publishing Archive

Punched in the Throat

By amy ross | Filed in books, publishing, writing

I’m super excited to announce that I have a piece up on The Millions!

Okay, it’s only The Millions’ tumblr… A short recap of Steve Almond‘s recent reading here in Moscow, ID to promote his new book, God Bless America. Still, it’s exciting for me because I adore The Millions and the way their posts feed my brain, so it’s exciting to contribute to that.

As it happens, inspired not by the giddy freedom of having at last turned in my thesis, I volunteered not only to do this write-up, but also to introduce Almond the same night. Here’s what I said, before I inelegantly dropped my notes on the floor just as Almond started for the mic.

Steve Almond is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. He is also the author of five books of fiction, including the newly-released God Bless America, available for sale here. (God Bless America is published by Lookout Books, which happens to be run by Ben George, a 2005 graduate of the UofI MFA program). Almond has won two Pushcart awards and been featured in Best American Short Stories multiple times.

But as impressive as all that is, I volunteered to introduce Steve Almond tonight, because ever since he came here as Distinguished Visiting Writer my first year, I feel like his spirit has haunted this program. The younger generation can tell you how those of us who were in his class talk about Almond as if he were one of the Gods, stepped down from mt olympus to slum with us for a while. That week, my first semester here, he set an example for us of exactly what a writer should be.

He taught us to avoid unnamed narrators, not to keep secrets from the reader, and to never, ever use the word “beacon” in our writing. Ever. But even more than those nuggets of practical good sense, Almond taught us that a writer should be fearless. He taught us the importance of humility. And he taught us that when you have something really important, really big, and really discomfiting to say, laughter will always sweeten the pill.

An example. On I believe it was the second day of class, Almond stood in front of the student being workshopped and lambasted him to his face. In fiction worshops, we are usually very careful to be delicate, to focus on the text itself, and there is a convention that we behave as if the author were not in the room. Almond respected none of these conventions. Speaking directly to the student, he said, “You have allowed poetry and pretty language to get in the way of telling a story. I’m going to spend the next ten minutes humiliating you for doing this. But it is only because I hope that if I beat you up enough, you will never make this mistake again.”

The rest of us sat there in silence, in horror, listening to the diatribe and not knowing how to react. We were afraid the student might go to pieces over the beating he was getting. Then at last, around minute 8, he starts chuckling. Then giggling, then full out laughing. And at the end, he swears solemnly never to make the mistake again.

The rest of the week was spent with us all pretty much in stitches, because we knew now we had permission to laugh. And that was a good thing, because without that laughter, there might have been some tears. But the important thing was, we all walked away with a big dose of truth, and we’ve become better writers because of it.

Just to keep it in the family, I’ll close with a quote from Ben Percy, who was our fiction DVW this year:

“Steve Almond is one of our most prolific-fearless-political-hairy-intelligent-sexy-hilarious writers…. He makes me care deeply about his characters, so many of them wrong in the head and right in the heart, down on their luck but clinging to the desperate hope that the next hand of cards will turn up flush.”

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Rhetoric of Modern Masochism

By amy ross | Filed in publishing, Uncategorized, writing

My response to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain is appearing in the Journal Sexuality & Culture. Ooh, peer-reviewed — fancy! and the whole thing is available online.

It uses Deleuze and Guattari to address the uses and representations of masochism online…

A common-sense definition of pain would state first of all that pain is bad: pain is by definition what all living creatures most fundamentally seek to avoid. And yet, anyone with an average range of experience knows that much of what is ordinarily termed pain—from stretching to massage to exercise to childbirth—is not necessarily aversive. Self-proclaimed masochists are one group who embrace and embody the complex human relationship with pain as both an undeniably material experience, but also a practice deeply embedded in culture and rhetoric. Reading through Elaine Scarry and Deleuze and Guattari, this article seeks to engage the apparent paradox that makes pain both an irresistible weapon of torture and a mechanism towards an ecstatic restructuring of subjectivity. The article posits that it is precisely the complex discourse and rhetoric of pain which allows the material experience of it to be so radically contextually determined.

Sorry I only post these days when I have a publication, but there is thesis-ing to be done.

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False Eyelashes for Everyone

By amy ross | Filed in publishing, writing

A paper I wrote is out in Transverse Journal. Even cooler, there’s a smart and pretty in depth discussion of it in the Editorial Introduction.

