time set aside for collegial conversation over coffee (or whatever else one prefers).  I always return home with new writers in mind and at least one really great pedagogical idea I'm dying to try out.  And last I heard, the conference is still willing to consider proposals in hopes of filling out its last few slots.  So while the American dollar is still fairly weak against the British pound, making the trip not exactly cheap, if you're an American creative writer in the academy looking for a place to present a provocative paper you've just written or looking for a new place to read from your own work, I urge you to--quickly!--consider the Great Writing conference.  Hey, it's London, people!


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Meanwhile, in Boston . . .  On to more somber thoughts.  It's ironic that when I first wrote about my intention on presenting at Great Writing, I also wrote about Boston, the site of this year's AWP conference.  Now I find myself, for much sadder reasons, writing about Boston again in a post about Great Writing.   At this point, the identities of both the victims and perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing have been well-publicized world wide.  We've watched as last Thursday night and Friday a literal explosion of activity happened in the search for those perpetrators and as an unprecedented manhunt occurred that ending up killing one perpetrator and wounding another.  We know who, we know when, and we know what.  The only real mystery remaining, and it's always the biggest, is the why.   All last week this question bugged me, since I couldn't see one outcome from the bombing that held any benefit for anybody.  The Boston marathon?  Why?  Even if the motivation was simply to kill as many innocent persons as possible, there were far more lethal methods the perpetrators could have employed.  The entire business made no sense.

Just since the manhunt on Friday, pieces of information have come out about the two perpetrators, especially the older brother: Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  It appears that in the last three years he had become, in the words of some who knew him, "very religious." And in the last year he had begun watching jihadist videos and even adding some of them to his YouTube channel.  And of course he took that six month trip to Chechnya and Dagistan, which has led to speculation that he received training there in terror tactics.  I read Saturday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been increasingly upset over what he regarded as a "lack of values" in the West.  Did this, in his mind, justify murder?  If so, I have to wonder why for him being a murderer didn't also indicate a "lack of values."  Most value systems, whether they be religious or secular, forbid murder.  It appears that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the victim--for lack of a better word--of a particular kind of religious mind set.  (I say particular because I know for a fact that many religious people and religious systems do not endorse it.)  This particular religious mind set--utterly dualistic, harshly judgmental, prejudiced in the extreme--makes one so unable to recognize the common humanity in other people, or whole populations of people, that behavior as unthinkable as murder becomes justifiable.  This kind of thinking, it seems to me, is so twisted and so fundamentally contradictory as to border on mental illness.  It's also, as my wife pointed out, completely megalomaniacal: I am God; I get to decide who lives and who dies; and on my terms.  Most of all, of course, it is just sad.  Like everyone else, I hope investigators get some answers out of the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  But I have my doubts.  I fear that he'll not be able to provide any explanation for what the brothers did.  At least not any explanation that makes sense.  But, then again, sense and murder are two words that don't belong together in the same sentence.

One positive note: As I write this, it is Sunday, April 21, 2013.  The London Marathon is underway, and nothing untoward has happened.  London and Boston again . . . But it looks like we can anticipate a happier ending this time.

On to AWP

Two days from now, I'll board a plane to Boston for this year's installment of the annual craziness called AWP.  According to the organization, it will be the biggest conference yet, which is a little scary, considering how big past conferences have been.  The conference has thoroughly outgrown even the space provided by mega-hotels; so for the 2013 edition AWP will be held in the Hynes Convention Center in downtown Boston.  One request, dear reader: please pray for no snow.   Winter weather has caused enough traveling snafus in that part of the country already; the last thing thousands of AWP conference goers need is to have their air and train schedules slaughtered by delays and cancellations.  I'm already worried about the "Sequester" and how cuts in the air traffic system might affect scheduled flights.  Thanks, U.S. government, for being so comedically dysfunctional!   (I realize any problems that the sequester causes for my travel plans is nothing compared to the trouble that will be caused to those people who will endure furloughs and severe cuts in pay.)

I am looking forward to the conference for several reasons.  First, I'm excited about the panel I'm on, which will discuss the phenomenon of single semester novel writing workshops.  As I reported in a previous post, this relatively new but fast growing type of course has seen a variety of iterations among its instructors.  Unlike the typical Fiction Workshop, there isn't a standard pedagogy yet, and that makes the class--and my panel--very exciting.  I expect to learn about the drastically different ways different instructors skin this particular cat.   And I'm eager to report on what my students are doing in their Novel Writing Workshop this semester.  Too, I will be at the conference to represent Toad Suck Review magazine.  We will introduce to a national audience our groundbreaking Toad Suck Review 3-D issue.  It really is a great issue, and I know our head editor, Mark Spitzer, and I are looking forward to showing it to folks.  We may even find ourselves soliciting for new material for issue #4!  We will also have along some of our grad students, who did editorial work on issue TSR 3-D.  It will be their first time at AWP--an important milestone for any young writer.

