Twenty years of adventures creating an on-line life

By On June 4, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

I burned out early trying to create an on-line life. In the process, I learned a few things.

Life, in some ways, is all about the search for a panacea, the next great thing that’s going to solve all your problems, get you discovered, shower you with bliss, find you love in all the right places, and bend over, pick up the soap, and hand it to you in the shower. Life on-line, I have concluded, is pretty damn ordinary. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read your musings on your on-line life, so if you skip mine, I applaud you for having something more worthwhile to do for the next ten to fifteen minutes.

Maybe the reason on-line life seems so ordinary (please hear this word as Mena Suvari uses it in American Beauty) to me is I started carving out an on-line life a long time ago, eons in the Internet time zone. Remember the AOL chat rooms back in the mid-1990s? I do. I gotta tell you, those conversations were racier than anything I’ve done on-line since (well, almost). You could jump into a “room” of “thirty somethings” and elbow your way to a conversation with someone of the opposite sex (well, who really knew), then meet them in a private room. We should all shudder at the idea of all those digital social experiments being recorded for posterity on a server somewhere. It was just like being in a singles bar on First Avenue, Manhattan upper East Side in the early 1980s. I even arranged a tryst with a woman (I hoped) in an Amtrak city 100 miles away. I never followed through. For three months, I was addicted like it was blow. Then, almost as quickly, chat just became ordinary.

Before most people knew what a digital magazine was, I launched an on-line news service as part of my editorial responsibilities at a trade publication owned at the time by a Fortune 500 publishing company. Want to guess what year? 1997. In fact, my publisher and I were so convinced digital would overtake print in a few years, we decided to put as much content as possible on-line and reduce the print publication from monthly to six times a year. Boy were we wrong! By the time we both had left the publication, the new owners restored it to monthly, even as they created several new on-line products. That venture was extraordinarily early. We almost destroyed the magazine.

I left a fine career in publishing at the end of of the last century/millenium for a dot.com startup. I was not only going to replicate industry information on-line, I was going to supplement it with hundreds of on-line design and operating “apps” that power plant engineers could use in their daily work. We were creating the “cloud” before anyone was dancing for digital rain. I left the business before y2k ended, but not before experiencing all the fun of C-suite morons running around creating “revenue” out of the barest wisps of murky relationships with people who might actually pay us for something…some day. These same C-suite gurus convinced lots of new employees to take a large chunk of their compensation in stock options. Not me. I was curious, not naive.

More than ten years ago, I joined an early (and in many ways pretty darn productive) writing workshop site called Zoetrope. You reviewed a certain number of short stories or novel chapters by others and then those others would review your stories. Some of the feedback was pretty helpful. Most participants, as in life, just did the minimum to get by. Short works got reviewed more often. Sexy titles got all the attention. Cliques developed in places called “offices.” Some authors were far more adept at figuring out how to use the site for self-promotion. There were some pretty good stories and authors on Zoetrope in the early years. But there was no real policing so you took your chances with titles that sounded good, writers you got to know, etc. In the end, it took too much time and energy to get to something beyond the ordinary.

Maybe you’ll forgive me saying that, as regards on-line life – been there, done that.

Nevertheless, you can’t stick your head in a newspaper forever. Speaking of, I decided at the beginning of 2014 that 2013 would be the last year I’d drag mountains of newsprint to the recycling bin half a block down the alley each week. So I opted for the on-line editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Well, no, I didn’t go cold turkey. Couldn’t you tell by my AOL chat room experience that I’m a chicken shit at heart? So, I kept the Sunday print edition. BUT, six days a week I now read the two papers of record on my iphone. What this has done to my reading and filing habits is interesting. I used to meticulously clip articles from both papers – stuff ranging from client-related items to recipes – and file them. Now I to email to myself important stories.

Surprise! In the time it takes me to get from “reading the papers” to settling in at the computer for work, most of those stories lose their import. That’s usually less than forty five minutes. Saving them on-line is more convenient than clipping and filing, but, you know, it’s just harder to be bothered. Oh, and in the span of three months, I decided I don’t even need the Journal. I quit paying for the on-line subscription. The first few times I emailed myself a WSJ article after that, I’d click on it and a version that gives the first few lines, then fades to white, would pop up.

I also learned a few other things about on-line editions. The publication has you over a barrel. Unless you print everything out (obviating the on-line cache), your archives are not accessible if you don’t pay your subscription. She (in the case of the The Gray Lady, not a gender-bending pronoun) who controls your data controls your life. They also run stories on-line for days and in different departments. I found myself reading the same book reviews not only several times but under different departments – Arts, Books, Culture – and on different days. It reminded me that I don’t remember any of what I read anyway. Going digital helped me acutely understand what I need and what I don’t.

Lingering over the paper each morning is so short now I can’t even get in two cups of coffee. On the other hand, anything I might want to look up later will be available on-line. The same publications I pay for subscriptions will pay or otherwise ensure they are listed at the top of Google searches.

I’ve been writing fiction for almost fifteen years. Today, every author is urged to create their on-line “platform.” Okay, I thought, I’ve completed a novel, I have almost ten short stories published. It’s time. With an extraordinary platform, I could transition from being an energy industry consultant (you tend to mosey away from me at parties after I say that) to a successful author (you tend to lean in at parties when I say that). So, I joined a bunch of on-line writer communities. Well, for the most part, everyone just asks a lot dumb ass questions and you’re supposed to be respectful in answering them. Or someone’s having a meltdown because a cat resembling a New York agent just passed by their window. Or, they want to know what you do to overcome writers block. Even funnier, everyone is trying to promote themselves without looking too much like they’re promoting themselves. Even the sites that caution,”NO PROMOTION!”, are promoting someone, just not you.

One thing you would think writers should know better than anyone: Words are an attempt to communicate, but they don’t always. Words always have a dark side. To someone. Often to lots of people. This is something I learned after twenty years working for a publishing company. Once I wrote an editorial, a eulogy of sorts for some industry colleagues who perished in a commercial plane crash. This, I thought at the time, will be the least controversial thing I’ve ever published. Yet one reader responded vehemently about what I had wrote. He had misinterpreted my closing sentence. One person writing a letter to the editor almost always means many other readers think the same thing.