I also presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2011 Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media. It’s a queer take on composition pedagogy… Oh hey, why don’t I just throw in the abstract:

In order to advance our respective fields, all writers, academic or otherwise, must necessarily assume a position of authority that we may not yet feel comfortable claiming. When facing the challenge of a strange idea, a new approach, or a discipline-revolutionizing claim, we may all remember what it’s like to be a basic writer, struggling to find the right words, faking mastery over an unfamiliar vocabulary. In this paper, I hope to introduce the idea of “drag composition” as a way of managing the panic of the unfamiliar in all writers. I borrow from queer theory the idea of passing and performativity – of performing a role that feels false at first, but may eventually be added to the closet-full of identities possessed by any adventurous writer. But where passing – whether as a different sex or race, or as an authority in a field one hasn’t mastered – always brings with it the paralyzing possibility of discovery, drag performance wields the visible disconnect between the performer and the role as an effective rhetorical tool.

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Summer Salad

By amy ross | Filed in microfiction, publishing, writing

I have a short short called Summer Salad out in this issue of 5×5. It’s print only, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the magazine if you want to read it… It’s about nostalgia and culture clashes and the pressures of the academic job market, and how the question of what to bring to an end of semester potluck can weigh heavy on a man’s heart. All that in 600 words!

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A Brief History…

By amy ross | Filed in microfiction, publishing, writing

My (very!) short short is up now at the Journal of Microliterature: A Brief History of America According to Motel Marquees.

The piece is shorter than the title.

It got its start because I was brainstorming story ideas and decided I wanted to set something in an old highway motel. I love motels like these, and always get a weird, possibly perverse thrill out of staying in them during road trips. I prefer independent establishments to chains, and I’m especially pleased if they’re a bit on the gritty and desolate side. (Although I did once stay in a motel in DeKalb, IL that was too gritty even for me, what with the cold water showers and all.)

Anyway, I was trying to imagine what kind of story might take place in my fantasy motel — what would best capitalize the run-down, faded glamor I had in mind. And I was playing with some scenes, some characters, some scenarios, but I kept finding myself cutting stuff down, stripping stuff away. I didn’t care about the story, I just wanted the images. The pool emptied for winter, the patterened carpet in out of date colors… Then I started cutting away the images, too. I just wanted the feeling… Ultimately, I distilled the whole exercise down to the frisson of excitement I got as a kid when we drove by those motels on our way to some place more upscale, their marquees conjuring up all kinds of seamy stories in my imagination.

Once I got that idea, it was just a matter of nailing the tone of desperate promise that I associated with the marquees. When the Journal of Microliterature accepted it, the editor made a remark that appealed to me. He said that he didn’t view it as a short short story, but rather as a micro-essay. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it fits.

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Literally Literary

By amy ross | Filed in publishing

I came here today thinking I wanted to write about genre fiction, and why it gets such a bad rap from most “literary” writers. But then, as I stuck those scare quotes around the word “literary”, I realized that was my story… what the hell does literary really mean?

Literary is a slippery little word — it gets used a lot by people both on the creative side of this industry, and on the money side (and there’s a false dichotomy if I ever saw one, but that’s a post for another day). Like any word, the meaning of literary is context dependent, and since it is used so differently in different contexts, a lot of confusion tends to arise surrounding it, and sometimes even bad feeling.

For example, writers who consider themselves “genre” or “mainstream” or “commercial” often use literary as an insult. In such circles, literary is taken to mean pretentious, plotless, boring, and inaccessible. Literary writers are often denigrated as writers who make their real money as professors (or something similar), so they can afford to write wholly self-indulgent books that appeal to no one but themselves and their friends. Harsh.

And then there are the people who use the word “literary” as a synonym for good, or well-written. For these people, pretty much any book they admire can be considered literary, even if it has space monsters or pirates or terse detectives. As long as the book is doing something new, interesting, evocative, or aesthetically compelling, then that’s all that’s necessary to be considered literary.

Then there are the publishing people — the people who really have to think directly about who is going to buy a certain book, and how to use that information to help everyone pay their electricity bills. For them, literary is often a simple classification, rather than a value judgment. Literary is a genre like any other, in that certain books that can be classified as “literary” will be most likely bought by a predictable group of people. Once you know who that group of people is, you can more easily market directly toward them, and thus spend your publicity money more efficiently. This system, of course, has a tendency to be a bit reductive — no matter how brilliant and ground-breaking your pirate masterpiece is, there’s a good chance someone’s going to shelve it with the other pirate dramas, figuring that people who love pirates are the most likely audience for a book about pirates.

On the other hand, if you write story about a faltering marriage on a windswept Nebraska farm, no matter how hackneyed, predictable, and poorly written it may be, someone in the industry is going to call it “literary”.