I will be blogging most days from the conference.  So if you're interested in how the conference "feels," at least to one conference goer, check this space, starting Thursday.

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Publication notice: An odd little short story I wrote called "Homeroom," which adopts the form of a high school homeroom announcements sheet, will be published soon in theNewerYork Press's Electronic Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature (EEEL).  I'm excited for it to land there.  Experimental, it is.


News Item:  Jennifer Egan, novelist extraordinaire and author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me, and several other titles, came to the UCA campus this week.  She gave a great reading, followed by an extensive question and answer session.  She then followed this up the next day with a small group meeting with Department of Writing students in which she covered a wide range of subjects, from drafting and revising strategies to the phenomenon of audio books to her side job as a journalist.  She was not only encouraging to the students but offered several morsels of really sharp, shrewd advice.  She earned her money, put it that way.  And the students spoke glowingly of her for days after.  Sometimes visiting writers don't live up to their billing; Egan exceeded hers.

Followup note: I wrote a couple weeks ago about Bobbie Ann Mason's historical novel The Girl in the Blue Beret.   If the novel, or Mason, sounds interesting to you, you should check out an interview with the author published in The Pinch magazine last fall.  In the interview, Mason discusses the kinds of research she carried out for the sake of the novel.  (No link to the interview, I'm afraid.  You'll have to get ahold of the journal itself.)

Followup #2:  The novel I'm writing this semester while my Novel Workshop students write theirs is at 54,000 words.  That's only 1000 words from the mandated total word count I gave them at the beginning of the semester.  Problem is, I'm about 5/6 of the way through my plot.  So it will just need to go longer!

Resolution roundup

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions.  It has always seemed to me that if there's something you need to do or change then you just do or change it.  No matter what month of the year it is.  And if you have to think about what resolution to form for the new year--i.e., if it's not glaringly obvious--then chances are you are doing pretty well, and you should just carry on.  But I have to admit that there is something about the dawning of a new year that prods some people into action, into committing themselves to doing or changing what they've long known they should.  And that, especially if they follow through, is certainly a positive thing.   That was me last year around this time, when I made the sudden resolution to write creatively every single day of the year 2012.  Not that I wasn't consistent and dedicated in my writing before.  I talk to my students all the time about making writing a
habit--and I've blogged about this--and for much of my writing life this has more or less meant getting up early on weekdays and writing before the rest of the house wakes and life must begin.  Of course, there were always days when the burden of grading student papers was simply too great, and I had to sacrifice my writing time to that duty.  And there were the days when I traveled to conferences: crazy busy affairs in which once the day starts there is barely any down time to be found.   There were other days when I was visiting out-of-town family and didn't feel the requirement to push myself to the notebook or the computer.   And then there weekends when I afforded my creative brain some time off.  Still and all, I was living the message.  At least I thought so until some visiting writers came to my campus who indicated that working writers should literally write every day.   Even on a beach vacation.  Even on Christmas.  Even if you travel to a conference!  One of these writers, Heather Sellers, in her book Chapter After Chapter frames the idea this way: Even if you are on leave of absence from your home you do not take a leave of absence from your book.  It might just mean working on it a bit differently.  You could bring a few chapters with you to line edit.  Or you could exchange novels-in-progress with another writer, and you agree to read each other's work while you're away.  In that way, your book keeps getting worked on even if you are not at your writing desk and you are not the one working on it.

Because I was more or less living the message already, for several years I ignored the every day mandate and kept working the same way I always had.   (And in point of fact, I know that many successful writers do not write literally every day, even though they all make writing a habit.)  Then, when I was on sabbatical in 2009, I added a sixth day, Sunday, to my writing week.  When I got off sabbatical I decided to hold on to that Sunday work session.  And then last year, at the end of December, in what was a quick, unanticipated decision, I committed myself to going all the way.  Just for one year--no matter where I was or what else I had to do--I would write creatively every single day.  Even if that meant for only 5 minutes.  Of course this begs the question as to what I mean by "writing creatively."  I knew what I meant, so I didn't actively formulate guidelines--they were innate--but for the sake of this post I'll tell you what those innate guidelines were.  If I composed original fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry or plays, that (of course) counted.  If I revised or edited fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or plays, that counted. If I wrote in a journal--and by this I mean the kind of descriptive, impressionistic, and exploratory journal one might keep on an overseas trip, as opposed to the "It's Tuesday, and I just had leftover fajitas for lunch" kind of journal--that counted.  And that, friends, was pretty much it.  Many other activites, even if they were related to my writing, did not count.  Writing a blog post did not count.  Commenting on other people's blog posts did not count.  Writing queries to agents and publishers did not count.  Conducting research for a story or novel, unless I carried this out during an active writing session, did not count.  Writing letters or emails--no matter to whom and about what--did not count.  Composing a letter-to-the-editor in response to something I read in a newspaper or magazine did not count.  Writing critiques of my students' creative work or of a friend's creative work did not count.   In fact, all the writing I do for my job as a university professor--grant proposals, committee reports, letters of recommendation, syllabi, assignment instructions--most definitely did not count!  (Don't get me wrong; I belong the school that says all writing is creative--or has the potential to be--but for my New Year's resolution to accomplish what it was meant to accomplish, I had to stay true to my innately understood definition.)

