The right way and the wrong way

[This is a post I originated for my other blog Payperazzi, but I think might be of interest to Creating Van Gogh readers as well.]

If you stay in the creative writing game long enough you accumulate plenty of quirky, sad, disheartening, and even enraging publication stories.  Maybe about things that happened to you; maybe about things that happened to your friends.  But they happened.  In the unfortunate if inevitable tussles between writers, agents, editors, and publishers (take any combination of those four) sometimes things just go wrong--or they don't go at all.   In a previous blog post I mentioned that once I'd had a short story accepted for a themed anthology planned by a press who specialized in such, but that five years after the acceptance I was still waiting for the book to appear--until it became 100% clear, rather than merely 99% clear, that the book was never coming out.  Then I deleted the "publication" from my resume.   I'm going through something similiar now, except that it's taken a lot less than 5 years.   In Oct. 2012 I had a story--actually a short chapter from my Van Gogh novel--accepted for an anthology called The Man-Date: 15 Bromances which was being assembled by Prime Mincer Press, publisher of Prime Mincer literary journal.  The bromance thing seemed like a cute, trendy idea, one that might catch a lot of attention, make for a series of fun promotional readings, and hopefully generate some sales.  Although my piece was fairly serious--a picture of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh living together in a Paris apartment that was never intended for occupaton by two single men--I envisioned a series of comedic but literary, and maybe even moving, buddy stories.  The acceptance email I got from Prime Mincer made it clear they were proud of what they'd put together, so I eagerly anticipated the book, scheduled for release in "early 2013."

Well, the busy fall semester ended and a few weeks later the busy spring semester started.  I received no further communication from Prime Mincer, although I had no particular reason to be concerned.  In fact, at the 2013 AWP conference in Boston (last March) I spied Prime Mincer's table in the great big conference bookfair room, so I went over to introduce myself as one of the contributors to their bromance anthology.  The guy at the table was reasonably friendly, shook my hand, and informed me there had been some delays with publishing the book but that it would come out "soon."  No problem, I told him, and walked away, not doubting that what he said was true.  Turns out that would be the very last time I would ever hear a single word from anyone associated with Prime Mincer Press.  

Spring turned to summer; I started teaching a summer class, and then I took a trip abroad with my brother and his family.  I got back home to Arkansas and started preparing for the fall semester.  Fall semester began and things got busy and . . . You get the picture.  It wasn't until several months after the March AWP conference that it occurred to me to wonder, So where is that bromance anthology, anyway? First thing I did was go to Amazon to see if maybe it had been released already and I just hadn't heard (not likely), or if there was a future release date listed.  Nope.  No mention of the book at all.  It did not exist, according to Amazon.  I went to the press's web site and was more concerned when all I found there was the original call for submissions, with the same old damning information that it would appear "in early 2013."  We were well into the second half of 2013--about a year since submissions to the book were closed and all the acceptance notifications sent--and they hadn't thought to pull down the call for submissions from their web site?  I immediately emailed the managing editor of the press, just asking after the latest news.  I thought (or at least hoped) I might get an apologetic reply, with an explanation that the publishing schedule had changed again and the book would have to be out in late 2013 or early 2014.  But what I got was nothing.  Total silence.  This, of course, was bad.  Having one's emails ignored by someone in a professional setting is never a good sign--it's also completely inexcusable and the sure sign of someone with no real notion of what being professional means.

You know the end of the story.  When the semester was over, and I had time to breathe again, I did some more research on the anthology and the press.  This time I found not more information but less.  Prime Mincer's web site, rather than showing outdated information, had been pulled down completely.  It was gone.  Evaporated.  Meanwhile, the Facebook page for Prime Mincer, which previously had featured regular and enthusiastic news about the book, had not been updated since October 2012, around the time I received my acceptance email.  The web site for Prime Mincer's literary journal still existed, but it was advertising the last 2012 issue, long out of date by this time.   With nothing to lose I emailed the managing editor again as well as a different person who at one time--and I hoped still was--associated with the journal.   "What's up?" I basically asked.  Neither person responded.