On-line writing is NOT the same as off-line conversation.

I’ve bought a few books from completely unknown authors peddling their work on-line. So far, the reading experience has been worse than buying from the quarter book pile at the bookstore or a street vendor. Then, there are those authors who could be latter day Steinbecks, but you’re so sick of their “LOOK AT ME!” posts that you wouldn’t buy lemonade from them if they were eight years old and it’s a hundred degrees outside.

How long can yakking with people you don’t know, can’t see, and can’t hear hold your interest? Are Facebook posts really your machete for fighting in a political or cultural argument? Can you get serious responses from the like-minded that you couldn’t get from a book that’s probably sitting on your shelves? Are you asking a question just to avoid a Google search for a dozen good answers (and a thousand not so good)? Am I liking my brother’s post so I don’t feel guilty about not wanting to call him? Do I just need an excuse not to use my time more wisely?

Is any of this improving anyone’s writing, or whatever you do for work and avocation?

Oh, and maybe another reason it all seems so ordinary is that I’ve also worked from home since 1982. Not regularly. That didn’t happen until the late 1980s. What I discovered the one or two days a week I commuted to Manhattan back then was the extraordinary amount of time people wasted in an office environment. My boss, frankly, was the worst offender.

Millions of people working from home make on-line social media a fertile playground. Free agent nation gathers at the on-line water cooler, the digital ambient air for a cigarette with the smoke team, or the virtual lunch room for a meal or a soda. I guess the more people who use something, the more it reverts to the mean.

Have I mentioned all the e-zines, on-line locations, and links across my myriad interests that I have bookmarked? I can count on one hand those I ever returned to. If someone I know and respect suggests an on-line something, I’ll probably check it out. But, contrary to what I thought, I don’t spend quality time perusing my bookmarks for something to do, learn or read. The few blogs that I followed (my daughters’ blogs the exception) were pretty interesting for a while, but they tend to cave in on themselves. I get the core message. I don’t get it when they go off-topic and get personal or political (unless it’s a political blog). I get mad when I realize they’re just building a sales platform, too (usually for a book or their academic work). It’s hard to write something interesting regularly. It’s even harder to write something fresh. Most blog comments are populated by people who have something to gain from being associated with the blogger. Let’s face it, most blogs and comments are excuses to rant, join the choir, take pot shots at someone else’s choir, orshow how smart or clever you are.

Maybe that’s why about 95% of what gets passed around Facebook are slogans, cute contests (“IF YOU WERE A LEAF, WHAT KIND OF TREE WOULD YOU HAVE COME FROM?”), and quick retorts (guilty as charged here!). Getting credit for being alive, attentive, or concerned is a click or a few keystrokes away.

Twitter? I can’t even go there. Not yet. How do you say vertigo in 144 characters?

None of this is to denigrate on-line life totally. Some people are very clever on-line, probably a whole hell of a lot more entertaining than they would be in real life. I’ve gotten re-acquainted with some guys from high school I lost touch with...in high school. We’re different men now. A dear friend of mine just made a plea on Facebook for someone to donate a kidney. Some people use Facebook as their daily offering of poetry, or wise saying, and I would be lying if I didn’t find some of it truly inspirational. There’s one writer person who is either going to land in the psyche ward soon, or write a really great novel, and, given what I perceive as his natural writing talent, I can’t wait to read it, if he publishes it before his hands are strapped behind his back. His agent and publisher will be taking virtual Clorox to all of his on-line posts. Imagine Faulkner drunk and taking a break every few minutes to post. One particularly ravishing blond poet’s glam photo appears so often I click on it hoping it goes to her on-line dressing room. I’ve taken an interest in issues I probably would still be ignoring off-line.

Come to think about it, the world is a better place with some people always on-line.

I’ve been getting some pretty good short stories through an iphone app, perfect for reading something besides People at the dentist office. It’s funny. I appreciate that I don’t come off as some intellectual snob with National Geographic in my lap. At the same time, I can’t help but remember those women on the subway who used to read those steamy romances between innocuous covers or behind a larger magazine.

When I first got married, my spouse wanted to find a church to attend. The only times I had been in a church between ten years old and her desire to attend was (1) a Unitarian church infrequently (hardly counts anyway) as a teenager, (2) because a Baptist woman I was head over heels for at age 22 wasn’t going to give me the time of day if I didn’t, and (3) weddings. After my wife found a suitable church, I used to joke seriously that I attended often enough so that no parishioner would think we were having marital problems.

That’s kind of how I feel about my on-line activity. You don’t have to get with the program but you should understand the program. I post often enough so people know I am still alive. I post when I think I have something useful to say. I post when I can complain but also get credit for being entertaining (hopefully). I answer even dumb ass questions so that someone else might benefit from my experience. I post when I blog (extend that platform!) but I don’t blog too often because it’s really difficult to write a sensible blog piece. Also, true confession (now that you’re close to the end): I write blog posts as much to capture some commentary for myself as I do for someone else to read.

Above all, I post after having learned a few things: (1) I am creating a permanent, indelible digital signature discoverable by anyone with the will and the money; (2) my words can and will be misinterpreted, especially when lifted out of context; and (3) restraint is the better part of valor in digital life.

I participate in social media often enough so people know I have an on-line life. And I know at least something about theirs. I burned out early creating an on-line life before there were on-line lifeforms. I found no panaceas. I acutely understand it takes time and energy to extract or offer something out of the ordinary. Just like real life.

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‘Off the reservation’ at the Weldon Spring Ordnance site

By On May 28, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded. 

I like the word externality. It refers to a cost of a product or a service that isn’t reflected in its price, usually an environmental or human impact of some sort. The legacy of slavery is probably the most onerous externality I can think of. American society still pays for the impact of slave labor, which never figured in the price of, say, cotton.