So how did it turn out?  Well, I'm happy to report, on this last day of 2012, that I did it!  I wrote creatively every single day.  And though I took several trips this year, the only one that truly challenged my resolution was my March trip to the madness of the AWP conference in Chicago.   Part of the difficulty there was that I also blogged every day from the conference.  There were a couple days at AWP when I logged my creative writing time only by composing observational haiku during down moments at the book fair table I was manning for Toad Suck Review.  Those haiku may not be thunderous literature, but they kept my creative brain engaged.  More importantly, I enjoyed doing them.  During family trips--such as our east coast marathon in July and a Thanksgiving trip to Lowell, Arkansas--I kept to the resolution by simply doing what I always do: getting up before everybody else, starting a pot of coffee, and then writing.  I can't know how much more I wrote because of my resolution--quantity really wasn't the point--but I did write a lot.  I composed many many short stories--some very brief, some rather long; I composed a series of long poems (because I taught a course on the Long Poem during the spring semester), some of which I've arranged into a chapbook; I wrote one original play and adapted a short story I wrote into another;  I wrote some creative nonfiction; I carried out substantial new edits on my story collection, Island Fog, a thematically-unified book in which all the stories are set in Nantucket Island, Massachusetts; I gathered together and edited other stories of mine for a different collection (most of those stories being set in the south) that I sent off to a contest just two weeks ago; I substantially edited and revised (once again) my Van Gogh novel as well as the (much shorter) novel that I wrote after it; and, as of last count this morning, I've written the first 215 pages of a semi-comic, wildly braided novel that I'm having a good time with--even if I'm not 100% sure where it's going.  How much of all this writing will eventually appear in print I can't say.  But I can say that because of the resolution, and because of sticking to it, I've felt more intimately engaged with my writing life this year than ever before.  And that's precisely what the write-every-day mandate is about.  I highly recommend it--at least for one year!

So what about next year?  Let me get back to you about that.  ; )

Reading report: I've been enjoying a couple books so far during this Christmas holiday.  The first was sent to me by a booking agent for writers in the hopes that UCA would want to invite his client.  I put it aside for weeks and then decided on a whim to read it during Winter Break.  It's called Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (2011) by Alexandra Fuller, the author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003).  The latter was her memoir about growing up in Africa, so with this latest volume Fuller decided to chronicle her mother's story of having grown up in Africa.   It's a gem of a book, carefully researched and composed, so much so that she is able to convincingly narrate scenes that happened between her parents and others long before she was born.  While it's an extremely personal and familial book, it also presents a superb picture of central Africa and the changes that occurred there between the 1940s and the 2000s.  Her book reminds me that perhaps the only way to truthfully tell history is to tell the history of individual people who experience it.  Anything else skirts dangerously close to propaganda.  It's a fantastic, engaging read.

After finishing Fuller's volume, I started on Canada (2012) by Richard Ford.   All I can say about this one is that I think it's the best Richard Ford novel I've ever read, which is saying a lot given how many he has written and their consistently high quality.  The opening lines: "First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which happened later." If this sounds like an interesting premise for a novel--it is.

