the self-publishing polemic

Dear reader,

Recently, I've been hearing a lot about self-publishing. Generally, the conversation goes like this:

Person talking to me or writing on the internet: Did you hear? There is some girl who writes formulaic novels about vampires and love affairs and sells them for next-to-nothing on Amazon, but hey! she is making a fortune doing it, and why shouldn't we all take a nom de plume and publish a bunch of saleable garbage so that we can be rich too?

Me: Is that a real question?

Person talking to me or writing on the internet:  I mean, of course it would be ironic of us, and not represent our real literary voice or interfere with a serious career and no one would ever know!

Me: Except our neighbors, who notice that we now drive a hybrid Ferrari instead of an old VW.

Okay, those aren't exact quotes, but I think that you understand what I'm trying to say.

There are also people who self-publish because they aren't interested in reaching a large audience, or just want a family history printed for people who are actually in their family, but those aren't the self-publishers that interest me.

I was over on htmlgiant the other day and read Roxane Gay's column about this topic. It's called "Taking No For An Answer," and it was a very thought-provoking read. Her premise is that we've villified the publishing industry to such an extent that writers are starting to see self-publishing as this liberating act.

"We are not taking rejection any longer!" we yell, and post our drivel defiantly on the web or as an Amazon e-book.

Gay argues that perhaps we are too quick to demand recognition, that writers who are rejected by publishers often have products that are not ready to be published. (Stop yelling about injustice. I didn't say always.)

I think what is comes down to is this: why do you want to publish a book?

If the answer is seriously to make money, then perhaps you should go into prostitution or time-shares. I hear they can both be quite lucrative if you have the right personality.

But seriously, the reason that I want to publish a book is because I feel like I have stories to tell, a literary voice that someone might want to listen to - and hopefully more than once. I would like to be able to support myself as a writer, yes, but my endgame doesn't begin with an $ and end with .00.

What I am trying to say is (and mind you, this is from an unpublished wannabe), that I'd rather wade through a pile of rejections and write something I can claim with my real name than make a couple hundred thousand dollars for writing about bloody necks.

What do you think? Is self-publishing as self-congratulatory an exercise as I perceive it to be?

                                                                                                                            Talk soon,

                                                                                                                            Rachel

an ode to books (or, i love you, i love you, i love you)

After graduation, I set about liquidating my belongings for the move back to the United States. Towels and kitchen things went to college-poor friends, my bike went to the family down the hall, and then things got very serious. All of the books I’d amassed in three years of studying literature in two languages, plus the stacks purchased solely for pleasure, towered before me on a haphazardly shelved wall. The thought of leaving them behind made me nauseous; it was not possible. So I left my shoes. I left my clothing. I left my shampoo. And I filled four enormous suitcases with my books, carefully aligning the spines so their pages would not be crumpled in transit.

My nerdified youth secured my relationship with books early on. Little league softball? No, thanks, I just got a copy of Little Women. The memories of my childhood are comingled with the smell of the page and the thrill of discovery. It all started with The Secret Garden; I was in first grade, and felt as though I’d entered a secret society that gave passage to magical worlds other than my own. In my school years, I soaked up the required reading: Harper Lee, Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, and then stayed up til dawn reading Plath, Salinger, Camus, Kerouac, Chekhov, all of whom made me feel dangerous, alive, elite, invincible. And then I found Nabokov. I remember reading the first page of Lolita, then reading it again, then reading it out loud, just to hear the exquisite resonance of the language. I became aware, for the first time, of how emotive language could be: that prose could be poetry, and that words were like music.

            My current reading life is an ordered jumble of fiction, non-fiction, biography, and memoir. I am an adulterous reader; at any given time, I usually have my hand in at least three books. On my nightstand at the moment are David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest, the memoir of Patti Smith, a collection of Raymond Carver stories, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about vegetarianism. On the shelves are bindings that remind me of the places I have explored, the friendships I have made and lost, and the stories that inspired me to be a writer.

            So much of what I have learned from reading is not literary; it is universal. Flannery O’Connor assured me that religious crisis was intrinsic to the human experience. From Proust, I learned that the quotidian could be transcendent. Ian McEwan showed me in Atonement the horror of betrayal, and that “it wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy …above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you." I think that truth is the secret of the fiction writer, or really any writer: the ability to look at another person and see their story, imagine their fears and prejudices and dreams, and create a character as complex as the reader. I aspire to create those characters – the ones that break your heart and make wrong decisions, but that are utterly human.