A few weeks ago, I went hiking with a group who shall remain unnamed because they like it that way. We hiked around the reclaimed and rehabilitated site of the former Weldon Spring Ordnance Works, a TNT (trinitrotoluene) and DNT (dinitrotoluene) producing facility from 1941 to 1944, later converted into a uranium processing facility, making (now made infamous by the Bush administration lies justifying the Iraq War) yellow cake, or uranium ore concentrate, in the 1950s. Later it became a “disposal” and processing site for all manner of bad shit from the army. Today, there is an interpretive center run by DOE, a domed burial facility under which much of the bad shit is “safely contained,” hiking and biking trails, and a conservation area. You’ll find lots of information about this site on-line, official and unofficial. Suffice it to say, it is a place with lots of bad karma, a testament, really, to the externalities of war, the scars on the victims and the victors. Residents of whole towns were forced to move, the first attempts at cleanup and decontamination killed people and probably sent toxic fumes throughout the region, the groundwater became contaminated, cancer rates are thought to be elevated in the area. It just goes on and on.

But when you go off the official trails, like we did, you find relics not part of any official tour, timeline, or “interpretive center.” For example, our destination, thanks to our guide/leader who did the research ahead of time, was a huge in-ground concrete storage pit and pump house. And we found them! Overgrown, yes, but still visible, and you could still enter them. There is still a ladder you could climb to the bottom of the pit, a drainage grating visible at the bottom, and a large pipe feed at the top. Graffiti at the bottom attested to the fact that others were stupider than we were and climbed down there. At the pump house, you could see six concrete pads where the pumps sat, some of the pipe headers, and an electrical cabinet which, astonishingly, still had old relays intact. There was no trail, we were “bushwhacking,” mild as it was, in retrospect, although the first part off the sanctioned trail was probably a former roadway or access way.

While I was elated to “tour” this industrial wasteland, I could not believe the government would leave an open pit of such size. It’s a place screaming for a disaster and more lawsuits. While we passed a few “danger” signs, we were able to get through broken sections of fencing. Nothing said “do not enter” or “enter at own risk.” Just amazing.

The fun continues when you try to figure out what all this stuff was used for. The process engineer in me had to come out. Plus, I’ve loved old industrial contraptions since I was in elementary school traipsing through the woods near Chattanooga, TN, hoping to stumble upon old grain alcohol stills, and later when I worked a summer job loading tires into and out of old abandoned factories serving as temporary storage facilities. After a visit to the “interpretive center” (I hope you love the Orwellian sound of that as much as I do), and some questions asked of the curator/guide there, then considering the topology we trekked through, I speculate that we were looking at a raw water storage pit and associated pump house, which delivered water to an elevated storage tank on site (described as the most visible landmark of the facility). Water from this tank was then gravity distributed to where it was needed in the process. The fact that it was left there and not “remediated” also must be a clue (hopefully) that only benign material was stored/pumped there. One set of pumps probably drew the water from the Missouri River (only a mile or two away) and directed it to the storage pit, and another set drew from the bottom to deliver water to the tank.

Apparently, there are other open-pit lagoons and storage pits in the same general vicinity, but according to the information, one probably was smart to stay the hell away from those.

I downloaded a few of official documents about the site, historical stuff, EPA reports, DOE reports, etc, to see if I could confirm what I speculated about the facilities we viewed. I wish I had found something that added up or estimated the total cost of human and environmental damage incurred at this site, not just the cost of remediation and reclamation.

War is hell as the saying goes. War also spawns thousands of private hells, human and ecological, which are not usually counted among the dead and wounded. Future archeologists will have a field day with this place, and thousands, I am sure, like it around America.

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Dying wish: A Viola Sonata and a “cover” of Beethoven’s “Moonlight”

By On May 1, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

Last Saturday I heard Joanna Mendoza (violist for the Arianna Quartet) and Alla Voskoboynikova perform Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano in C Major, [the link is to another world-renowned violist’s performance, available on YouTube) described in the liner notes as the celebrated composer’s last work written while dying from lung cancer.

Apart from the gorgeous performance, somehow a viola seems the perfect instrument for a personal elegy, as it does not possess the natural perkiness of the violin or the foundational authority of the cello. The viola is naturally melancholic (to me anyway) although great violists (like great string players generally) make the instrument bend to their emotional will. What fascinates me about the piece is that the composer embedded “quotes” from all fifteen of his symphonies, but even more, the third movement is one long riff on Beethoven’s moonlight piano sonata, which the composer credits for his decision to become a composer in the first place.

Most people are familiar with fragments from the Moonlight even if they don’t associate with Beethoven or are not classical music buffs. It is interesting to hear how a composer takes his own themes and melodies and those from another great from past eras and integrates them into something new. Subconsciously, our influences are always at work, I suppose, but in the case of this Sonata it is overt. Plus, he wasn’t phased by using one of the most celebrated piano pieces of all time to carry him towards his exit. For the listener, we are allowed a rare “cover” (of sorts), something that is routine in popular music, but (at least to my knowledge) rare in classical music.

The free performance took place in a church and it reminded me of being in Paris many years ago and discovering that on any given day (especially Sundays), you can hear wonderful chamber music in any number of the city’s magnificent churches. For free! Similarly, the St. Louis area’s top classical musicians often play free of charge (or for next to nothing) at  churches, schools, and community venues. While the country’s great orchestras are suffering financially, chamber music seems to be blossoming. Or maybe I’m just paying more attention.

The Shostakovich Op 147 is not what you’d call uplifting. It has its ethereal passages, undoubtedly the composer coming to terms with passing to the great unknown. If the last movement doesn’t move you to wet eyeballs, then you are probably just acting tough. But the Sonata also feels like a summary of a life in music, the composer’s suffering (like many artists, he suffered for his art in his native Russia during the Stalinist period) transcended by the joy of what he was leaving behind.

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The Global American Footprint in Fiction

By On April 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

While American novelists expand their post-modernist styles, stretch and bend pop culture irony, embed high art and music into their language, and deal with the culture wars, the rest of the world’s novelists, including Americans from the various war theatres, are writing about ducking for cover from the heavy American footprint everywhere.