Boston and London

2013 promises to be an exciting year of conferencing for me.  It starts in March, as I head to Boston for the annual mammoth necessary insanity of the AWP Conference.   Boston, of course, is one of the great heritage cities of the United States and has the added benefit of being the hometown of my oldest sister.  I'll be wearing two hats at AWP this year.  I'll be there to represent Toad Suck Review, of which I am currently the associate editor, as we share our brand new issue #3 with the world.  (See my previous post for more commentary about this.)  But I will also be speaking on a panel that addresses the subject of novel writing workshops.  Such workshops are a relatively new, but exciting, development in the world of creative writing instruction.  For decades the short story form has dominated fiction workshop activities, and basically for one reason: a class can easily read in advance and discuss in one class period an entire short story (or two or three).  It's a manageable sized bite of work to prepare and process.  Now I adore the short story form--I really do--but it's a fact that most fiction-writers-in-training have their eyes on writing novels eventually (or immediately), and it's also true that novels are typically preferred over story collections in the eyes of publishers.  Most of all it's true that learning to write a successful short story does not really train one to write a successful novel.   They are very different animals.  So what, as creative writing teachers, do we do about this? Do we open up our regular workshop class to both novels and stories?  Or do we create separate classes just for novel writers?  And if the answer to that is yes, can we ask students to write a whole novel in a single semster's time?  Do we expect the whole class to read it?  How do we workshop it?  Does a teacher possibly have time to read 15 or 20 student novels over the course of a semester or at the end of the semester?  These are good, pressing questions, and different teachers--myself included--have come up with their own answers to them.  What we should not and cannot do is fail to encourage our students in their pursuit of longer forms.  That would be a disservice.  By happy fortune, I will again be teaching my Novel Writing course next semester--to a mixed group of graduate and undergraduate students--and therefore I will be able to bring my latest news, and my latest experiences, to the panel discussion.  I'm really looking foward to it.

The wanderings continue this summer when I head off to another of the world's leading cities for the Great Writing Conference, held June 29-30 at the University of London, Imperial College.   The brainchild of Australian Graeme Harper--who studied, wrote, taught, and administered in the UK for decades and does so now in the United
States--Great Writing is in its fifteenth year and going strong.  Without question it is the most important creative writing conference in the United Kingdom and arguably the second most important in the world.  Writers and teachers from virtually every part of the Anglophone world participate.  I submitted both a proposal for a critical presentation--on historical fiction (of course)--and a proposal for a creative presentation.  Graeme later informed me that the selection committee liked both proposals and accepted both, but I had to choose to present one or the other.  As a creative writer, it's my first instinct and my first pleasure to read from my own fiction, so that's what I've decided to do.  I will read from a collection of short stories--half historical and half contemporary in nature--that are all set on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts.  Nantucket is a hisorically fascinating and physically beautiful place, a piece of the United States but at the same time--in rather fundamental matters of personality--not really.  I can't know how many in the audience will have ever been there, but it doesn't really matter.  My job is to bring the island to them.

What an honor to have the chance to speak at both Great Writing and its American predecessor in the same year.  In many ways, Great Writing is a superior experience to the manic, crazy-busy, bacchanalian, writers-on-steroids entity that is AWP.  At Great Writing, the papers seem a tad more thoughtful, the audiences a bit more attentive, and the discussions between sessions more relaxed and more probing.  (Because more time is afforded for them.)  It's a very nourishing conference, and I've missed it.   I last attended Great Writing in 2007, when it was held in Bangor, Wales; the year before that I attended my first Great Writing in Portsmouth.  Both Bangor and Portsmouth are quietly charming locations, cities I was quite glad to get to know.  But it is certainly hard to beat London as a site for a major international conference.  We won't quite stop traffic like the Olympics did, but I like to think that, for a few days at least, Great Writing will something real to the cultural life of the capital.

Waiting for the Toad

One of the more pleasant of my many duties at the University of Central Arkansas is to serve as Associate Editor of Toad Suck Review, our national--and international--literary magazine.  (The journal is named after a place in central Arkansas, but we publish writers from everywhere.)  It's an especially pleasant time now as we read over and put final edits on the latest issue we have assembled, our third.   As I see all at once what took chief editor Mark Spitzer and me many months to put together piece by piece, I cannot help but feel proud.  I am struck by the quality and daring of the work, a solid portion of which came to us in our gmail inbox from writers we had never heard of.  Little miracles just delivered to us out of the blue.  It's one of the most exciting aspects of working on a literary journal.  Some of these writers are Arkansans, but most of them are not.  Most have never visited our state; some have never visited our country.  Yet as I look over the magazine I see that in every genre we publish--eco-literature, Arkana, short fiction, poetry, translations, criticism--sterling work came to us from these previously unknown sources.  Just as a small example of what I mean I offer you a taste of Georgian poet Zviad Ratiani, whose lyrical, existentialist musings were sent to us by his translators, Dailila Gogia and Timothy Kercher:

     And take me now to Rome, I say to my life,
     my snickering life.

     I suppose I couldn't quite believe that the world really existed,
     that those countries, cities, waterfalls, islands,
     really existed,

    so, when I found myself somewhere I'd never been before
    for the first, second, third times,
    I felt altogether embarrassed, disappointed,

    disappointed with both the world and myself,
    yet more with the world since I had expected more of it,
    while it turned out to be what and only as
    it should have been.  That is,
    besides being real.

