After 20 years of writing, my first novel, Swapping Purples for Yellows, finally entered the world in August of 2019. The book took four years to write, another two to sell, and 18 months to edit and prepare for publication. Along the way, my daughter grew from a newborn into third-grader; my wife and I bought a new, bigger house to accommodate this addition to our family; and I went from being a stay-at-home father to a full-time college instructor. This book remained the one constant. Now that it has been released, I've begun reflecting on the experience of getting to this point-and even have what I hope is a little insight into the process.
Links of the week November 25 2019 (48)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
25 November 2019
1. Networking happens outside of Brooklyn, too.
I live in an actual one-stoplight town in North Carolina, so when I read articles that advised getting an agent by asking your friends to introduce you to their agents or pitching agents at high-priced conferences, I despaired. Nevertheless, I found my publisher through networking even though I live in the middle of nowhere. A year before I finished the novel, I attended a nearby writers' workshop alongside another novelist-in-training who would later start his own "fiercely independent" small press, Southern Fried Karma. I submitted to their first novel contest not because I thought I would have an "in" with him but because I knew him to be a savvy businessman. If anyone could make a success out of a fledgling press, I knew it was he. I didn't win the contest-which was judged externally, for the record-but I was a finalist. He offered me a "revise and resubmit," providing a lengthy editorial letter on spec, and it worked.
My first love was in a band. His advice about music translated easily to the writing life-or I made it fit, those nights I was killing time backstage in dive bars during sound check. "Leave them wanting more" was his advice on playing. So I won't drone on when I give readings, erring on the side of reading too little.
"All money made by the band goes back to the band" is another one of his sayings-easy to follow when I made only $10 here and there publishing poems. My first three books were poetry, published because they had won contests.
Women's financial lives are different than men's. We earn less, of course-women of color earn least of all-and we also save less. We are often forced to drop out of the workforce for years at a time because of caregiving. We are less likely to have credit cards, bank accounts, cars, property, and utility bills in our name. We are less likely to have an established credit history because we often have to leave jobs or are forced out. We are more likely to be financially abused or to be trapped in relationships that are controlling, dangerous, or even deadly. Escape from such relationships is not only emotionally and physically difficult, it is also expensive, with women's incomes declining an average of 20% after divorce (which is itself costly), according to research conducted by a London School of Economics professor. For many women, poverty after divorce is chronic.
Indigenous literature has been one of the top-performing categories for local booksellers in 2019, and international publishers are noticing a similar increase in interest for books written by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander authors.
In the decade since she moved abroad in 2009, Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch says something extraordinary has happened in Australia. "Major publishers are picking up Indigenous writers and putting them at the top of their catalogues," she says. "We weren't being read 10 years ago. Maybe one of us was being read per year."
From a related article:
The appetite for Indigenous literature has even caught the attention of academics. Dr Paul Crosby, from Macquarie University's Department of Economics, is trying to measure how demand has changed over the past decade. He hopes to hand down his findings next year.
"We've got a clear indication that there's a renaissance in Indigenous literature at the moment," he says. "There's been some self-reporting in the industry but as for academic studies of this scale, it hasn't happened before. It's a fascinating area to be in. For arts funding, the more data and research we can give people, the better."
Until the 2010s, if you were reading, it generally meant you weren't doing it online. Though change had been in the offing, this was the decade that irreversibly altered how we consume text - when the smartphone transformed from a marvel to a staple. Suddenly, the sharpest cultural and political analysis came in the form of a distracted boyfriend meme. Racists deployed a playful cartoon frog to sugar their messages. From the Arab Spring onward, the best reporters were often panicked bystanders with Twitter accounts.
It would seem as if few times in history could be less hospitable to literature. Not even 20 years ago we mostly read about things in lag, on thin slices of tree, whereas now we do this, whatever this is. Yet instead of technology superannuating literature once and for all, it seems to have created a new space in our minds for it.
As the decade began, there were reasons to be optimistic: America had elected its first black president, and despite a global recession just two years earlier, the world hadn't cascaded into total financial collapse. Obamacare, for all its flaws, was passed, and then came the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords. Sure, there were danger signs: the anger of the tea party, the slow hollowing out of legacy news media, a troubling sense that somehow the bankers got away with it. But then maybe the immediacy of social media gave some hope, at least if you listened to the chatter of the bright young kids in the Bay Area trying to build a new kind of unmediated citizenship. Maybe everyday celebrity, post-gatekeeper, would change the world for the better. Some of that happened. But we also ended up with the alt-right and Donald Trump, inequality, impeachment, and debilitating FOMO. How did we get here?