The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, is everything a novel should be. It’s primal theme is what life was like in Colombia while America conducted its War on Drugs. It is narrated by an innocent professor/lawyer who meets a guy recently released from prison, a guy who flew a small plane to run pot and cocaine in the 1960s and 1970s. His American wife, who has not seen him in decades, is coming to see him but the commercial plane she is on crashes and everyone dies. Walking home, the professor and his friend are gunned down in the streets of Bogota in the 1990s. The professor survives to tell this story. The back story is all about how his dead friend’s American wife was a young idealist with the Peace Corps and got in over her head with this pilot guy. The professor encounters their daughter much later. Both share hearing the black box tape of when the commercial flight went down. It’s a depressing story, but it is riveting. I don’t know whether it is the translation or the original writing (likely both) but I tried so hard to slow down my reading of this book ( I do that when the writing is superb) and could not.

This novel is solidly structured and woven together with wonderful recurring devices (e.g., airplanes). Can you imagine listening to the last words on a black box tape of the pilot of a plane crashing with your loved one in tow? Yet this horror brings two random people together. The last thirty pages read like that plane falling from the sky, like Vasquez is tightening the g-force between you and his sentences. The narrator, Antonio Yammara, represents all the innocent bystanders and Colombian civilians of the War on Drugs, a collaboration between the Colombian and American governments. Idealism represented by the Peace Corps volunteers is battered, shattered, and buried, but two human beings deeply affected by the events, one shot up who almost dies and the other who loses her mother way before that plane crashes, find each other, at least for a time.

This is the passage that stands out for me: “And you, Senorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil, and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you Gringos aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans. The future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Senorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today, these people are insurers of course, but one fine day there will be other persons interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand this better than anyone. That’s why your people are going forward, Senorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind.”

Lots of people in the US earn their living telling people what’s going to happen – consultants, bankers, regulators, insurers, medical professionals, clergy, data scientists, economists, academics, and probably others I can’t name off the top.

I have read many novels in recent months and years which are translations or in English about other parts of the world, usually places with a heavy American footprint. These include: The Wandering Falcon (Jamil Ahmad) about Afghanistan, The Apartment (Greg Baxter) about an Iraqi War veteran searching for some peace and quiet away from the American footprint, 2666 (Roberto Bolano) about Juarez and the Mexican – American Border drug wars, Back to Back (Julia Franck) about Post- WWII East Germany, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid) about Afghanistan, Shantytown (Cesar Aria) set in Argentina, Tyrant Memory (Horacio Castellanos Moya) about El Salvador, A Map of Home (Randa Jarrar) set in Egypt, Kuwait, Palestine, and Texas, and A Hologram for the King (Dave Eggers) about Saudi Arabia.

A seminal theme in all of these novels is the implicit or explicit American footprint, whether CIA, Peace Corps, DEA, Pentagon, American consumer, or tech-American corporations; Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terror, or Global Economic Warfare. It’s easy to say all of these novels are about places America has fucked up in one way or another at one time or another, but it’s more accurate to say they are about how the rest of the world lives in the shadow of a lone superpower.

Mostly, think of a dinosaur bounding your way while you duck for cover. You’ll get the picture.

But I’ve also read some big American novels recently too – Middle C (William Gass), Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon), May We Be Forgiven (A.M.Homes), The Signature of All Things (Elizabeth Gilbert), and Orfeo (Richard Powers), among others. What our “big novel” authors are concerned about and what the rest of the world’s major novelists are concerned about might suggest that the globalization we’ve all heard about and participated in for the past twenty five years (marked in many minds by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) has really been America, often with good intentions but disastrous unintended consequences, making life difficult for ordinary people everywhere. Meanwhile, back in the mother country, our literary world is lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population.

Yet I just heard on the news an hour ago that forty people were shot in Chicago over the weekend. Several weeks ago, it was reported that U.S. veterans are committing suicide at a rate of more than 20 a day. So we have our survival issues. But they aren’t the literary topics du jour.

I suppose if we’re always focused on tomorrow, it’s hard to pay much attention to who was killed over the weekend, or today, or last week.

Anyway, The Sound of Things Falling. It’s worth your time. More truth is revealed in fiction, and this novel reveals truths about how others are coping with our long global shadow overseas. I think we need more that reveal the truths about the chill that shadow has left here at home too.

 

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Ambition is not enough! The author Richard Powers and Orfeo

By On April 8, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.

…..

Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits loved ones, reminisces about his college love, and disgorges thoughts that will remind you of people who got 800s on their SATs but never learned how to tell a joke with their friends.

This is the third Richard Powers’ novel I’ve read. I doubt there’s a novelist out there who I admire more for the ambition of his fiction. I want to love him. I also want to un-torture his story-telling. In an asymptotic way, I see clearly where he wants to go. But in the end he seems to sacrifice story for lofty concept.

I am especially disheartened that I could not finish Orfeo because he weaves music into his prose. I love this! I try to do this with my writing. And damn him, he selects works that are high on my list of all-time faves, like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Mind you, he doesn’t just refer to these works, or have characters listen to them or talk about them. They are stitched into the text as if you are following the score in parallel with reading the story.

Powers’ doesn’t stop with music. He integrates scientific, engineering, environmental, medical, literature, and just about every other academic discipline into this prose too. If I pulled a passage out to illustrate, I’d have to type ten pages.

Instead, here’s Powers’ on pot:

“Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els [main character] was after something more solid, a priori, shared–durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners.”

I spent many late nights stoned in my dorm room in college, having edge-of-the-universe conversations with friends. The difference must be that Powers’ went back to his dorm room and recorded all of his. I just crashed.

About a third of the way through the book, Powers’ takes a detour and dwells on this favorite work of mine, Quartet for the End of Time. This is what probably kept me plugging away through the second third, after which I quit. I mean, how many times are writers told, “show, don’t tell?” Between pages 106-121, Powers’ gives us a history lesson on the circumstances surrounding Messiaen’s composing this work in a gulag in France. Okay, he seemingly gets away with it because Els is delivering a lecture to his students. But still. It’s a great story, a heartbreaking story, but in this context, pretty dry stuff, and I suspect it only “moves the story along” if you know and love Messiaen’s work, or you can run down the hall and have a eureka moment with a music humanities professor.

