Wide Ranging Interview with Robert Detman at Wisdom of the West

Many thanks to generous fellow blogger Jim at Wisdom of the West, who over the years has left insightful comments on items in this blog. Jim is publishing a serial interview with me about my novel, Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas. This complete interview is available here. The interview took place last month, and covers a variety of items, mainly concerned with character development, themes in the novel, politics in literary production, and the curious question of whether a reader should like or find a protagonist sympathetic.
Here's the introduction to "The Detman Files".
Here's part 1 of the interview.
Part 2.
Part 3 completes the interview.

Rave Review of IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF BASHER THOMAS from Nomadic Press

Nomadic Press has provided a rave review for Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas:

“This is a novel that will stick with you because of its poetical means of exploring the human condition and Detman’s uncanny ability to weave beautiful, and haunting, imagery.”

Full review here: http://www.nomadicpress.org/reviews/impossiblelivesofbasherthomas

Another orphan finds a home: Superstition [Review] publishes "Fire"

The estimable Superstition [Review] has selected for publication my short story "Fire." This long forgotten gem, many times altered inextricably from its origins and almost as many times re-titled (formerly known as "Double Kayak"), once went toe to toe with a dozen or more challengers as a finalist for the 2008 New Letters Literary Awards. Goes live December 4th.

On having to explain one’s work (or that dumbing down logic)

There is the idea that, as an artist, you should not have to explain your work. If there’s any need to explain, it seems to highlight some idea of there being a flaw in the work. If I attempt to explain my work, which I often feel compelled to do, it is usually out of a sense that the work will be misunderstood. Or it is just as much to alert an unsuspecting reader that this may not be what you expect. And since I think I can assume a number of folks who will feel compelled or curious to read Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas don’t normally read novels to begin with, I feel as if I have to brace myself for the impact of their eventual failure to get it--if there’s anything to “get.”

Thus when I asked Ben Marcus that question (http://robertmdetman.blogspot.com/2014/10/ben-marcus-responds-to-my-question-on.html), it was because I wanted to know if he ever felt a need to explain his work. Do I note a bit of tetchy sarcasm in Mr. Marcus’s response, as if I’m acknowledging what he is all too aware of? A lot of casual readers will probably not understand his work. This will continue as he tries to become a more mainstream author. If you are notoriously difficult, you can get shuffled into that gray zone: the experimental folks don’t think you are that cutting edge, and the realist folks find you too abstruse. David Foster Wallace, who would seem to require a lot of explanation, often gets a pass, and gets picked up probably as fast as he’s eventually put down by those readers in search of something new to read. And I’m not sure his explanations were any easier to understand than the work itself.

Not to say my predicament is anywhere near what Beckett might have faced, but for him, the necessity to not have had to explain seems paramount. His writing is hardly accessible. Then there is the curiosity of those who hear you expound on this (favorite) difficult author. Inevitably they turn to you, seeking explanation; explication. And in such situations I feel the onus of literature’s great, myriad, plainly inexplicable project that, rather than having one easily consumed and digestible nugget, is rather a project for a lifetime’s study. But no one seems to know this, or thinks it, particularly when they find something not conforming to their preconceived, even received, notions of literature. I can’t help you, I often want to say, as if committing my approval of a difficult writer’s work then requires me to become the village explainer.

There have been moments of panic, while editing Impossible Lives, that I might need to dumb things down a bit, or at least go further to make explicit why I have written it the way I have. But this is not to say Impossible Lives is so difficult or esoteric that it won’t be understood. When I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile, it’s often because I realized I’ve not had to please anyone but myself. This seems to me the exact opposite of the impulse that the agents and editors of the mega-conglomorate publishing-opoly would require of me. I would never be happy with my work being turned into, essentially, the equivalent of a ken doll. 

This points to the wonderful freedom of writing short fiction, where that dumbing down by others doesn’t usually apply. I think that the nature of short work gives a creative writer wide latitude because, if any publisher wants to consider it, they can read it in a sitting and grasp the whole of it quite readily. Editors are rarely going to come back to you with a ridiculous list of what you could do to your 500 or 1000 or even 3000 word story so that they will consider it. Rather, they take it or they do not. And when it comes to submitting a story, no explanation is required. No synopsis. No handy comparisons to similar works. Try getting a novel read like that. After submitting a short story, you might get a few editing suggestions, but they’re never on the level of fundamentally rewriting what you’ve already written. You’d never bother, if you are wise, and neither would they. Whereas with a novel, in the dumbing down logic, and with considerations by the marketing machine of a large publishing house, where they are literally banking on you, you would have dozens of lame opinions geared toward marketing. I take this information from the piece in Poets & Writers, “A Day in the Life of a Publishing House” (Vol. 42, Issue 5). Who hasn’t read one of these novels that’s been generated from some humble author’s work and found it to be exactly what it reads like: a mess, a neutered hodgepodge?