So this appears to be the situation: Prime Mincer Press closed its doors, scuttled its very public plans for an anthology--and then didn't tell anybody!  And to this day they still refuse to tell anybody.  That is exactly the wrong way to handle an unfortunate turn of events.  Everybody knows things happen with small presses.  While they do great work, and serve an overriding need in the publishing industry, it's a struggle for them to survive.  Sooner or later many of them go belly up.  That is no cause for shame.  What is cause for shame is ignoring the very writers who helped you assemble your books.  What is a cause for shame is acting as if they don't exist or aren't worth even a two-second email.  What is a cause for shame is not taking responsibility for the project that you started.   And by taking responsbility I mean explaining to all involved what is going on.  I would never expect, don't need, and don't deserve a detailed explanation of the troubles that brought your press down.  What I do expect and deserve is a statement clarifying that your press no longer exists, that your book is not coming out, and mabye you feel sorry about it.  That's all.

That's not asking too much. 

In fact, that's asking for the bare minimum.  And yet too many publishers, like Prime Mincer, don't even do that.  What people need to understand is that writers, while being naturally disappointed by such a message, will appreciate being told, will appreciate being valued enough to be told.  Being told nothing--in fact, having one's attempts at communication ignored--isn't just disappointing.  It's maddening; it's infuriating.  It's utterly unprofessional and it doesn't make the situation better for anyone; it makes the situation worse.   (I happen to know, from my net-wide scrambling for info, that several writers who'd been accepted into the anthology put up excited posts to their blogs and web sites.  It's not just me who is being ignored but at least a dozen contributors, some of them highly established authors.)

I'd love to hear that the behavior of Prime Mincer is the exception when it comes to a failed press handling its lingering responsibilities, but I'm pretty sure it's not.  I'm pretty sure most presses, to say nothing of most businesses, handle their various demises exactly the same way: that is, by tucking in their tails and running, instead of owning up to the mess they left behind.  If you have a heartwarming story of a small press going down with dignity and taking care of its own, please share it!  It would make me feel a lot better.  And don't get me wrong, I've had fantastic relationships with many small presses in the past.  A great small press--Lavender Ink/Dialogos in New Orleans--is bringing out my short story collection Island Fog this year, and I couldn't be more pleased with how things are going.  Another small press--KY Story in Kentucky--is soon bringing out an anthology called Redacted that features, among several other pleasantly perverse submissions, a sci-fi story of mine about dogs being discovered on Pluto.  I've had nothing but frequent and open communcation with Ashley Parker Owens, the founder and chief editor of KY Story.  She's running KY Story exactly the right way.  So while I adore small presses--they are usually run by writers and out of a devotion not to profit but to the word--it's a simple fact that sometimes a small press fails; and thus a ballyhooed book by that press won't ever appear.  That's a real life situation.  Then the question for the press becomes: Are you going to handle it the right way or the wrong way?  I wish the correct answer was as obvious to others as it is to me.

Good news all around

As a writing teacher, you are regularly bombarded with requests to review this or that manuscript: to critique them, to edit them, to suggest publication venues for them.  These requests, understand, don't come from your own students--who get enough of your opinion anyway--but usually from total strangers, people in the public who make cold calls to Writing or English department offices, begging the secretaries to suggest names of faculty they should contact; or occasionally they come in the form of a mass email from a colleague who has been put in touch with one such stranger; and sometimes it's literally a matter of a person walking the halls of your building, manuscript in hand, hoping someone will listen to him.  Almost always it comes as a shock to these folks to hear that editing manuscripts is a time-intensive affair, work for which people actually get paid good money in the real world.   Almost always, word of having to pay for the service is enough to guarantee that the person hangs up, doesn't write back, or leaves your office.  Often with a mumbled reply along the lines of "Well, I don't really have much money to spend, and I didn't think I would be asked to actually . . ."  (Exactly what do they think writing professors do all day anyway?  Apparently, we are just staring out our windows, puffing contemplatively on our pipes, waiting for the next person with a project to come knocking, because god knows we don't have enough to do critiquing our students' work!)