Powers’ is in that league with Pynchon, William Gass, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and I suppose, Faulkner, Joyce, and others, who are praised for their ambition and scope and audacious intentions, usually by people who make a living off of teaching such novels to students, reminding us how complex but important they are, and making the rest of us feel like Charlie Brown when he is asked by Lucy and Linus what he sees in the clouds. “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckie,” he says, after Linus woos and waxes philosophically.

I wrote the word asymptotically earlier, because one, I love this word, but two, it perfectly describes Powers’ in relation to some of the others in this league. An asymptote is the limit of a curve that is plateauing. Over the course of the x- or y-axis on a graph, the curve approaches the asymptote but never reaches it as the variable goes to infinity. It’s like seeing the goal posts or home plate but never getting there. I guess the fact that I use a word like asymptote tells you I feel a kindred spirit to Powers. Maybe that’s part of my issue. Envy. But I digress. The difference with Powers, say, and the others in his league, is that I see where he is going. I know where the goal posts are when I read his stuff. I don’t lose my bearings because I have context in the three-dimensional plane (unlike Faulkner, early Pynchon, Gass, etc, where I generally have no ideas what’s really going on.). BUT, I am too frustrated, exhausted, and annoyed. I want to punish him by not finishing. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I wish the guy would focus on little

Don’t get me wrong, I love complex stories, ambition, and a literary challenge. But if a horsey and duckie aren’t in there somewhere, I have to wonder whether the intention is to leave a lasting impression in the halls of academia (and The New Yorker) or an enriching (even if challenging) experience with your audience.

As a postscript, several people have told me that The Goldbug Variations is his best novel. I will probably give that one a go if I live long enough. Because I really do want to love this guy.

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Gone to Ground: Industrial America as reflected in East St. Louis

By On April 5, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Uncategorized

You’ve heard the phrase “ghost town.” A town that was there and isn’t today. What about a “ghost city?” When a once-vibrant urban area goes to ground, you can hope for rebirth or say bye bye.

…………………….

First, I wish this essay to be a testament to how a random occurrence can lead to greater insight, inspiration, and ideas for the future.

In the process of cleaning house a few weeks ago, a rather large house filled mostly with books, I came across East St. Louis – Made in USA: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town. This was surprising because there aren’t many books in this house I am not familiar with, even if I have not read them.

I’ve spent the better part of my career writing about industrial America from the inside out. As a youth, I worked a summer job once in Chattanooga, TN, loading and unloading tires from boxcars and rail cars into and out of temporary warehouses created from abandoned industrial structures. On my lunch breaks or waiting to be picked up, I’d rummage around the old machinery, occasionally the files and paperwork left behind, and the neighborhoods these manufacturing facilities inhabited. Before that, I remember being “volunteered” by my mother to work one of the first Earth Days in 1970 in, to be euphemistic, one of the less fortunate city neighborhoods, far far away, frankly, from the comfortable suburb my family lived in. We worked abandoned light industrial areas and inhabited residential areas.

Industrial America fascinates me.

If Americans know anything about East St. Louis, they know (1) the flat tire scene in the first Vacation movie, starring Chevy Chase and (2) that it is one of those cities adjacent to one of those much better off cities. I moved my family from Bucks County, PA, to St. Louis in 1997. East St. Louis, directly across the Mississippi River, was known for three things – crime, strip clubs, and decaying industrial sites. I was familiar with these kinds of cities. There are edge cities, prosperous suburban metropolitan cities adjacent to or near the cities everyone knows. Then there are fall off the edge of the cliff cities, decaying cities adjacent to the cities we know, usually (but not always) in the next state over.

When I lived in New York City, I got pretty familiar with Newark. I worked in a refinery in Elizabeth, NJ, adjacent to Newark. Back then (1970s and 1980s), lots of cities in NJ served in the role of fall off the edge of the cliff – Newark, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and others. To the north were the prosperous edge cities like Stamford, CT, and those in Westchester County, NY. When I lived in Bucks County, PA, commuting distance to both New York and Philadelphia, I got familiar with Camden. In my frequent travels to Chicago and environs, I became somewhat familiar with Gary, IN. Later I spent a lot of time in San Francisco and got to know Oakland.

East St. Louis: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town, by Dr. Andrew J. Theising, a professor at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, IL, explained to me why East St. Louis is the way it is. It exemplifies the power, in this case destructive, of initial conditions: The city was conceived to cater exclusively to its industrial interests and once those industrial interests decayed to nothingness, the city’s purpose, it’s reason for being, went with it. It has, for all intents and purposes, gone to ground. There is very little left. What institutions and “businesses” remain, or have emerged in recent years, are, according to Theising, public and non-profit and therefore not paying taxes.

Theising’s treatise, eminently readable, is based on scholarly research. The photographic history alone is worth the read. Even in 1918, the city was determined by census statistics to be the second-poorest in the country. Mind you, this was a mere fourteen years after St. Louis, across the river, hosted the World’s Fair when it was America’s fourth largest city. Although simplifications are dangerous, you could say that St. Louis’ money went west (Clayton, MO, is the prosperous edge city for the metro area) and St. Louis’ industrial dumping grounds went east. The government of East St. Louis catered to those industrial interests, at the great expense of its residents.

I was so captivated by Theising’s book that I told him so in an email and he graciously offered to give me a tour (he runs a place called the Institute for Urban Research). I had driven around the city before but it had been about ten years. Yes, I had even visited the strip clubs every so often with an out of town business client on generous expense account.

But I wasn’t prepared for what Dr. Theising showed me.

Fact is, the city has, indeed, gone to ground. So little of it is left. There is a main drag and I was surprised to learn that, while the storefronts were boarded up and there was little activity early on a Friday afternoon, on weekend evenings, you’d be hard pressed to find parking. As portrayed in Vacation, the city is something like 97% African American. In this day and age, that in itself is kind of mind-blowing.

Here are just a few anecdotes illustrating what happens when a city has gone to ground. We toured a new neighborhood. The homes were less than ten years old. In the parlance of the urban planners, it is an “infill” neighborhood. I can’t recall whether it was described as a law or a neighborhood ordinance, but the residents are not allowed to congregate in the front of their homes. Can you imagine? Okay, most outdoor grilling takes place in the back yard, but a law that prevents you from hanging with your family in front, waving to the neighbors walking by? That’s because so many killings take place in these areas from people shooting from cars as they drive by. Yet over ten years, this neighborhood has apparently sustained itself as a quality place to live.