Imagine just finding that one day in your inbox.  TSR debuts at the AWP Conference in March, and I feel confident that it will grab its fair share of well-deserved attention, if for the cover alone, which is the brainchild and masterwork of our mad genius Mr. Spitzer.   But I won't say anything more about that.  You'll just have to wait to see it in March.   For now, I'll say that we really like what we've put together for our readers, and we are eager to to show it to you.

Lagniappe 1:  I had a lot of fun participating in The Pinch magazine launch party reading last Saturday. They are good people, and it's a great journal.  It was an especially rewarding event for being able to catch up with two formers students who have settled in the Memphis area and were kind enough to come out to hear me read.  Thanks to managing editor Chris Moyer for inviting me to participate--and to submit in the first place.  When he introduced me on Saturday, Chris told the crowd that when he tweeted about my participation in the event, what he heard back was, "Is he performing live?" "Yes," he responded, "and no cover charge!"  Once again, I am mistaken for John Vanderslice, the west coast indie rock singer. (I'll have to meet this guy one day.)  As I told the group on Saturday, if they ever heard me sing, they'd gladly pay a cover charge to get me to stop.

Speaking of singers, the drive over to Memphis gave me the opportunity to listen (again) to Solo Acoustic, Vol. 1 by Jackson Browne.  The CD was released in 2005, but I only bought it in October.  Since then I've been listening to it compulsively.  Can't seem to get enough of these hauntingly stripped down versions of some of his more familiar songs.  Coming back to Arkansas, however, I had to put the dang thing away.  Too soulful!  I needed to stay awake! 

Lagniappe 2: Like many others, I am mourning the loss of Isaiah Sheffer, the founder and artistic director of public radio's Selected Shorts program.  Like thousands of others I was a dedicated fan of the Selected Shorts podcast, and I even had the opportunity to see the program recorded on stage in Chicago several years ago.  I can't count the number of fine writers it has introduced me to, writers I read regularly now and cherish.  Sheffer's life was all about bringing art to as many people as possible, and that is a life well-lived.  You can follow this link to read tributes to him composed by grateful listeners.

Lagniappe 3: You may or may not have noticed that as we approach the American holiday of Thanksgiving, various people on Facebook--that is, Americans--have been putting up daily gratitude posts.  The reception is mixed.  My British friend and colleague Garry Craig Powell,  a self-described "unsentimental, miserable old git" has just about run out of patience with all this gratitude.  Last week he excoriated  Facebookers (all in good fun, of course) for their "mawkish posts about being grateful for Jesus, their wonderful husbands, wives, children, dogs, cats and goldfish."  So far I've refrained from inflicting any of my own gratitude on the Facebook universe, but with Garry's permission I'll say a little something here.  On Wednesday, my family and I will travel to Lowell, Arkansas to celebrate the holiday with my younger brother and his family, and with my mother.  I am quite looking forward to this trip.  It's been a beautiful, but in some ways painful, semester.  It will be good to get away.   Last summer, this same group was assembled at Cobb Island, Maryland for the better part of a week.  At the time, my mother was only a few months removed from finishing up (light) chemotherapy, post-surgical treatment for ampullary cancer.  Her spirits were good, but as a lifelong very active person it was frustrating for her to be hampered by the same old bum hip that had kept her on a cane for almost two years.  For so long she had wanted to get the hip replaced--it was during a doctor's visit to consider the feasibility of the operation that the cancer was discovered--but she could not be sure if or when the doctors would clear her for the procedure.  After all, her body had been put through the very difficult whipple procedure for the cancer and, on top of that, her heart was showing new, mysterious symptoms.  Fast forward four months, my mom's cancer is still gone, her heart is better, and her hip replacement surgery is scheduled for January.  Recovery, she has been told, will not be difficult--nothing like recovering from the whipple surgery--and she is on cloud nine with anticipation.  It should be a fun Thanksgiving, and for that I am very much grateful, if in advance.

Check out "The Big Thing"

I returned home yesterday from the AWP Conference with various thoughts stinging my head, particularly about the organization's approach to pedagogy generally and its decision specifically to eliminate pedagogy forum sessions from the conference in 2012 and beyond. I think, however, that I will save those thoughts for a future post. Today I'd like to alert readers to a great and passionate blog titled The Big Thing, created and maintained by Indiana writer Cathy Day. Cathy is and has been extremely concerned about the ways in which the traditional creative writing workshop--regardless of genre--discourages students from tackling larger forms like the novel, the novel-in-stories, the long poem, the linked essay collection, and the book-length memoir. She discusses this subject on her blog and offers ideas to teachers on how to afford space in their classes for the longer forms and ideas to students on how to pursue them. A superb and compelling introduction to Cathy's point of view is her essay "The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis," published recently in the online magazine The Millions. Believe me, the piece has generated a lot of buzz. If you are someone who aspires to tackle longer projects like the novel--as I assume you are if you read Creating Van Gogh--and especially if you are someone who either takes or teaches creative writing classes at one level or another, you need to examine Cathy's blog. It is riveting and thoughtful reading, full of useful anger and provocative strategizing. It will make you completely rethink the idea of the creative writing course, in ways both subtle and significant.