In other words, the first thing that happens if your novel has been anointed for publishing by the biggies is a disrespect of your work, which, if you want it to be published, you will accept. I can’t think of anything I’m more fundamentally and violently opposed to.

I will continue to read books put out by the industry heavyweights, only too aware how often the quality is off base. Like many readers, I’m a sucker for the hype. I usually need to read the hyped novel for myself to find out what’s so great about the next big thing. I came to Knausgaard early, purely out of curiosity and before there was any hype; now of course, the speculation runs rampant about this work and its quality. I found it eminently compelling, while I cannot say the same of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. It was merely ok, even passable, but it’s hard not to feel like the hype is usually misplaced for so many name writers (add Murakami and Junot Diaz to the list). Much of what’s hyped in the mainstream feels steeped in a narrow mind-set and for me isn’t, in fact, strange enough.

As an avid reader, you know what you like and maybe even why, so invariably you take a chance on a hyped to death work, because you’ll never know unless you look into it. It’s easier to believe a lot of these established writers aren’t being guided by the editorial teams of their publishing houses, though the same probably can’t be said for the marketing department; you can be sure said author’s next work will be promoted as the “revolution of the novel” or whatever.

At least I can say, Impossible Lives is as pure a vision of its original intent as intended. I should not have to explain myself further.

Guerilla Marketing V 2.0

Almost without exception, everyone in publishing speaks of marketing and selling a book in terms that are, let’s be honest, anathema to most creative writers. The fact is, I doubt very much my fictional works are going to give you anything of value. I’ll go further and suggest that they are going to cost you time and maybe some small expenditure of money, and, in the worst extreme, if you despise the thing, I’ll have earned your wrath. You will only grow richer in terms of getting whatever value I might have imbued in the novel, however that is possible. I will go even further and say what most of the writers who attempt to heed sage marketing advice do not say, that my writing is basically a selfish endeavor. But I have always tried to write what I find interesting—and hope the reader also finds it worthwhile.

So it is that a writer pursues the dream, humbled by a bunch of publications under my belt, and almost always surprised when I can come up with something to say that I can put down with the ease and freedom I don’t take lightly, onto the web where possibly one or 1000 people might read it. At times I wonder, would Thoreau have had a blog? Tolstoy? Barthes? Most definitely. Ignoring the myriad technical questions such a thought implies.

Because of the ease and speed of the internet, the volume of written stuff must have grown exponentially each year in the last fifteen or so, to where I can now be reasonably assured that, because there are so many people attempting to put out their little darlings--which might be better off dying gentle suffocating deaths in file cabinets everywhere--that few, if any, will read mine. I have made some peace with it, possibly by having taken the matter into my own hands. Still, in the effort to drum up some old fashioned, even arcane technology for my own marketing campaign, I have produced a bookmark which I began distributing this past few weekends in a couple of bookstores in Los Angeles, and a bunch in the Bay Area. In L.A.: The Skylight Books staffer was kind enough to stick a stack on the gimme counter, among a variety of Xeroxed flyers and such—I’m relying on the appeal of the ubiquitous book mark presence—its utility, its necessity, its minor novelty. At Booksoup, I was told by the manager that “We have no room for them.” In most cases, booksellers were more than happy to allow me to leave a stack (which they may have left on the counter—though in some cases, I saw they were putting them in the gimme card section). Still, any visibility was good to me. Will this have any impact on the target audience for such a work of fiction as Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas? I’ll admit I have faith in my own ability to produce a graphically striking, hopefully iconic, book cover, because I couldn’t think of anything else, other than bombarding unsuspecting individuals in my e-mail address book and potentially wiping any good karma I might have established by resisting such “Ten things you must do to get your book sold,” tactics in the past. My method relies on a personal approach which I’m still not entirely at ease with, though I know I should be.