I am captivated by writers who incorporate place and language actively into the fabric of their fictional worlds, who remind us that our environment powerfully informs our behavior. There are writers that do this effortlessly, as Junot Díaz does when he plays with intermingling Spanish and English in Drown and The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. There are so many others – Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez – that create settings that are so vivid and alive that they become a force, if not a character, in their novels. The verdant Sundarbans sweat out of Midnight’s Children; in A Bend in the River, the Congolese jungle is an open-mouthed trap, spring loaded with tension; Macondo mirrors the lives of generations of Buendías in Cien Años de Soledad. These writers are inspirational for me, exemplars of the kind of thoughtful universes I want to create for my characters. That these worlds are fictional is indubitable. That they are unreal – it’s just not so. Somehow, these carefully imagined worlds seem to bring us even closer to what is true.

I try to read as much new fiction as I can. Along with Granta, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope, to which I subscribe, I try to read other quarterlies as often as possible. They have turned me on to writers that I have followed through collections of short stories and then to novels. The humor and pathos intertwined in the work of Ben Fountain and Eric Puchner have me watching to see what they will produce next. I was pulled into the alter-realities of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio. And I feel that Jonathan Franzen’s most recent reflection on the American family picks up where Roth left off in American Pastoral a decade ago.

When I am working on a project, I find that my reading scale tips to the side of nonfiction, as I research my story and the history, language, and peculiarities of the characters. I much admire writers who devote themselves to getting the details right. Barbara Kingsolver, for example, is an author I have read since my early teen years, and who continues to impress me with her tireless research. Her most recent offering, The Lacuna, is an ode to Mexico City and to Asheville, NC, a fictional biography of Frida Kahlo, and cautionary tale about anti-communism in the United States. The years of research represented in that beautiful novel belie a dedication to historical accuracy, cultural realism, and speak to her great imagination.

Lately, I have been interested in writers that write fiction based on nonfictional experiences. Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, not to mention Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and any number of works by Graham Greene, are revisitations and reinventions of personal histories. 

These stories fall much more in the vein of my own work: fictional stories populated with familiar faces and re-imagined lives. I love to start with a real place, a sense memory, and work outward from a moment. There is such precise joy in seeing and touching and smelling a place deep in memory and feeling the life of a place breathe back into you. As I was applying to MFA programs, I remember being so attracted to Bennington’s slogan. Read a hundred books. Write one. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? But there is such a difference in reading for pleasure and reading to dissect a book, to figure out why it works, how it works. It is such rewarding work, though, reading. We learn so much from others’ worlds, and bring so much from our own. In fact, I think I will go have a read right now. I’m galloping through Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists this afternoon, and really enjoying it. I’ll let you know when I’m through.

                                                                                                 Talk soon,

                                                                                                      Rachel

new beginnings (in the middle of things)

A Spanish gypsy named Pintór once told me, as we stared up at the ancient walls of the Alhambra, “Toda vida es cuento. Eres un personaje en mi historia, y yo en la tuya. Así nos comprendemos.” All of life is a story. You are a character in my story, and I in yours. That is how we understand ourselves. He was illiterate; I had never heard it articulated so well. Suffice to say that I have always had trouble differentiating the events of my life from literary narrative. 


        My love of language and chronic wanderlust have taken me around the world, each adventure captured in a gaggle of notebooks. Some, from the years I lived in Madrid, are mostly in Spanish, others spattered with words and phrases in French, Portuguese, Otji-herero, Greek, Aymara, the languages of each landscape I explored. I’ve always felt that language and place are intrinsically entwined, that there is something effortlessly communicated by a purring “r” or the crush of consonants in a nearly vowel-less word. Each new place meant a barrage of new smells, tastes, and sounds that I tried to grasp in my writing. For a long time, I thought that I would one day turn those stories into a memoir. But when I began to write, I found that being faithful to reality was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. There were other characters, faces from the sidewalks, conversations overheard in a café, begging to be explored. Revisiting those worlds with the freedom to manipulate and invent allowed me to examine the themes that most interested me and elucidate those ideas through characters alternately simpler and more complex than their non-fictive counterparts.