AWP is on! Day 2/3

Couldn't blog at all yesterday as my wife needed our computer for some sessions, and, besides, the internet was down at the conference hotel. Bad news when you've got a bunch of computer-hungry writers around. On the whole it was a good day, though, despite opening up my portable hard drive at one point and not seeing the file of the novel I completed in my Novel Writing workshop last semester. (See former posts about this subject.) I had planned on doing some editing, and it was nowhere to be found. Later, however, I discovered the problem.

Went to an interesting, and fairly angry (maybe I should say urgent) session called The Future of Creative Writing at the Academy. The subtitle could have been, "Or how do we get these idiot administrators off our backs?" The most troubled speakers were two women from University of Central Florida, where drastic administrative intrusion is forcing them to make very hard decisions. Like teaching workshops with 35 students in them. Yes, that's right. And running enormous lecture courses with 150 students. To their credit, they are trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to still do right by their students (which is more than one can say for their administrators), but it sounds like quite a battle. As usual, the voice of serenity and careful planning was Philip Gerard from UNC-Wilmington, whose program is as thoughtfully put together--and functionally autonomous--as any in the country. Sounds like a little bit of creative writing heaven.

At lunch, I took my own advice and drafted a couple poems, playing around with some of the words in the songs piping through the radio at the sandwich place where I ate. The songs were "Don't you love me, baby?" and "Piano Man." I know. I can hear the cringing. Too bad. It was a poetic word game, and I enjoyed it. It also gave me something to tinker with later as I sat at the Toad Suck Review booth, waiting to snare stragglers with our sales pitch.

I went to one other session yesterday, this one on the Long Poem. I'm toying with the idea of proposing a Topics in Creative Writing class at my school on this subject, so I was curious to hear what the speakers had to say. There were a great many contemporary long poems referenced, and a number of practical aesthetic points discussed, but what sticks in my craw from this session has nothing to do with its subject matter. This was yet another one of those typical AWP sessions in which no time was afforded for audience questions, mainly because one of the panelists just couldn't bring herself to edit down her clearly too long paper. She must have spoken for at least a half hour. Not only did the audience not get a chance to speak, but one of the panelists never did either! What is wrong with these people? Why can AWP not insist on a ten or twelve minute time limit per panel speaker? Why can't these speakers simply time themselves in advance and--hey, amazing idea--edit their darn papers if they have to to fit the time frame? Talk about blithe arrogance, talk about self involvement to the point of myopia--which unfortunately is a characteristic of the whole AWP organization. Heck, talk about disrespecting your audience. The people who attend this conference are smart people; their questions, and the responses they evoke, are often the best aspect of a session. Yet maybe half the sessions at an AWP leave time for such questions, even though every single session claims it will.

As I mentioned, I also hung out a bit more in AWP's gigantic Book Fair, which in the end may be more valuable to writers than the sessions are. The most interesting figure in the room was writer Davis Schneiderman, who came dressed as a mime, white face and all. And then he acted like one, freaking out a number of dumbfounded writers. We are a blockheaded group, aren't we? (See previous comments about myopia.) Since Davis visited UCA last year, I'm familiar with his inventive gamesmanship. I loved it. And as a contributor to the new Toad Suck Review, he dropped by our table and did his mime routine, at least until I realized who he was and then we started chatting. I've discovered a few interesting new journals at the Book Fair (or at least new to me) and have heard about some intriguing format changes in other ones. Seattle Review, for instance, has completely remade itself into a journal committed to longer forms; that is, the long poem, the novella, and the long essay. How convenient to find this out just as I'm thinking of proposing a Long Poem course. And there's no doubt that the most underrepresented forms in the marketplace of literary journals are the longer forms. There's almost no place to send them, which is ridiculous and culturally stifling. Congrats to Seattle Review for being forward thinking.

Bit more of the conference today, and then I meet my mother and sister for a visit to the Phillips Collection--not far from our hotel--and a dinner in DC. It's great to be back in this city again, where I lived and worked several years ago. On one hand it hasn't changed a bit. It's still elegant and upbeat and remarkably multi-cultural. On the other hand, it's easy to see plenty of little changes. But nothing fundamental. Like all great cities, it abides.