East St. Louis has six police officers. Dr. Theising told me the number of 911 calls the city gets per day and I forget the number but I do remember doing the math in my head and it came out to approximately one every five minutes. The city only has about 27,000 residents. When I asked the obvious question, how do six officers respond to a situation every five minutes, Dr. Theising’s expression answered the question simply: They don’t. They can’t. I think the suburban town I grew up in had 200o residents and at least six police officers.

We drove through an intersection well to the east of downtown and Theising pointed out the two grocery stores across the street from each other. Of course, the irony is that the rest of the city is a food desert. You could probably guess that the two stores are competing to see which one goes belly-up first. But here’s the kicker: One of the stores actually pays for a car service to pick up and return customers. Now, I do know that most grocery stores operate on the thinnest of margins. It’s impossible to imagine how a store remains solvent adding car service fare to its expenses.

If you wanted to develop some constructive ventures in East St. Louis, apparently you’d be hard-pressed to even figure out who owns the land. Many residents have had the land passed to them from relatives but never had the records officially revised at City Hall.

Towns surrounding East St. Louis are often incorporated as separate cities essentially owned by the companies who operate the industrial facilities, or once did. Thus, there is no hope of annexing or incorporating adjacent areas.

Truckers which just charged residents of St. Louis like me so much per ton to transport our bulk waste to a landfill or a recycling center routinely dump their cargo in some abandoned lot across the river. You know an urban dystopia has emerged when it is a good thing you see tires sticking up from the ground or a sidewalk. Why, you ask? Because that means someone had the decency to mark where a sewer lid had been stolen so no hapless soul descends to their doom into a sewer line from which the likelihood that someone would hear you scream is next to zero.

But here is the Disney Matterhorn of the tour. Dr. Theising took us to an overlook sandwiched between a functioning agricultural industrial facility and an expansive abandoned property along the river banks. It’s an urban park (Malcolm W. Martin Memorial Park) with an amphitheater cut into the ground and a lookout point so handicap friendly that the poor bastard who pushes the wheelchair up the five inclined stair-stepped walkways probably needs an iron lung when he/she reaches the top. One of those bronze sculptures of a famous person (I guess it’s Malcolm Martin), so real you’re happy it isn’t dark out, greets you. You gaze across the river. Damned if you aren’t equidistant from the ends of the Gateway to the West, the St. Louis Arch. I mean, this lookout point bisects the arch perfectly. It’s almost as if the designers were poking their figurative thumb in the eye of the “prosperous” city across the way. The experience was even richer knowing that, at the top of the Arch, visitors were looking down at us.

I’m looking at you…looking at me. You’re looking at a ghost city. I’m looking at your majestic skyline, unobstructed views, a photographer’s paradise, free parking!

I brought a friend with me for the tour whose knowledge of the arcane of St. Louis (he’s the kind of guy who stops and makes you read historical highway markers) is second to none. I at least consider myself an educated and informed citizen of the region I live in. Neither of us had even heard of this “park” though it was completed in 2009. Yet a family who drove up with Ohio plates somehow knew about it (and evidently were not familiar with the scene from Vacation).

Yet, for all the desolation, the gone to ground appearance, I couldn’t shirk the feeling of hope. East St. Louis was a clean slate, on the surface anyway. I began to envision a 50-year development plan that learned from  the lessons of the original “initial conditions.” I remember a movie, an awful movie, and I think Chevy Chase was in this one, too, with John Candy, where one of them looks out across the wilderness from the deck of some country home, and says, “I see condos…I see shopping malls.” Well, I saw a completely different energy infrastructure, one based on renewable and clean distributed small scale electric power and microgrids, a bicycling community, urban farms, a small scale farm to market where residents walked to the “farmer’s market.” I saw an urban area that rid itself of its “initial conditions.” Converting the rails to trails. Deploying the Internet as the “highway system.” I saw a place where someone like my daughter, soon to graduate with a degree in environmental studies (urban planning, social justice and lots of other things thrown in), and others like her, could start from scratch and begin to build a model community for the twenty second century.

But that was after I stopped reflecting on the geometry, the irony, accompanied by my friend and an expert on East St. Louis, and the silent perennial sentinel, the bronze statue, , all four of us standing (well, for accuracy’s sake, the statue guy is sitting) virtually under the majestic Arch, in homage to the city which no longer ranks in the top fifty by population in the United States.

If America ever had the guts to embrace central planning again, East St. Louis would be a pretty fine place to start. Maybe the city across the way learns a thing or two as well, because maybe it’s on the same path (not that anyone would want to admit that ). Because the alternative, corporate and industrial control, resulted in this ghost of a city.

Thank you, Dr. Theising.

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Discovering the New

By On March 28, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?

……………….

A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,”  in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to write stuff worth a reader’s time. So much fiction, he wrote (I paraphrase heavily), is dull because writers young and old can’t capture and enhance the lives of bricklayers, bus drivers, bureaucrats, bullfighters, barmaids, beauticians, baseball players, ballet dancers, barbers, or babysitters because, well, they are professional writers, often with MFAs, whose excitement was mostly limited to the halls of academia and summer workshops. Plus,writing is by its nature, a solitary experience.

I think about that essay all the time. His words encourage me, a middle-aged guy with a successful career in engineering and consulting emboldened to write fiction. You accumulate experiences by living. You take risks. You deal. I had experiences worth the reading public’s time. I have lived.

Like most things in life, these accumulated experiences are a double-edged sword.

After you’ve traveled around the world, worked for 35 years, raised a family, seen hundreds of movies and televisions show episodes, read a thousand or two books and hundreds of short stories, bought hundreds of CDs and been exposed to thousands of songs and compositions, eaten in hundreds of restaurants whipping up every kind of ethnic cuisine, dealt with thousands of people in hundreds of different normal and abnormal situations, played a few musical instruments, owned six different houses (not at one time, no John McCain here), and driven nine different cars, been there, done that, what, really, is new?