            I moved to Spain immediately after high school, partly as an escape, but mostly because I loved the language and wanted to achieve real fluency. I studied Spanish philology and literature during the week and traveled around the country, sleeping on the beach or in caves with the gypsies and squatters, on the weekends. In the four years I lived in Madrid, I managed to travel as far as the Greek isles on my thumb, loitering around a fish market until I found a trawler who agreed to give me a ride on his ketch. I was serious about my studies and serious about my cultural education as well. As an editor of my university’s bilingual newspaper, I was driven by deadlines and enjoyed the challenge of proofing columns in both Spanish and in English. And my literature-heavy course load ensured that I was reading, discussing, and writing about novels constantly in both languages. It was fascinating to read Hemingway write about Spain in English and Reinaldo Arenas describe New York in Spanish. I very much enjoyed my undergraduate years and think fondly of that period of intellectual rigor and self-exploration.

            After college, I had debts and doubts and decided it would be prudent to wander on a less-permanent basis. I was fortunate enough to be offered a teaching position despite my lack of training, and was surprised to find that I loved it. I went back to school in the evenings and obtained my licensure, and poured my creative energies into designing lesson plans, rewriting curriculum, coaching competitive public speaking, and sponsoring student clubs like Model UN and Operation Smile. I took students on a summer trip to Perú to immerse them in language and culture. I was designated a Distinguished Educator of the Year. I fell in love with my work.

I doubt there is really a moment in which a person decides to forgo art in favor of more practical pursuits. If it were so simple, we would stare down the prospect with our young faces and march bravely toward an impractical but fulfilling horizon. No, I suspect that it is instead a series of sensible decisions that we make to accommodate our families, our security, and our careers, that eventually leads us to a quieter, more painful moment cast years into the future, a moment in which we realize that we’ve ignored the inspired core of our nature, that we have become a consumer instead of a producer of art. Fearful of such a moment in my own offing, I took stock of my creative life about a year ago. I realized that I hadn’t written – beyond journaling – for seven years. All of my creative energies had been channeled into my work, which, although gratifying, was not fulfilling that essential artistic need. I made a decision to set aside time to write seriously.       
    

I joined a writer’s group called The Muse and took a class on narrative travel writing. I felt inhibited by the form, the lean sentences and pesky adherence to truth. Last spring, I asked to join the Open Studio, a workshop for independent writers working on longer projects. Since then, I have been participating regularly in the group, submitting ten or so pages every two or three weeks. It was a change that challenged me. It is wonderful to have a deadline again, to have a group that reads thoughtfully and provides insightful criticism week after week. The collaborative environment has afforded me a safe haven to test my work and ten sets of eyes to tell me when something does not make sense.

After a year of participation in The Muse workshops, I felt that I was ready to take the next step in my writing. Although I am still devoted to my teaching, I decided that I was no longer satisfied relegating my writing to the side. I decided to apply to some MFA programs in creative writing. Like many others who have careers that they love and marriages that anchor them to a geographical location, a full-time program wasn't really an option for me. Although the writing programs at Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and University of Virginia were dreamy, I essentially weighed the pros and cons, and threw my lot in with the low-residency format. Instead of moving to a campus for two or three years to study and teach full-time, the low-residency format allows you to maintain your current career and travel to a campus twice a year for about ten days. Many of the programs also have programs in translation, creative non-fiction, and young adult fiction, and a few of them offer residencies in alternate locations as far away as Santa Fe, Puerto Rico, or Slovenia.

After a too-fast month doing final edits on 25 pages of fiction as well as writing personal essays and re-writing critical essays for submission, I licked envelopes, crossed my fingers, and sent applications to Vermont College of Fine Arts, Bennington College, and Warren Wilson College. And then I waited a painful month in limbo before I heard the verdict: accepted at Vermont College and Bennington, rejected at Warren Wilson. I was surprised when Bennington told me that I had exactly one week to accept or reject their invitation. Who makes a decision in a week? It was not an easy decision to make; Vermont's program so appealed to me, especially with their optional focus on translation and residencies in Slovenia, but I kept getting hung up on the allure of Bennington, and the delicious abstract list they sent me of the talks that would be given in June. At the last minute (literally), I called Bennington and declined their invitation. I am headed to Vermont.

 I could not be more excited about starting this new course of study. I look forward to having a structured schedule of critique and editing, to learning about and improving my craft as much as I can. I am also excited by the possibility of completing a concentration in translation, having the opportunity to share the voices of writers that I love with an English-speaking audience. My goals are simple: to learn more about the craft of writing, the mechanics of a well-structured novel, and to become an adept editor of my own and others’ material. I hope to mine my travel history for interesting and important stories that have urgency and significance. I know that I can become a better writer and teacher through this process, and am prepared to devote myself to the task. More than anything, I hope to appease the creative craving in my gut, and to write a story worth reading. 

                                                                                         Talk soon, 

                                                                                         Rachel