AWP is on! Day 1

I put up a quick note this morning about successfully arriving in Washington despite the terrible weather country-wide; so now, much later in the day, I thought I would share some news and reflections from day 1 of the AWP conference. This will prove to be my most session-heavy day, I'm sure, and by design. There's a diminishing returns quality to a massive conference like AWP. Too many sessions and your brain turns to jello. So while I'll still be at the conference, tomorrow and Saturday will likely be a bit lighter in terms of my session involvement.

Today's sessions, I'm happy to report, were all fine. Early on, I attended a session on encouraging and enabling the use of multi-media strategies for students' storytelling. As one speaker remarked, this subject is urgent. The literary landscape is changing under our feet, almost by the minute, as innovations like the iPad fundamentally alter what reading means. Anyone who wishes to write in the literary landscape of the future needs to be fluent in multi-media. Even if this idea is disheartening to a former curmudgeon like myself, I can't deny that it's also probably accurate. I also attended a really fascinating session on the use of monsters (liberally defined) in literary fiction. While the conference, because of massive travel problems caused by the Big Storm, has not been nearly as crowded as in the past, this session was jammed. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, the tremendous--and growing--popularity of supernatural fiction can't help but be felt, and reiterated, by AWP conference goers. And that's not a bad thing. The presenters named some titles that really sound intriguing and that I need to read, especially given that I taught a Special Topics course at UCA last fall called "Supernatural Realism."

I attended two other sessions today. One was a pedagogy forum session featuring short papers on the teaching of writing fiction and drama. The session went fine--I heard some wonderful approaches for teaching specific aspects of craft--but before the session got underway the moderator announced that starting next year AWP will no longer include pedagogy forum sessions in its program. The rationale behind this decision was supposedly a desire to increase AWP's commitment to pedagogy as a subject matter, a statement that I do not believe and that makes no sense. Whatever becomes of pedagogy at AWP, I will regret the loss of the pedagogy forum. It provided an important entryway for graduate students and y0ung instructors to come to AWP and present. It also is the only part of the AWP program in which the acceptance of one's proposal is based solely on its individual merits and not on whether it was included as part of a shiny-glamorous panel configuration.

The last session I attended was a very enlightening session on contemporary Jewish-American fiction, featuring several expert voices, including Margot Singer, Anna Solomon, and Erika Dreifus. A friend of my wife's spotted me there and we chatted afterwards. I'm afraid my attendance confused her. "Are you Jewish?" she asked. No, I assured her, smiling. Her confusion was perfectly understandable. After all, the audience was almost entirely Jewish. But in fact my roots are pure Irish Catholic (or at least as pure as someone's can be whose last name is Vanderslice).

Sitting through today's sessions, I realized that I've adopted a Code of AWP Behavior for myself, a code meant to make the conference more useful and less stressful. To end this post, I'll share some items of my Code. Rule 1: No forced networking. For networking to be profitable it also has to be genuine. Forcing yourself into conversation with someone for no other reason that to stick your name in their face makes you come across as bumbling, illiterate, and possibly mentally retarded. Just go to the sessions, learn what you can, ask questions when you feel like it, and don't feel compelled to talk to a soul if you don't want to. Don't worry about making any specific number of contacts. Just enjoy. With so many writers floating around, you're bound to fall into conversation with one of them anyway--a more natural conversation, that is. Rule 2: Leave the conference hotel for meals and as often as you can. Any conference as big as this one will drive you bonkers after a while and surely mess with your perspective. Get out. Cross the street. Realize that there is sub shop over there filled with people who don't all want to talk about their just completed sonnet sequence or the novel they are trying to find an agent for. Normal people still exist. Rule 3: Avoid the how-to-publish-your-book-sessions or any variation thereof. These sessions reek with desperation and oneupmanship. They will curdle your soul and make you doubt the benign nature of humanity. Besides, rarely does one ever learn anything new in them. How many times does one need to be told how to compose a letter to an agent or that the traditional market for fiction is dwindling to nonexistence? Rule 4: Write while you are here. Most people will tell you that it's impossible to write at AWP--but that's a flat out lie. If you call yourself a writer and you "can't write," then shame on you. Go to the bar and compose a few flash fictions over a pint or two. Skip a morning session and draft a story in your hotel room. Grab a lobby seat for twenty minutes and jot down a poem in your notebook. So what if the efforts aren't your best ever? That's not the point of this Rule. The point of this Rule: For a writer, writing tames your soul, lowers your blood pressure, puts you in equilibirum. It's what you do. It's who you are. It's why you are here. Good to remind yourself of that from day to day when faced with so many people urgent for that next job or book contract. Finally, it's the writing that matters. And it's the writing you have to love. Otherwise you're in the wrong business.