For anyone who wishes to purchase a copy of Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas, I am offering it at a discount of 25% ($12.64 after taxes and shipping). Just click on the buy button below the cover image at left. I will ship orders as soon as I receive them from the printer. Also, through Goodreads, I'm doing a giveaway campaign, also at the left.

The Li(n)e Between Truth and Invention in Fiction

In the recent biography Updike by Adam Begley, we learn that the celebrated writer ransacked his entire life for story material. He did it religiously, assiduously. In fact, he didn’t invent anything, he merely mined his own life. I found this both a surprise and a letdown. To read Updike’s stories however, the remarkable observation and acuity with detail perhaps make up for a deficiency in inventiveness.

What I’ve learned from reading Updike is that a fiction writer needs to have a painter’s eye for detail, and this can (or used to) be enough to carry a short story. Maybe my disappointment with Updike is that he hadn’t done more than this—he made fiction look so easy just using the basic tools of life experience--admittedly not a very exciting life, at that.

Contrast this to Alice Munro, in her last collection, Dear Life, she has an addendum onto the final four stories, that they are to be read as essentially biographical. For whatever reason, I have always assumed her stories are autobiographical. Why would I assume this for one writer, but not another?

Maybe there’s a lot to be said for a writer who can take the day to day of their life experiences for story material. If most people did this, I feel like we’d have incredibly boring stories. But as soon as you call it memoir, it changes the game (Just look at Knausgaard). Perhaps as a fiction writer, you are in one or the other camp.

Awhile back I must have decided I was in one camp—invention—versus that of using material from my life for fiction. Let’s call them inventors or lifers. I believe I’m incapable of writing a fiction from life, period. I just call it memoir. And because I’ve always coveted Updike’s writing, I assumed he had a natural way with invention.

Jim Shepard’s short story approach, as far as I can tell, is to research a subject that fascinates him, and imagine a story from that. It’s possible some of Shepard’s personal life creeps in to these stories, but really, how much? For example, the details of his recent 2013 Best American Short Stories story accumulate and deliver you somewhere that an Updike-ian story would and could not. So much in Shepard’s work is joyfully inventive, and I think it is in this kind of discovery that a writer makes, rather than the prosaic details of a less than fascinating life, that are what provide the transcendence that can elevate fiction. What’s convincing is the voice, and the fantastical elements within realism, or maybe it’s a transcendence of realism.

Stories that are invented need to be convincing, or some element of the writing has to lift it above mere narrative. Is what Updike pulled off the opposite of this–that his attention to detail makes the story convincing?

I find it interesting that almost all writing of anything of psychological depth is interrogated in terms of “did this really happen?” This might be a credit to the skills of the writer; isn’t there something to being able to transmute life into a story?

What is behind these arguments and discussions about whether a fictional story “really happened” or not, is that it might make the work more compelling. Because there is less at stake, the detail carries the story. Also, a key to a story written from life is its engagement with a gossip quality. Once we know it is based on life, there’s a curious desire to figure out who the characters are based on.

With invention, the writer is relying more on alchemy of a sort. Writing from life, the story is the material. Writing an invented scenario, the material is the story (is this a canard?). Maybe the language enters into the efficacy of the telling, but at some level, the narrative can’t involve distracting language. Is it possible to write a memoir to the level that transcends the language? This speculation could be entering the curious avenue of beliefs. Does Updike’s fiction now seem more compelling to know that all this stuff in his hundreds of stories actually happened in his life?

For me, there’s more of a charge out of writing from what I don’t know. I explored this extensively in an earlier post, “Against Personal Experience”. Something I did not say in that piece was that living life might tend to make you more aware of possibilities in your writing.

Updike would just recycle his experience through characters’ lives. I think, in fact, Updike would essentially rewrite the experience as a story, but he would not place the characters in Afghanistan, or have them drive trucks in Nebraska, for example.

This is not the same thing as invention, on the face of it. I will use the psychological elements of an interaction, but not the setting or scenario. So is it simply that writers are merely using these psychological elements in more or less invented situations? Is this distinction too unclear?

What these questions might actually be getting at is the authority of the writer, how writing seems to establish a benchmark on a detail or an incident from an actual life (or rather involving many lives). If the ancillary characters (based on real people) don’t see themselves as particularly involved or invested in that incident, as they may or may not be, they will feel slighted no matter what is said. The subjective encapsulation will never be enough, or it will be too much. In Updike’s fiction, generally, this seems to be the result; he often waited years to publish some of his more scandalous stories. He still wrote it, but what he wasn’t able to reveal he avoided publishing. If readers who are undeniable subjects of a story question it, it’s like questioning the version that is being told, since it is plainly, unavoidably, subjective.

