Literary community: Paying for what we value

Today’s post is the third in a three-part series. You can see the first part, on how reading factors into literary community, here, and the second part, on how regular local literary happenings cement community, here.

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The currency of community is friendship, common aspirations, goodwill.

But the currency of community is also currency—money, that is—and members of a community should strive to keep it flowing to support the things they claim to care about.

When a friend scores a book deal, congratulations flow, both in person and on social media. We tend to be happy for our fellow writers when they get a book contract, even if we’re also a little envious, because success for one suggests the possibility of success for others. At an even more basic level, a book contract means that there’s going to be a new book in the world, and that’s a beautiful thing.

So the currency of goodwill flows, even if some of it looks counterfeit. But the currency of money doesn’t move quite as freely, and it really needs to if the community is to thrive.

After the announcement of the book contract comes the post with a link for pre-sales. Literary titles rely heavily on advance sales, which help to determine the number of the initial press run. If all of those congratulatory friends put their money where their mouth is, a release gets a promising boost at the start, and the publisher can have a bit more confidence in the project it is investing in. But if congratulations end at the word, “Congratulations!,” and pre-sales don’t follow, a publisher may be more cautious with an initial order, and perhaps more cautious about promotion.

As a writer with three chapbooks and a full-length collection, I’ve received many kind words, and they really do warm me. But nothing feels quite as good as seeing my book in a friend’s hand, or hearing that a copy has arrived at someone’s doorstep. I was out of town recently and I met a friend for dinner, and at one point he pulled out my book for a signature. The friend is a voracious reader, but he doesn’t ordinarily gravitate toward poetry, but the book looked as though it had been read—the pages were fluffed out, the corners were curled. Nothing makes a writer feel more loved and appreciated than seeing a clear sign that someone has given time to her.

Friends should buy their friends’ books. Friends should read their friends’ books. And friends should spread the word about their friends’ books. That’s all pretty basic, and the reasons are obvious. When those friends are writers, too, the favor is likely to be returned at some point, but my own friend is not a guy with book aspirations; he’s just someone who cares about me, and this is how he enacted that care.

My friend is part of a community—one that includes him and me, our spouses, our mutual friends from our college days. And the people who celebrate each other’s accomplishments in person and on social media are also part of a community; they interact and communicate; they cheer and debate and share their indignation.

But beyond these specific communities is a larger community that is composed of readers and writers of new work. The members of this larger community may never meet or speak, although there is an instant kinship when we do encounter one another. This community is larger than our personal ones, but probably smaller than the community of, say, Star Wars aficionados or gun enthusiasts.

For the literary community to flourish, we need to fund it. It’s not crass to have this discussion; rather, at a time when the National Endowment for the Arts is targeted for elimination in the proposed federal budget, it could not be more urgent to talk about how we support a literary culture that is threatened by loss of public support.

Presses need our dollars if they are to produce the books we love to read. Likewise, literary journals, the proving ground of new writers, have to cover their expenses, and so do festivals, reading series, and the other literary institutions we love.

Today, like most days, I’m supporting the literary community by contributing to an ongoing conversation about what it means to live and work as a writer and a reader. I’m also starting to think about ways I can put my money where my heart is and support the presses and journals that carry the community on their backs.

And maybe after I’ve launched this post, I’ll head out to my local bookstore for a bit, or I’ll preorder a book by a friend, or I’ll just sit down outside on a beautiful day and I’ll read. 

Why you should submit to literary magazines: 5 insightful articles

Guest post by Trish Hopkinson, blogger at Trish Hopkinson: A Selfish Poet

It’s easy to get discouraged, to question the purpose or why it’s meaningful at all to send your poems and other writing out for what often results in rejection. We all do it. There’s not one poet or writer (alive or dead) who hasn’t questioned the quality of their work, questioned their reasons for writing, asked themselves if any of it is worth it.  I’m here to tell you IT. IS. WORTH. IT. And so are the authors of the five articles listed below.

Here’s my own short list of reasons:

#1 - Helps you to become a good literary citizen—support the art of literature. Read literary magazines online. Subscribe to a few. Request books of independent publishers and lesser known authors you love at your local library. And of course, submit your own work. In doing so, you become part of a community.