What comic situation could you write about that hasn’t been beaten to death by Seth Rogen, the SNL players, and the rest of Hollywood? What scenes in a contemporary novel could impress when, lurking in the subconscious and screaming from the forefront, are a dozen images that are similar playing the mind’s movie reels?

This isn’t just a challenge in writing. It’s a challenge in reading and viewing, too. It’s a challenge in simply having a conversation. My kids plead with me not to list the bands that came before, and sound much like, the one they just suggested I might appreciate. I visibly shut down with people because I’ve had the conversation before, with them, not once, but several times.

If you are the type that likes a certain format (i.e., a genre type person), maybe this isn’t so troublesome. If you are the type, like I fashion myself, who constantly seeks to discover the new, it’s frustrating as all hell.

Your warehouse of accumulated experiences is inventory for the next writing project, but it’s also where the new enters and, usually, exits immediately, humbled and hung. When will I read a novel written in second person that can stand up to Bright Lights, Big City? Do I die before I read a western that bests Lonesome Dove? Who would tackle a novel about race relations in the deep south when To Kill a Mockingbird (book and movie) exists? I can’t write a 900 page novel, not about baseball, but about a baseball, the one hit by Bobby Thompson in the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951, because Don DeLillo already did. I wouldn’t even attempt a novella about a baseball now.

Of course, writers make the old new again all the time. I don’t think I can be that kind of writer.

How to discover the new? I read differently now. I start lots of novels (lots of non-fiction too) and don’t finish. I make endless lists of new music and books. I listen to a community radio station that prides itself on keeping its distance from the tried and true (they aren’t as successful as they’d like to believe, but still better than commercial radio). I’m not sure I write differently, but I try to think about all the other people out there who have vast experiences just like me.

Mailer’s words have proven to be doubled edged. It’s not just about your experiences. It’s about exposing your experiences to the accumulated light of everyone else’s out there, then determining whether you’ve truly illuminated something that could blind someone, or not.

 

Pitching a novel, pitching for venture capital

By On March 24, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Pitching your novel

In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to feel like the sprint.

…………………………….

I’m always struck by similarities among endeavors, like how getting your novel published is so much like raising venture capital (VC) as a tech start up. I spent several years working with clients to raise VC, and I’ve spent many years writing fiction (although only now beginning to pitch a novel).

In fact, I found the similarities so striking that, with partners, I launched a publishing company four years ago originally based on the VC model. It was a classic good news-bad news outcome – the good news was that the business model worked. We published and cultivated an author who then landed a big deal agent (one of the biggest of all, in fact) who then “sold” said author to a big deal publishing house, an imprint of a very large publishing enterprise. The bad news was that we grossly over-estimated the number of zeroes after the digit that we could get for doing this. No worries, the company continues as an indie publisher specializing in regional authors.

First, tech startups pitch for money. They pitch at confabs identical to confabs where literary agents show up to hear pitches from novelists. You have to get your company’s or your novel’s reason for existing and taking up the precious time of the agent or investor down to a few minutes or less.

Second similarity is that VC investors and publishers rely on the big kill rule. You invest in ten start-ups in the hopes that one makes it really big and covers the losses of the others. Most publishing houses, especially of literary fiction, rely on only a few titles to cover the significant losses of the others. To an extent, all businesses operate this way. 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the activity, or some variant thereof.

More importantly, in the very tech world, at least the world I was involved in, most, if not all, investors never really fundamentally understand, at the molecular level, how the technology works. They just understand the business model. In the literary world, reader and buyer tastes are so subjective and fickle, and the background culture is changing all the time, too, that agents/publishers don’t really know what will sell next. Agents/publishers and investors aren’t all-knowing taste-makers.

But they do know two things. They know what worked well in the past. And while every investor and agent/publisher knows the old adage, past performance is no guarantee of future results, they still mostly on past performance to gauge what’s next. Let’s face it. That’s why so much entertainment is cookie-cutter. That’s why so many tech start-ups fail.

They both also know what I used to call in my VC raising days their “comfort window.” The first time my brother tried to raise money thirty years ago, he was told his degree would “sell” (his was from an Ivy league school and a top graduate engineering school) but his partner’s would not (his was from a state university in the deep south). The comfort window is determined by trusted advisors, credentials from ranked sources (formally or informally), degrees, professional network, etc. Everyone in the literary world senses the magic conferred by the four letters I-o-w-a. Everyone in the tech world senses the wizardry conferred by the three letters M-I-T.

When you fundamentally don’t have the capacity to understand chemistry or physics or engineering, or when you fundamentally can’t objectively evaluate how well a novel will sell (regardless of how beautifully written), you rely on your comfort window. Hell, we all do this all the time. We rely on the opinions, sometimes informed, often not, of family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues to make buying decisions. But the more subjective the sales situation, or the less the buyer understands about what he/she is buying, the more critical the comfort window becomes.

Business is about managing risk, regardless of the business. People who stake their money to a business strive to make it less like gambling and more deterministic, more science than art, more deliberate than random.

The most universal element of all successful business, though, is unwavering faith in what you have discovered, then adapting to the realities of the marketplace as you develop and scale the technology. Likewise, the one thing that can’t be subjective about your novel is your faith in what you have created. I’ve witnessed entrepreneurs with faith in their ideas miss multiple waves of opportunity. In the world of my professional work, those waves might only come every five years. Most wanna-be novelists have heard the stories of successful authors being rejected hundreds of times before getting their shot. It isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about believing in what you’ve created.

In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, what with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to be the sprint.

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Wanted: Readers (Hint: bring chocolate and red wine)

By On March 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction

The seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel or a few of your short stories and discuss it/them. (Bring pastries and booze when the big day comes!).

I am a consultant to the electricity industry in my day job. Usually when I mention that to people at a party, they slither away towards the bar. Except every five years or so, when the energy industry gets hot in the stock market. Then I hold court with people seeking free investment advice.

Whether I am helping them communicate about their technology to customers or venture capitalists, often, clients ask me, well, what should we say? How should we respond? My answer always is, “honesty seems to work best in my experience.”