How to Use Your Short Work to Get Your Long Work Published

The exciting Akashic Books has a regular feature on their website, Thursdaze: Original Flash Fiction Under the Influence, and they have kindly selected a piece from my novel Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas. (This novel is also forthcoming from Figureground Press in October--cover at left--more details to come as they develop.) This excerpt, "First Time, Last Time", goes live on September 11.

Also, Em: A Review of Text and Image will be generously publishing my piece, "Anger Management", in the upcoming issue, slated for the fall.

Links for all of these to follow.

The Myths and Realities of Writing Every Day

I used to make a habit of writing a thousand words a day. I have done this in various weeks long or months long pursuits of a goal, but never consistently. Now, I’m content with around 500 words most days, or four out of five days. I’m doubtful of writers who claim to do their writing as if it is a job, four to eight hours a day. If you have that luxury, because there’s such a demand for your work, then more power to you--I just don’t believe you. That also might be for the factory of thriller writers, but for the literary writer--where the words are considered with regard--there’s more useful strategies.

I try to get a few pages in every day with some regularity, half of which might be channeled into an active piece aiming for publication. On a very good week, I might produce several thousand words, which is the level I think you have to be at to produce a novel with any useful efficiency. I say efficiency, because you have to keep at a novel. When you put it down for too long, you can lose the thread and the inspiration, if you had that to begin with, and it’s difficult to pick that up again unless you are a genius. The pressure comes in at this sustained level, because then you have to find the time to dedicate to the sometimes teeth-gnashing goals of a quota, in pages or word count.

For anyone who is starting out writing, the idea that you have to practice, that you have to produce every day in order to make any headway, can be daunting. It takes years to get there, but it also can happen overnight simply by vowing to write a bit each day.

Any writing can get the gears turning, though for the most part, I think this process is something you don’t hear a lot of established writers talking about: how unproductive daily writing can feel. And yet you have to get over that hump to produce the work, and remind yourself with great patience that writing is really about re-writing. For most of the last few weeks I’ve been up around 6 or 6:30, and written at least 2 pages, sometimes more. How focused was I on the story I’ve been writing? Loosely, I had an idea and wrote to that end. When I sat down to read my twenty plus handwritten pages recently this week, I caught glimpses of a Nabokov-ian spoof filtered through my own concerted seriousness to say something compelling.

Usually, or ideally and rarely, I would be burning with a story to write, and would crank it out as soon as possible--usually in the early morning. Sometimes I’ve awakened at four in the morning with an idea that I could not shake, and forced myself to write, then after an hour and a half fury of near illegible scratching on a legal pad, I go back to sleep. Some of the best things I’ve written have occurred like this. There’s something about the synapses in the morning that are unpredictable and wildly able to go anywhere, it can seem.

I imagine the reason writers don’t often talk about this process is because it’s not romantic, and doesn’t convey the heroic notion that usually puts the vocation into a hallowed and sacred act that leads to the magical writing of magnificent, well-received tomes for mass consumption--if we could all be so lucky. In contrast, that idea that one writes as a job can be equally daunting sounding. If a writer does treat it as a job, I can almost guarantee for the full four or eight hours they are not continuously writing--either that, or the writing is mostly garbage. There’s a kind of sweet spot about how much time and how much you write each day that is probably optimal, but there is no formula. Everyone has to discover their own practice.

I’m not sure writing isn’t ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. I think because I have experienced the inspiration driving the writing, I’m inclined to believe anything less is wheel spinning--though wheel spinning can indicate that the mechanisms are at least working.

When you generate this much writing, at some point you have to realize its potential. At five or six thousand words, is it going to be a story you pursue or not? And then, further, are you working on a story, or a novel, or something else altogether? I’ve put some much editing time into even relatively short pieces, that I know a novel takes a yeoman effort. In the futile seeming generation of all of this raw material, you might begin to think it is all a waste of time.

It’s not a waste of time. All writing can lead to this next story or article that will, or could, be the piece that pushes you to the next thing. That’s largely what writing is about, having the faith to continue on in absolute uncertainty. This is easier to consider in thought than practice, but it’s true.