So it should be obvious by now why sometimes feelings get hurt when folks get together and aren’t clear about what definition they’re using. Someone might call you literary, referring to your most likely market, and you might think they’re calling you boring and pretentious. Someone might call you a genre writer simply because your book takes place in an imagined future, and you think they’re calling it formulaic and cheesy. Or someone might call your book literary, meaning it’s a meandering snooze-fest, and you mistakenly feel flattered that they’re calling you a genius in line with Shakespeare and Melville.

For my part, I try to avoid using the word at all — once a word has too many meanings, it ceases to have any useful meaning at all. How about you? How do you define literary?  Be honest, now…

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Publish or Polish?

By amy ross | Filed in publishing, writing

Talking to a writer friend over drinks the other night got me thinking about the various paths to success in this industry.  Industry?  Or is it an art form?

Which kind of gets to my point.  Over the past few years, I have made the acquaintance of some very ambitious writers.  And on some level, I think we’d all like to be multi-published bestsellers as well as critical darlings with an assured place in the literary canon.  But at a certain point, most writers seem to make a choice – either they’re going to put all their energy into getting published, or they’re going to put it all into perfecting their craft.  And while the two approaches certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re not identical, either.

Let’s take for granted that writers on either path will begin by writing a LOT.  Whether your goal is publication or aesthetic perfection, you’re not going to get anywhere without writing, writing, and more writing.

But that aside, the writer who wants, above all, the legitimacy of publication is going to take certain distinct steps toward his goal:  he’ll read all the agent blogs, follow the industry gossip, network with other aspiring writers, scan the best-seller lists, devour every book review that comes out.  All this research will help him discern what the popular trends are, and determine how he might “position himself in the current market”, as they say.  It will also prepare him to send out a dazzling query letter, impress people at conferences with his pithy pitch, and know exactly the right thing to say when an agent finally calls. It’s not an easy path, and it comes with no guarantees, but I think this route does prepare people for the realities of the publishing industry pretty well.  And if what you want is to get published, that can only be helpful.

On the other hand, the writer who is craft-focused may follow a pretty different path.  She’s going to start by reading a ton – the very best books she can get her hands on, in a variety of styles.  She may enter an MFA program, or look around for a hard-hitting critique group.  Or she may simply lock herself away with her work-in-progress and spend five to ten years honing it to near perfection.  She may seek out advice from the authors she most admires, attend writers’ retreats and conferences – whatever it takes to learn from the people who take craft seriously.  This is also not an easy path, and comes with no guarantees – but it’s probably the best bet for producing accomplished writing.

So then what?  Shall never these paths meet?  God, that’s a depressing thought – and not one I subscribe to.  From what I’ve seen, writers who are driven by publication usually find themselves working pretty hard on craft at some point, even if they come on it through the back door.  And those who devote themselves to great writing usually have to take a remedial course in “the bizz” before they find a home for their masterwork.

Still, even if our paths will inevitably cross here and there, we could probably all benefit from checking out the other route more often.

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What can writers learn from musicians?

By amy ross | Filed in books, publishing, writing

So lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of frustrated writers (though most recently from literary enfant terrible Steve Almond) about how the current publishing model needs to change, and we should all look to the music industry for a system that allows non-mainstream talent to find its niche and gain success.

It seems like a good analogy, at first glance. After all, writers and musicians are about equally arty, and both art forms are distributed via mass-media (as opposed to say, sculpture or… beadwork).

But as much as I love the idea of being the literary equivalent of Built to Spill or Gravy Train!!!!, I’ve spotted some crucial differences between music and literature. Musicians don’t need a label to distribute their work because they can build buzz and sell albums at shows. And it’s relatively easy for a band to get booked for small shows, because bars and clubs are desperate for talent. They won’t always pay, but at least there’s exposure and a fairly captive audience. If you’re good, it won’t be long before people notice.

Already famous authors can work a similar angle by doing local readings. But the world isn’t exactly clamouring to hear unknown authors read. The temptation for many of us is to put writing on the internet to build buzz, but the internet is the opposite of a captive audience. Only the very grabbiest, pulpiest fiction has a ghost of a chance on the internet (if produced by an unknown), and that’s very limiting.

Does it have to be this way? I don’t think so. I think it might be possible to create a world in which unknowns could read a few pages of their stuff to a room full of drunks and maybe get a little recognition, if they’re good — kind of like poetry slams, or amateur night at the Apollo, or the Gong Show. I’d personally love to see such a thing in action, but so far… I haven’t thought of any good way to make it happen.

So… I’m putting the idea out into the internet. Maybe somewhere out there is an unpublished author more desperate/enterprising than I am, and I’d be glad to jump on his bandwagon.

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