Lady Oracle is both the title of a Margaret Atwood novel (1976, very funny) and the author's unofficial epithet. Crack open a news source today and you'll find something that Atwood speculated about a decade or three ago in one of her novels: lab-grown meat, environmental catastrophe, state surveillance, the diminishment of reproductive autonomy, antimicrobial clothes. Atwood isn't thrilled about her reputation as a cheerful eschatologist and has pointed out that it rests on a misunderstanding of dystopian fiction, which, she argues, isn't a prediction of the future, dummies, it's an interpretation of the present. In other words, If you're not seeing what I'm seeing, you're not paying attention.
Picador has announced "with great sadness" news of the death of Clive James, who passed away peacefully at home on Sunday 24th November after a long illness, aged 80.
James was a Picador author for 40 years and was the longest continuously published author on the list, with some 40 titles in all. The first Picador James title was Unreliable Memoirs; it was an immediate bestseller and went on to sell over a million copies, according to Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books, and remained with the imprint ever since.
Picador poetry editor Don Paterson said: "While James had always written poetry, it became his principal focus in his last decade; this unexpected late blossoming produced book after book of effortlessly-turned, moving and memorable verse, which saw several of his poems - among them the celebrated ‘Japanese Maple' - shared around the world. It was however typical of James's immense generosity that the last book he'd finish - The Fire of Joy, a reader's guide to his favourite poems from the English canon - was a work of pure enthusiasm. James was always prized for his superhuman learning (he really had read all those books) and one of the greatest turns of phrase in contemporary English; but he also possessed the rarest and most valuable skill we find in the critic: the language of praise. Any encounter with James, either in print or in person, left you desperate to go and open a book, watch a film or a TV show, or hunt down a recording. With Clive's passing we lose the wisest and funniest of writers, a loyal and kind friend, and the most finely-stocked mind we will ever have the fortune to encounter.''
On a cool winter's day in Cairo, I stepped into the Marriott Hotel and wandered over to the local bakery tucked away near the lavish hotel gardens. In the far corner of the small room sat Umm Kulthoum Mahfouz. We were meeting to discuss her recollections of her father, the late Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel laureate author, who still held the most recognizable name in Arabic literature. Instead, I found myself engrossed in a story of copyright and licensing infringement that shed light on the exploitative nature of one of Egypt's most respected publishers.
During the course of a career that spans over 70 years, Naguib Mahfouz, the son of a lower-middle class civil servant, wrote 34 novels, 5 plays, and 15 short story collections, in genres ranging from historical fiction and realism to stream of consciousness, noir, and existentialism. Prior to being selected for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, his readership was generally limited to the Middle East and North Africa, where he was widely read and respected. However, following the selection, Mahfouz's books surged in popularity and were translated into dozens of languages, offering readers around the world informed criticism of British colonialism, Egyptian nationalism, and social change while capturing the essence of Egyptian culture, not many Westerners are familiar with, in the 20th century. Critics compared Mahfouz's descriptions through Cairo to those of Charles Dickens' London and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky .
It's funny, but if you'd asked me a few years ago (when I was 14 and had just finished the first draft of Inside Out) whether the book had anything to do with my disability, I would have given you an emphatic "No". My writing has always been a part of me, much like my disability, but for a long time I kept the two things stubbornly separate. As I have gotten older, and the publication date of the book finally draws near, the picture is becoming more complicated.
Before I go on, I ought to explain my disability. Cerebral palsy (CP) is an umbrella term, given to a collection of permanent conditions often caused by premature birth. Because it can affect those who have it in different ways, I want to make it clear that the account I give of its affect on my life and writing career is entirely personal. I cannot speak for all disabled writers, nor would I want to if I could. Nonetheless, my condition has had an impact on the road to publication of this book, and that impact runs deeper than many of those reading this would perhaps assume.
Anyway, back to the interesting stuff. The most obvious way in which CP has affected me is that I am a lifelong wheelchair user. So the age-old solution to writer's block - "Take a walk in the fresh air" - is impossible to execute. The faffing around and paraphernalia involved in getting out of the house each day (getting out of bed, washed, and dressed) cannot be accomplished quickly or without help.