Double Barrels: Political Humor and a Double Review

It's been a good few weeks for placing work. This week, my satire, "Kim Jong-un's Unread Spam Emails to Obama" is appearing in The Higgs Weldon, assuring that I'll never step foot in North Korea. Also, a double review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One and Tao Lin's Taipei is to appear in Trop Magazine, assuring that I'll never undertake reviewing two books in one piece again without being paid an extremely exorbitant sum. Also, I've updated my website publications page.

Misspent Youth Chronicles, Vol. II

A further dispatch from Misadventures in Deconstruction, the latent memoir of my tragically impressionable apprentice years in architecture, appears in Glint Literary Journal. "Abandoned" portrays the time tested game of cat and mouse occurring with that unknown quantity, the dorm mate, in my case a future hopeful Nobel economics candidate.

Go here to read the one published prior to this. You might laugh, you might even cry.

Misadventures In Deconstruction

An episode of my misspent youth attending architecture school, in my unpublished memoir Misadventures in Deconstruction, will be published next month in The Bacon Review. Thanks to TBR. This piece, entitled "Storage Room" answers the question about just how ineffective I could be in the workplace.

Shadow is Substance

Many thanks to Burningword Literary Journal for selecting “Object/Multiple Singularities/Be Here Now” for publication in their quarterly, upcoming on April 1st. This piece was inspired at my alma mater Goddard and the Pratt Center Library's bunker-like lower level on a snowed in January day several years ago.

Re-upping Indie Credibility

The estimable Spork Press will be going live in March or April with three experimental thematic pieces I wrote: “Ejection Seat”, “Shine”, and “Ski Patrol”, proving to me that it’s never too late to re-up my indie credibility. Gravity has a lot to answer for.

The Southeast Review

The Southeast Review has kindly accepted my review of Tom Bissell's Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, to appear in their upcoming print issue.

Insistence On Persistence

This is maybe an echo on the last post, which I put out hastily, but with no elaboration. This is the elaboration.

Reading the Wallace Shawn interview in the latest Paris Review, I thought, it’s hard to imagine this writer would not be doing what he is and have become good at it, if he was merely pompous. Which is apparently what Wallace Shawn is accused of being, pompous.

Barring a stable set of readers, I realize I’m not going to appear to a random reader to have anything new to say--and maybe I’m not. But if my work touches one person, it must be worth the effort. Then again, you have to overcome a lot of skepticism to deign to believe you can add to the conversation.

That’s one of the first steps in being a writer, and maybe it’s too falsely achieved--that quality of believing you have something to say. We’d sometimes like to accuse others in the struggle that they should consider if they really have anything of worth to contribute, but we could heed Wallace Shawn here:

“. . . without writers, humanity might be trapped in a swamp of idiotic, unchanging provincial cliches. Yes, there are writers who merely reinforce people’s complacency, but a writer like Rachel Carson inspired the activism of millions, and writers like Lady Murasaki, Milton, and Joyce have recorded people’s brains! And for any writers to exist at all, there must surely be a tradition of writing. Maybe in order for one valuable writer to exist, there must be a hundred others who aren’t valuable at all, but it isn’t possible at any given moment for anyone to be sure who the valuable one is.”

(Wallace Shawn, The Paris Review, #201, The Art of Theatre No. 17)

Who am I to say whose efforts aren’t worthwhile--including myself?

I like to think there is something to persistence, on the other hand there’s the notion that if you repeatedly keep trying to do something and repeatedly fail at it, that this is the definition of crazy. I’d also sometimes like to believe that I don’t have a set tolerance level, that I’ll keep trying to achieve an elusive (seeming) goal without ever calling the attempt into question. But I’m guessing tenacity pays off. Every story or piece of writing didn’t exist at one time, and after it did, it maybe will have taken dozens of attempts to get it noticed (i.e., published). Writing, in this way, becomes the penultimate illustration of this theory. I’d already more or less given up on many stories (not with cause) simply because I spent years sending them out to no avail, and by some fluke I sent one out two or three years after I’d given up on it long enough to come back to it, take it off life support, and send it flying into the void again--for no discernible logic--not that I ever stopped believed in in said story. Another self-serving notion I cop to is that “it just wasn’t time,” or, “maybe next time,” which are really ways of persisting at something even though, clearly, there is no apparent justification for the hope.

Unless the fact of the story eventually finding a home is one.