#2 - For the thrill—yes, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride to submit to literary magazines, but I actually think a better metaphor is golf. Very few people ever really get good at the game, it’s rare to get a hole in one, or even make par on most holes—but when you do? There’s simply nothing like it.

#3 - You will want to keep writing—sure, there are days when all those questions come pouring in. But ultimately, if you’ve ever had a piece accepted and published, you’ll want to continue playing the game, pushing yourself, improve and refine your art. This is where my tagline “selfish poet” comes in. When I write poetry, the process of creating, the act itself—that is for no one else but me.

Need more encouragement? These articles each take a little of a different approach and have something new for everyone. Each article is a page or so. Some focus on poetry, others on short stories, and some on writing in general. Bookmark your favorites and come back to it on those days when you need reasons for what you do.

4 Reasons You Should Submit to Literary Magazines by Crystal J. Zanders (Blue Mesa Review)

My favorite:

3. You is important: No one has lived through your experiences and can write about them with the style, grace, and beauty or starkness, darkness and terseness––or however you write––that you can. Your voice matters. We need to hear it. I believe that a story, a poem, or an essay can change everything. What if that essay is just sitting on your hard drive when it could be making the world a better place? You are an important part of the literary landscape. We need you.

Ten Reasons for Sending Your Poems to Magazines by Helena Nelson (Happenstance)

My favorite:

4. The poet who works at getting the poems out there is a member of the community of jobbing poets. It’s part of the apprenticeship, if you like. It’s an honourable striving. If the poems aren’t accepted, the effort is no less praiseworthy. Besides, you’re going to stick at it. You’re going to send them somewhere else. There are many publications for your messages in a bottle to float away to.

What's So Great About Submitting to Literary Magazines? by Becky Tuch (The Review Review)

My favorite:

See Old Work in a New Way: Many lit mags are either themed journals themselves (criminal justice, J Journal; music,Conduit; motherhood, The Mom Egg, etc.) Or else they are generalized magazines that publish to specific themes once in awhile (“In the Dark”, Hayden’s Ferry Review; “Southern Sin”, Creative Nonfiction, etc.) You might not think of a certain piece of writing as publishable. Yet when you look at it within the context of a particular theme, lo! Perhaps the piece is suitable for submission afterall. It might need work to get it into shape, but it’s worth a shot. Another advantage of pursuing this angle of publishing is that the competition may not be as stiff. While a journal’s ordinary submissions might be in the thousands, a theme issue may not have quite so many submissions.

Stubbornly Submitting to a Literary Magazine is Good by Michael Nye (The Missouri Review)

My favorite:

Assistant editor Evelyn Somers spoke up at this point, explaining that getting rejected by a magazine repeatedly and then, finally, getting work accepted is, actually, fairly normal. It’s a little frustrating for an editor, she said, when a writer submits to us five times and then just stops and we never hear get the chance to read the writer’s work again. She noted that TMR has published several writers who sent manuscripts to us for over a decade before we published their work.

Why You Should Submit to Literary Magazines (The Business of Books)

 My favorite (short story focus):

Yes, most literary magazines are small in circulation and have little (if any) money to pay you. But publication in one ups your literary cred significantly. Remember, these mags are used as scouting grounds for young, hungry agents and editors looking to make their mark. Think about it: You’re new at an agency or publishing house, and you dream of discovering an unknown writer and signing him or her to a book contract before anyone else does. Where’s a good place to look? The pages of these magazines.

If you like this post, please share with your writerly friends and/or follow Trish Hopkinson’s blog or like her Facebook page. You can see all the resources her blog offers poets/writers on her Blog Tour page. 

About our guest blogger: Trish Hopkinson has always loved words—in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. She is author of three chapbooks and has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Stirring, Chagrin River Review, and The Found Poetry Review. She is a product director by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at http://trishhopkinson.com/.

Surprise donation offers assurance: Your work matters

The meaty heels of my palms are resting on a sleek, cold MacBook Air as I type this post. I’m not used to the keyboard yet—its new dimensions. The letters are a little closer together than on my old machine, but the keys are springy and responsive. I can type the letter “O” and an “O” will show up, without the gape-mouthed, stunned surprise I’m used to from that will-it-or-won’t-it vowel.

Where did I get a new MacBook? It was an unexpected gift from a benefactor—a patron of the arts, my own private Medici.