This scenario took a different, better turn several weeks back when from my office desk I spied an older, nattily attired gentleman in the hallway knocking unsuccessfully on another faculty member's door and looking noticeably disappointed when no one answered.  I asked him if I could help him.  As it turned out, the man had written an essay that was quite important to him, and he was seeking editorial assistance.  Plus, he had brought along a short story written by his wife decades earlier, something they had discovered at the bottom of her desk drawer during a recent clean-up.  He thought his wife's story was a stellar piece of work, and he wanted some feedback about it.  Despite the fact that he stated up front he was willing to pay for the editing services--he was a retired professor himself, he explained, and he knew what a professor's time was worth--I resisted. As a writer there is always another writing project you need to get started on, and as a teacher there's always the next class to prepare for, so this resistance has become a necessarily automatic reflex.   However, as the man visited with me and told me more of his life's story, I became interested.  He'd grown up in Arkansas's delta region, in a home with an alcoholic father who on a regular basis drank up his meager paycheck, leaving his wife almost nothing with which to hold the house together.  Determined to escape from that home and that environment, the gentleman before me had--every day for four years straight--hitchhiked from his small town to the nearest university, which was twelve miles away.  (And not once, he declared proudly, was he late for class.)  His college education allowed him to become a science teacher in the local school system--just the escape he had worked so long and hard for--and years later he became a university professor.  This experience of making it through college at long odds was the subject of his essay.  As he sat in my office and told me these things about himself, it occurred to me that I was the one who should be helping the man with his essay.  And I wondered if I should offer to do it for free.  When he left, I told him I would spread word among the rest of the faculty to see if anyone among us was interested in picking up editing work, but I already knew which among us would probably be doing that.

As it turned out, I didn't do the work for free, but I did suggest a rather paltry fee--which this genteman immediately quintupled.  "Uh, okay," I mumbled, astounded.  How often is the counterbid higher?  His essay was certainly rough, but it had potential; obviously important stories were embedded in it.  In the critique I wrote for him, I encouraged him to bring out these latent stories, to put flesh on the skeleton of what he'd created.  When about a week later he came to my office to pick up my critique (and the critique for his wife's short story), he thanked me politely, paid me immediately, chatted for a few minutes, and then left.  For weeks I wondered if he thought he'd gotten his money's worth.  Well, it was to my true delight that he came by last week to inform me that my critique had helped him a great deal and that he had indeed revised and expanded the essay.  He was starting to understand, he said, what it needed.  He asked if I would look at it again; again for a fee.  Of course I said yes, and I was thrilled to see that he had made wonderful improvements to the piece.  There were still a few small matters to attend to, but it was so much better grounded, better realized now.  When I met with him a couple days later, he told me he hoped to publish it, and he even had three perfectly sensible venues in mind.  I encouraged him to send it out.  With the extra work he'd put in, he'd done justice to his own story; and in its new state it deserved to be heard.  He kindly took my joke that he'd proven himself to be one of my best students, and he asked if I would consult with him about a few other of his life stories he'd like to tell.  Certainly, I said.  Any time.

Lagniappe #1:  More good news for my Van Gogh novel!  One short chapter--it depicts a kind of stand off between Vincent and his exhausted, exasperated younger brother in Theo's cramped Paris apartment--has been accepted for the anthology The Man Date: Fifteen Bromances, forthcoming from Prime Mincer Press in 2013.  An up-and-coming outfit headquartered in Illinois, Prime Mincer is set to release its first title after several years of publishing Prime Mincer Literary Journal.  I'm very excited about this development, because the anthology will feature some impressive writers--Rick Bass for
one--and the competition to get in was fierce.  When I saw the announcement for submissions, I immediately thought of Vincent and Theo, those literal brothers, struggling to survive together in a one-man space in the spring of 1887.  The dark side of "bromance."  It seemed like a different, but appropriate, fit for the theme.  I'm glad Prime Mincer agreed!  For anyone interested, another chapter from the novel was published last year in New Delta Review.  Hit this link to read it.

Lagniappe #2:  I had the pleasure of attending a wedding of a former student this past weekend.  She was easily one of the best young writers I've ever taught, and the theme for the entire wedding was writing.  The bride even sported a pair of shoes with pages from The Odyssey découpaged on them.  The ceremony featured several fine poems.  I don't know about you, but I find reading poems at weddings to be a dicey, dangerously treacle business.  But all the poems in this ceremony were terrific.  One just blew me away.  It's from the inimitable e.e. cummings.  Like a great number of cummings's poems, it's a sonnet in diguise and known by its first line: "I carry your heart with me."  Who else but cummings could be at once so sweet and so profound?