The kicker of this is that I still try. I still doubt I should, or say I’ll give up, but as time passes, I write more that gets me excited again, and while sifting through the new pile, I find something buried in the old pile. I’ll think, this hasn’t been sent out in two years, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it (hubris has no place in the determination to get published)--in fact, I could just change it here and here, and I’ll send it out. To date, that’s how most of my published fiction got picked up. So even if I had to spend a lot of time going through the slog of postage, contest entry fees, grosses of 20 pound 96 bright paper and countless unenlightening trips to the office supply store, I can’t really say it wasn’t worth the effort.

So, maybe I’m feeling particularly resilient these days, or am trying to coddle myself into thinking I am this way. I just don’t know if I would get anywhere if I wasn’t at least paying lip service to this theme of indomitable persistence.

Doing The Numbers

It’s been years since I’ve submitted up to 200 pieces in a year, and from my stats I can see this is the number it takes a year to get published. Though in some cases, I actually had two pieces published from this quantity, so maybe the actual number is 100 pieces submitted for each publication (I have a post on this which talks about stats, and it’s a slightly different equation which I’m not going to bother explaining here). I am confident a story I’ve been sending out this year will soon find a home, and am beginning to think I should self-publish a short story collection, of which most of the stories have already been published in various quality lit mags. (Antioch, SMR, Evergreen)

The difficult reckoning is knowing one has a quality body of work that only a handful of people might have read. So why not just keep submitting? I am, but with much less quantity, though no less lacking in focus than before. I use most often the ready, fire, aim method. Yes, it’s as scattered as it sounds.

In any case, I think I’m mostly done with pursuing agents. I never thought I’d say this, but I have had far more interesting response from publishers for my novels than agents. I will pursue publishers until I’m sick of that and before I give up in total despair and go the self-publishing route.

Yet, I don’t know what publishers are looking for. If anything, I think the strengths of my work that get them interested on a sample, is consistently there through the entirety of the work. It’s not like I wrote a great novel up to page fifty and said fuck it. How did I get all of this other work published? Here’s my litmus test: if James Frey was sitting on one of my novels, you can believe his agent would be over the moon to publish it. Or Dave Eggers for that matter.

I’m as ever, perpetually baffled by the publishing industry. (And maybe that’s the key word to note, it’s an industry).

I’m not an active social media guy. I still feel like I’m going to keep writing and pursuing these specious interests until long after the world has moved on to more remunerative pursuits. A perspicacious admirer tells me that I need to do more social networking; let’s just say this little personal note is my calling card. And I am on Twitter when I can cough up 140 character witticisms. Other than that, it’s called love--of what I do. I vow to keep at it. One thing I can say--frustrations be damned--I am having fun with it.

Barney Rosset, R.I.P.

The afternoon Barney Rosset’s wife Astrid called me to ask if they could publish my story, “It Was a Tree that Saved Me” in the Evergreen Review, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was the fifth or sixth fiction publication I’d had, and it capped a year of many, which felt like a wonderful omen. I recalled those reprinted compendiums of the Evergreen Review with the original jerky and small, serif-less text layouts that looked slightly anachronistic even for their time, and the counter-culture black and white images that connected, in my mind, to a historical movement in American fiction that has waned to its detriment. Getting into their journal felt like the culmination in some ways of so much that I’d been writing for, and I felt recognized, if only in this humble, small way. As an avowed fan of Samuel Beckett, I’d heard quite a bit about this ornery iconoclast Rosset, who had first published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and I was happy to be included in the ranks of their publishing legacy. Watch the terrific documentary Obscene to get a sense of what the man was like, and what he contributed. I consider Evergreen Review one of the best journals out there--even if it is merely online at this point--and know Mr. Rosset will be missed in the publishing world which grows ever colder and difficult to understand and negotiate for young writers. So long, Barney Rosset, 1922-2012.

Moment Of Clarity

You can spend years learning how to write stories that someone will want to publish; you can analyze every story you read to the point where you draw the life out of it. One day you discover you are doing it--writing stories that someone wants to publish--and have done it.

In the process, you realize not only have you done it, you’ve done it your own way.

I don’t know if you can go so far and say you have a voice or something like that--maybe with enough work amassed you can see that, but one of the hardest things to do is to be objective about the work you’ve spent so many hours, days, and weeks on. So it’s always a surprise when someone does want it, though because you have done all the homework you shouldn’t be surprised.