Recently I tossed up a throwaway social media post about my dying keyboard and finger pad, my laggy cursor, my overheated case, my spinning rainbow wheel. Instantly, I received a private message from a Facebook friend, asking what kind of computer I was looking for.

I wasn’t sure why my friend was asking me this, but I answered honestly: I wanted a simple laptop, preferably a Mac, and a small one that would be easy to carry around with me. My friend asked for my address and then sent me a link to track delivery of my very own brand new laptop, due to arrive at my home within days.

There was just one condition: I wasn’t to reveal the name of the donor. This is something the person enjoys doing from time to time—covering the needs of a literary artist, merely because the benefactor is in the position to do so. The person was quite adamant on one point: public credit or thanks were not wanted. 

In return for this stunning gift, I committed myself—and still do, permanently—to passing the kindness along to artists, and specifically to writers (the benefactor, too, is a writer, and a talented one). As an adjunct college instructor, I’m not in a position to buy anyone a laptop, so I’m going to have to be creative to do justice to this amazing boon I’ve received—but I am creative, and that’s why someone chose to support my work in this way.

I’ve been brainstorming for some ways to be a better member of the literary community, and I’ve fixed on one plan above all others: starting and sustaining dialogue about writers and writing. 

Regular readers will note that I’ve picked up the daily blogging practice again, and each day I post two things: an appreciation of a contemporary book of poetry and an essay on writing. This is no accident. It’s how I’m starting the process of giving back to the literary community—to share the insights I gained as an editor for a couple of decades and to begin conversations about (and, I hope, to build readers for) books of poetry.

After each book review post, I go straight to Amazon to post my appreciation there, because I think it’s really useful for writers to get reviews. I’m always asking my own readers to post a review—good, bad, or indifferent, although I hope good—to my Amazon listing for No More Milk (Sundress, 2016), because buzz is helpful for building a readership. And just imagine the conversation we could get going if more readers shared their opinions about the books they were reading. I would love to see more conversation about poetry in the culture.

There are a lot of other ways I can contribute to writers and the writing community:

• Share favorite poems on social media.
• Write book reviews for journals and magazines that publish them.
• Take advantage of local opportunities to build “offline” relationships.
• Volunteer to teach workshops for populations that could especially benefit, like homeless teens or prisoners at the correctional facility in my town.
• Offer to provide feedback for fellow writers who need it.
• Support nonprofit presses and publishers with donations, contest entry fees, and subscriptions.
• Stay observant for smaller financial needs of writers that I am able to cover.

I take away a key message from my large, unexpected gift, and that is that I’m worthy of support. My writing matters. I really want to “pay it forward” in a tangible way—to help other writers in the spirit within which I have been helped—but the support I received communicates to me that I need to keep writing as a priority. Someone thinks my voice is important; someone thinks I’ve got the stuff.

It’s not always easy to see our own worth; it feels cocky to believe that poems have their own value. But the backing of a donor forces me to confront the idea that my writing itself is a meaningful way to serve. I’m going to choose to look at it as a mission, and to keep it up—to devote the best part of myself to my work.

Can we talk about writing?

I love a good year-end list. The picks, the pans—I enjoy any accounting of the year’s best and worst movies, the best and worst music, and especially the best and worst literature. It’s particularly exciting when respected authors offer up their favorite books of the year. These are the books I look for immediately. The year-end list feels like a particularly intimate form of communication from a writer, as it offers a glimpse into what the writer likes to ponder.

But then comes January. The year-end lists are gone (although I have a stack of books in my reading pile, thanks to all the good recommendations, including some names of writers who were new to me).

Me, I’d like to sustain the dialogue past Dec. 31 and throughout the year. Social media can be a help, but often we use it for self-promotion and forget to share exciting new work and writers. I would love nothing more than to have deeper, more important conversations about the writing that is meaningful to me.

In the not-so-distant past, correspondence was a vibrant part of a life of letters. I think of that famous letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman on the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Emerson famously penned, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.” Emerson told Whitman that he wanted to drop everything and come to see him in order to pay his respects.

Today, @HeresWaldo would have tweeted @BeautifulUncutHairofGraves to say, “Killer book for a rather ‘green’ poet, LOL.” Something, perhaps, is lost here.