I’ve been writing fiction for about fifteen years. Mostly short stories, Now I’ve completed a novel. I am in a slow (painfully so often) transition out of consulting to something else. What, I am not sure. But I know that writing, and writing fiction, will be part of it. Writing has been part and parcel of my life since sixth grade when I started a family newspaper (it lasted two editions).

Honestly, what does a fiction writer want? To connect with readers, I think. If you write mysteries, thrillers, crime, romance, science fiction, etc., it’s a little easier. Genre writing is pretty organized and a very open field today given the disruptions to the traditional publishing business model. But if you write literary fiction, which is what I think I am writing, it’s not so easy. Literary fiction is still very controlled by the traditional publishing apparatus. If you don’t have a academic platform or an MFA (Masters in Fine Arts), it’s really difficult to reach readers of literary fiction.

Writers are passionate readers for the most part. Most writers hope to find readers through other writers. We all participate in writers groups, on-line and face-to face. Let’s face it though. We are mostly reaching people like ourselves, people who have a story to tell…and sell. Isn’t the real goal to connect with readers?

Only a pure reader can give a writer pure feedback, free of a subconscious “I would  have done it this way,” or “They say never to do this in workshop,” or “She’ll never get an agent with this as a first chapter.” Readers are looking for great reads, great ideas, great story concepts, engaging characters, momentum in the plot. This is doubly true because writing is so subjective. They don’t care how a book got to them. They crave a great read.

Trying to connect with readers through other writers is like trying to sink to the bottom of a salt-laden sea. Mostly, you float on top of what other writers think and say.

As you write a novel or a short story, shouldn’t you inform your thoughts on revision based on what other readers think? I’m not talking about line edits, I’m talking about more general impressions.

Genre writers have expertly applied social media to interact with their readers. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is as much soliciting feedback and engagement as marketing, building loyalty among the customer base or fans, as it might be informing the writing or revision process. It’s hard enough to get feedback from five people (in a critique group, say) to converge on useful revisions that don’t destroy the story. Imagine soliciting from dozens or hundreds on-line?

We all know (or should know) that the vast majority of literary journals out there are read (or place on their shelves) by other writers and exist because academics survive under the publish or perish paradigm. I don’t care how much noise their staff makes about “seeking new literary talent, fresh voices, etc,” what they really want is for wanna-bees to buy or subscribe to their publication. I mean, I can’t tell you how many of these lit journals I’ve purchased or read over the years because, in submitting, I am admonished to read the journal to understand what they publish. I read them, and have no earthly clue what they expect in their submissions. These are the journals which have the gall (well, fewer do this today) to demand that you submit to them exclusively while they take their sweet time, often months, to respond. Most operate under the slave labor of graduate students, too.

When it comes to literary novels, the buying public, the customer, is largely conditioned by the opinions of leading opinion-makers, namely the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and a few other leading outlets. With few exceptions, these channels are part of the traditional publishing model. The five big publishing houses remaining (with their myriad acquired presses), much like the characterization of Goldman Sachs as the “vampire squid,” courtesy of Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, are for the most part impenetrable without a New York agent. As just one example, many of the short stories published in The New Yorker (Yes, The New Yorker) appear timed to help the author promote a collection or a new novel. I doubt anyone at the publication is going to admit that this is deliberate, but my informal analysis, and the suspicions I have heard from many others, suggests it’s a credible conclusion.

If you write literary fiction, then, you have a few poor choices – try to penetrate the traditional publishing apparatus, try to break into the recognized literary journals set up for a publish or perish paradigm, or publish in the proliferating print and on-line journals essentially established to gratify writers with more writers as readers – at best.

So, I maintain that the seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel and discuss it. (Bring pastries and booze, chocolate and red wine, when the big day comes!). Or work with branches of your local library to arrange a discussion of your draft or stories.

Yes, we need all the help we can get with editing and revising. I maintain (two decades of experience as the lead writer, chief editor, reporter, and technical and business specialist for an industry trade publication taught me this) that writers cannot edit their own stuff.

But what we crave is the feedback from the reading experience. That, more than anything, will keep us from becoming “workshop boy or girl.”

Your thoughts on how to connect with real readers are welcome.

 

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Judging the Saint Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest

By On March 13, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Reading stories by emerging writers, unknown writers, struggling writers, and widely regarded authors is a delight. Most recently, I was gratified to judge the St. Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest. A few days ago, I listened to the six winners (three honorable mentions) read their work. I was surprised to learn that one of the winners was a young man barely out of high school or into college, one was a lady who had never entered a contest before, and one was a lady who read her work beautifully.

Gems in a stack of manuscripts are rare. Let’s face it. Entries inducing the onset of headache are frequent. But writers coaxing their work into a new dimension through reading are the rarest of all. All writers are told how important reading aloud is. Writers are rarely taught how to read aloud well. In writing conferences I have attended, writers are encouraged to read, and “readings” are always an integral part of the program. In workshops, writers whose works are about to be discussed often are asked to read a passage first. But I have yet to attend, or hear of, a writing conference or workshop where reading is taught or work-shopped as a parallel craft.

Big name authors who come to town, or sign up as workshop faculty, usually read well. I don’t know if it’s because they read the same passage and get better at it by repetition, or their agents or publishers make them practice.

But I digress. For several years, I volunteered to review story collections for an on-line publication called The Short Review. The collections came from the English speaking countries around the world. Most of the time, only one or two stories were memorable in any way. But glimpsing what writers are trying to get from the inside to the outside is always fascinating to me. Even more, comparing what is being done on the “emerging,” “struggling,” and local/regional stages to what gets published and widely circulated through the usual national and international outlets (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the better known literary journals, and most recently the story apps delivering stories to your computer or device) is instructive.

What shocks me is the ratio of what is memorable or worth reading again or saving for another time to read again is about the same – sadly, very, very low. I guess the moral is a perfectly publishable story from a pro, or bubbling through the literary cognescenti, may be no more worth reading than an imperfect one ripped from the pen of an “amateur.” Past acceptances are no guarantee of future enjoyment. Perfecting a story for publication may take all the fun out of it.

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