If I think of any other Rules in the Code, I'll let you all know.

Made it to AWP

We certainly endured a weather scare this week, but traveling from Arkansas to Washington DC for the AWP conference proved surprisingly trouble free yesterday. Very cold temperatures and windy conditions were all we had to deal with, and when I landed in DC yesterday I was shocked to find that it was actually warm! At least by winter storm standards. Then the blustery front from the midwest arrived and temperatures plummeted over the course of just a few afternoon hours. When I left the hotel to go to Erika Dreifus's publication party for Quiet Americans (see my review in my previous post) it felt just like it had on Tuesday night in Arkansas. The party was wonderful, hosted very graciously by Erika's friend Natalie Wexler and her husband who own a terrific collection of art from Uruguay. Erika read from the book and signed copies. It was great to meet her in person.

Today AWP kicks off and I will try to provide a few updates on this space. I'm going to try to have a more sane AWP experience this year: fewer sessions but more carefully selected sessions. And I'll need to help out my colleague Mark Spitzer who is running a book fair table for the Toad Suck Review, the new identity for what used to be called The Exquisite Corpse Annual. And now . . . I'm off!

Getting readier

Tomorrow morning my wife and I fly out of Little Rock to finally arrive in Denver in mid-afternoon. I ran into a scare yesterday when I went to my Orbitz account--to run off my flight schedule--and found that I "had no trips planned." Oh yeah? Mild panic. Did I forget to make the reservation? Then my wife reminded me that you can't make reservations for Southwest Airlines on Orbitz. Ahh. So I must have abandoned reliable old Orbitz those many months ago when I made our arrangements. Checked my email for a message from Southwest and there it was: our flight data. So I guess I'm going after all.

I'm packing my novel via portable hard drive, the paper I will present (along with multiple copies of a handout), and as much cash as I can pull together. AWP isn't cheap. But, truthfully, for all its unbearable size, I almost always learn something handy at AWP, something I can bring back to my classes. Besides that, it's good to get away from teacher craziness for a few days and just think about writing as a writer. I'll post when I'm there to let everyone know how it's coming. And, yes, I am still determined to work on the novel, conference or no.

Away to Denver

I'm off on Wednesday to make my annual pilgrimage to the AWP conference, held this year in Denver. For all of you non-American, non-Canadian readers, that's the meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the single biggest creative writing organization in the world. AWP is both profoundly frustrating and absolutely necessary, a behemoth of an institution that for all of its arrogant, rear guard conservatism does a lot of good in the way of advocacy for creative writing in the academy and for hiring and firing standards among its member schools. I have similar feelings about its annual conference. It's both a necessary trip--because so much of the creative writing world is there--and also an enormous pain in the ass; because so much of the creative writing world is there. This is truly a gigantic conference, and it's no exaggeraton to say that one literally see one's entire career as a creative writer walk by over the course of a weekend; e.g., two guys who were in your fiction workshop while you were getting a master's degree, the man who taught that workshop, a writer who visited your campus just a year ago, a writer who visited your campus five years ago, a professor who acted as a crucial mentor when you worked on your doctorate dissertation, the man who took over as your dissertation director when your mentor took another job, a former student of yours who is now enrolled in an MFA program herself, the white-haired lion who ruled over your college's creative writing program back when you barely understood how to write at all and had no idea who the man was, the woman who just two weeks ago you went to see read at a bookstore 20 minutes away. (And that's just a small sample.)

The AWP conference is so big, with so many competing sessions, and a bookfair that runs the length of a football field, that it can make your head spin. And then there's that annoying little fact that everyone has a novel they want to publish or an agent they hope to find or a publisher they need to impress or an established writer they need to butter up. I just try to go to sessions that sound solid, find a few new journals at the bookfair, enjoy seeing some old friends, and leave it at that. To expect anything more is to drive yourself crazy. This year I can especially narrow my focus. Given that I've been working on, and am still revising, my Van Gogh novel, I'm going to seek out sessions on historical fiction and let most of everything else fall to wayside. (Well, almost everything. I actually am giving a paper at one of the Pedagogy sessions. I will detail a revision assignment I like to use with my fiction writing students.)

While I'm at the conference I'm determined to a) see and enjoy some of Denver, and b) actually get some writing done. (Yes, it's possible. I've actually done this. Even when it was in New York.) On both counts, that means being a miser with my time and grudging about what I commit to.

I'll let all of you know how it goes. Check in with this blog over the next week or so for updates. If it's like past AWPs, I'm going to get a lot more than I expected. And that's what's got me nervous.