This correspondence was far from singular. Other famous literary pen pals included Edith Wharton and Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Alice Walker and Langston Hughes, nd of course Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus—better known as the Young Poet.

Ephemera—those items, typically written or printed, that are intended only for short-term importance—is a hot collectible, and author correspondence is often a hot auction item. But it’s funny. Today we write more words than ever, but once converted to pixels, they somehow seem even more ephemeral. Once we hit “send,” they disappear.

So I offer up my own list here—seven ways we might open up and attempt to sustain more important, fulfilling dialogue. It’s not a list of things I do; it’s an aspirational list of practices I’d like to establish.

1. Write book reviews. So many small-press titles are ignored entirely by reviewers. It can be hard to get the major reviewing outlets to notice a poetry collection from a small independent press. If we fall in love with a book, we should tell other people about it. The sad fact is that books with small press runs and no attention from reviewers can die on the vine before they ever find their audience.

2. Sing the praises of excellent new voices. Talk them up to friends; post about them on social media. I know that I like to discuss poetry collections I like, rather than ones I dislike; there’s very little sense in recommending that readers ignore a book they were going to ignore anyway, statistically speaking.

3. Engage in discussions on Goodreads, Amazon, and similar outlets that already exist for this purpose.

4. Be a fan. Write authors a letter or postcard and let them know how highly you regard them. I wrote a fan letter only once, to William Matthews, a favorite poet of mine, now deceased. He wrote me back—real words, in his own handwriting, starting with “Dear Karen.” I treasure the postcard; I love knowing that in a particular moment in time, as that felt marker touched the card, I was “dear” to someone who remains enduringly dear to me.

5. Put yourself in a position to talk about the life of letters. Use the time when you could be posting online about The Bachelor to sit in front of a fire and share your favorite selections of whatever you’re reading right now. You don’t need a formal book club, complete with discussion questions; you just need friends who also love the written word.

6. Read aloud to the people you love. Then talk about the words that briefly inhabited the air and that you breathed in and made part of your good, red blood.

7. Read. Spend a little less time working, a little less time vegging out with electronics, a little less time cleaning the house, and just read writing—particularly the new stuff. Form an opinion. Memorize passages. Think. A life of letters starts, after all, in the mind, and there’s no better path in than through a book.

Blogging for literary citizenship: An interview with Michael Czyzniejewski

I’m two days in to a blog project that has me writing a review of a poetry collection each day, but I’ve got nothing on my partner, fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, who spent the 366 days of 2016 writing daily reviews of fiction collections—an even more ambitious task.

I was impressed to see Czyzniejewski complete his task every day without fail, no matter what was going on in his life or who might be telling him, “You know, I really despise that damn blog.”

I recently (as in, today, right now, from the back seat of the car) had a chance to interview Czyzniejewski as he drove to Chicago in his typical style—stingy with bathroom stops, his hand resting on the seat back beside him and blocking my view. We were between public radio stations and I’d already read us some Emerson out loud, so I needed a distraction. I began (a few moments in the future from right now) to ask him some questions.

Me: What was your favorite aspect of the Story366 project?

MC: Oh, reading all the books—consuming all those voices, all those aesthetics, all those different perspectives, but mostly it was getting to read. Reading is the pleasure in itself, and that’s what I got to do the whole time, was just read good books.

Me: Were there any downsides? Like, did you miss having fun with your beautiful family?

MC: Even reading 366 collections, I put only a small dent in the number of collections I wanted to read. I still have a hundred collections at my house that I haven’t covered yet. Also, I made a rule that I couldn’t do a book that I’d read before, and I had to exclude a lot of my closest friends because I’d already read their books—people like Seth Fried, Al Heathcock. Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Shannon Cain—it seems like they should be in the project, but they’re not, because I’d read their books, and I’d made the stupid rule.

Me: What about your beautiful family?

MC: What about them?

Me: Didn’t it take you away from them a whole bunch and make you feel crummy?

MC: Not only did the project take me away from my family, but with a deadline pressing, it affected my mood. I was stressed sometimes. But I think that’s how it is with any pursuit that you carry through. When you have pursuits like that, some kind of regimen, it has the potential to cause stress in your life.

Me: What is your chief writerly takeaway? And why are your windshield wipers still on?