The compulsion is still (for me) to go back again and look at what other writers are doing to see anew how it is done. I am always reading a lot of work, much that I am not always excited by, just to see if there is something I can learn from it (maybe, what not to do.) When you enter a dozen contests a year, the journals start arriving in the mail whether you want them or not. I usually don’t, but I paid my entry fee, and there they are. I read them anyway.

I’ve had this feeling on numerous occasions when I’m writing a story: that this one will get published. I don’t mean to sound arrogant or over-confident, but there is often a moment of clarity that seems to be the reward for the willingness to show up and do the work. That moment, out of nowhere, is sublime. And that moment isn’t exactly that certainty that it will be published, it is more a sense that “I know this story has the quality and the spark to be well-published.” Since it has happened a few times, I have to believe there is something to the notion.

In the best cases it’s when I’m writing the story, and I sense someone might connect with it; again, probably because you can recognize that quality when you read another writer (maybe 10 percent of the time) you begin to recognize that quality in your own work. Some might call this a voice and I suppose that’s what it is. I really believe this absorption in a wide variety of fiction makes finding one’s voice inevitable. You can learn and assimilate much by reading a lot and widely. It has less to do with reading “how to” books and more with reading good fiction.

On the other hand, I’ve spent months on stories that I’m quite sure will never see the light of day, but there is some reason I persevere with their doomed venture. I’ve come to learn to take my time. A story I started in May is only now shaping up, and I feel confident that it will resonate with someone. But that confidence is the best gift one gets for having written year after year when there was seemingly no one that was going to read your writing. That’s what the ten years on novel number two, forever relegated to a banker’s box of drafts in the closet, was for.

The Antioch Review

Returning home from Maine this past weekend I received notice that The Antioch Review has selected "Under the Suns of a Million Everests" for publication in the Winter 2012 issue. I’m excited and immensely grateful to Editor Robert Fogarty for this honor. Talk about great company: over its seventy year history the Antioch Review has published Joyce Carol Oates, William Trevor, T. C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, David Means, Ben Percy and Ha Jin, just to name a few.

This also got me thinking about statistics, specifically my orphan statistics. It seems like you need to all but give up on a story before someone will finally take it. Initially I got reamed on this story when I workshopped it with a new group in Berkeley (a once and only workshop occasion--they dismissed me after that first meeting as “not a good fit”)--perhaps with cause, I don't remember--and it’s also kind of a funny vindication and a lesson to anyone who is in a similar situation: you don’t need to believe all the negative criticism you hear from strangers. Rather, take most of it lightly, because you may actually be onto something in your work. As I am reminded almost daily, you do have to trust your gut.

For awhile I’ve changed my strategy with the orphans, since in some cases I’d sent them out to over seventy markets. When have you reached saturation is always a question, though when very good (I’d call them top tier) journals give you a citation, it always seems like the story will eventually find a home. You think, justifiably so, that this can’t just be a fluke. A writer friend told me he just gets rejections, revises and sends out again, without thinking--for years. It takes years, in reality, but I’ve been cultivating patience for a long time, and it’s all part of deciding that this biz will make you or break you.

When these citations come back, it’s time to take seriously their advice and tighten up the story as necessary. I’d only sent this story out at the beginning of the year because I hadn’t sent it out in over a year, and in about three years, it had been to only 30 or so markets. Very slim numbers (ten a year?), however, it received a positive note once from StoryQuarterly which has stared at me every day since as I tacked it above my workspace. And, as I was reviewing some workshop notes on the story, one of my readers (Tim) had remarked that it was his favorite story of mine. I trust this groups’ opinions, singularly and collectively, so I decided to give it another chance, and on a lark sent it to Antioch Review. Voila.

As I mentioned here, it takes me an average of 35 markets to place a story (this is not counting the fluke stories that get sent out seventy plus times), and now this one is no exception. I think I liked the story so much that I somehow expected it to place sooner, perhaps, and sent it to fewer, more select markets.

The Publication Trail

The paths a writer takes to publication can seem a unique combination of good luck, hard work and randomness. The following two items are from “22 Things I Learned from Submitting Writing” by Blake Butler at HTML Giant that resonated with me:

“9. If you really want to publish a book one day you will publish a book. The time that you spend getting there is kind of wonderful. Don’t cut it short. The emotional range is valuable.

22. No matter how far you get there are always going to be more people who don’t understand you than do. There are hundreds of thousands of books and all of them are important to somebody, and most of them most people have never heard of, and there’s a reason you’re related to those people.”