MC: Because it was rainy and foggy. Wait, is that going on the blog?

Me: Yeah.

MC: I think I understand now more than ever that different writers do different things well. Writers find their voice and they do something really, really well, and they write a book and that book is published, and some of those ways of writing books I can’t do and I never will do—and that’s OK. I’m never going to be the same writer Lee Smith is, or David Gates, or Junot Diaz; they’re all really talented, and they have an aesthetic that’s completely different from mine, but I’ve come to admire them for that, and to respect the difference, more than I ever had before. Alice Munro’s probably the best example of that.

Me: Don’t you think you should turn on your headlights? It’s pretty drizzly.

MC: My headlights have been on this whole time. How about if I take care of the driving and you do backseat things.

Me: How about if you move your arm?

Also me: What writer most rewarded your close investigation?

MC: Oh, wow—one writer?

Me: You can give me a few.

MC: People who I’d never read before—Amber Dermont. I’d never read her before and I absolutely loved everything she wrote. I loved Katie Chase’s book. John Jodzio. Shane Hinton is somebody I liked a lot. Tara Ison.

Me: Who had you read some but didn’t really get until you encountered them within the confines of the project?

MC: Oh, OK. 

Me: Cop.

MC: I’m not doing anything wrong.

Also MC: A person I hadn’t read in fifteen years probably that I read and I said “Wow” after every paragraph was Lee K. Abbott. I really liked sitting down with Lee K. Abbott again after all that time. He’s truly a master storyteller. I appreciate him now more than ever. I just thought he wrote good stories, but now I see how he constructs them and how he tells them, and everything is just amazing.

Me: I won’t ask for a name. We’d be poor ambassadors if we talked smack about writers. But did you read any popular writers you found to be overrated? And in what way?

MC: I don’t like the term “overrated” because I think the idea of rating is kind of a misnomer,. Who’s rating them? Does that mean they sell a lot of books? Is their name bigger than the title on the cover? I don’t think there’s anyone like that in the project anyway. People in the world of short stories, when they become popular as a story writer, they have to earn that. This isn’t Hollywood. People don’t get put into literary magazines because they have the pretty face or the six-pack abs. They earn their way. I don’t think there’s anybody like that. They do have talent; maybe it’s not my own aesthetic, but they do what they do, and they do it really well.

Me: Look at that big Trump billboard.

MC: [Shakes head.]

Me: Tell me about the withdrawal you’re feeling.

MC: It was this morning at about 1:30 that it just hit me—wow, I didn’t do a post! I’d been doing all this stuff, and there was this feeling that I’d just forgot. I was thinking around 9 o’clock that I’d just do one, but I had to get off that path. If I’d done one last night, I would have done one today, and when would it end? … I kind of missed that I hadn’t read a new short story that day.

Me: This was an exercise in literary citizenship. Is that principle an important one to you?

MC: It’s the most important one to me. It’s very easy for this writing pursuit to be selfish—for it to be all about you, and you wanting other people to give you affirmation and publication and credit, and that’s an important part of it, but at the same time, if everyone was selfish, there would be no reason for us to exist. The only reason I have a publishing career is because people decided to start small presses, and they decided that they wanted to do this.

Wait, what is that? Whoa, it’s a dude with an umbrella. It looked like a mushroom walking across the highway. Where was I?

Me: [Reads back.]

MC: In any case, people decided that there weren’t enough presses and there were too many good authors who deserved to have books out. As a result, I have three collections of stories published. I think that’s true of a lot of the books I covered in my blog this year. Whether they’re small presses, or they’re the large ones, when I tagged all those presses in the post every day, I realized that—especially if you go to the Penguin site or the Knopf/Doubleday site—there’s a history to each press, and you read them, and it’s always about someone loving books and wanting to bring these voices to the masses. There’s never any notion of, “Oh, let’s start a big press because we want to make money selling books.” Maybe that’s an underlying motive, but there are always stories about pioneers starting presses because they loved books. We need to keep that going.

Me: Anything else you’d like to say?

MC: You know, I just saw the umbrella out of the corner of my eye, and it really did look like a giant mushroom walking across the overpass. And thinking about how we were going 72 miles per hour, I can’t say it wasn’t a giant mushroom walking across the highway. We’ll never know.