Fiction Writers Review » publishing

The Amazon Rants

Charlotte Boulay — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:00:50 +0000

You’ve probably read about Amazon’s most recent promotion–they encouraged customers to use their price-check app in stores, scan an item, and then get an extra 5% discount for buying that item on Amazon instead. This promotion occasioned much ranting, including a piece by Richard Russo in the Times, and then a rant from an opposing perspective by Farhad Manjoo in Slate.

It won’t surprise regular readers of this site, which routinely suggests buying from independent bookstores and which links to Powell’s most often, rather than Amazon (though we get no kickback from Powell’s, we just like them), to learn that I agree more with Russo than with Manjoo. But I found them both ranty, and therefore not the most useful frame for this debate, not only because they’re not really listening to or considering this situation–they’re just responding–but also because they pose the choice as an either/or. Either never buy from Amazon because if you do you’re a heartless capitalist who is destroying “real-life” literary culture, or always buy from Amazon because it’s more “efficient” and authors need lots of people to buy lots of books. Both positions seem really out of touch.

What is “real-life” literary culture? Digital life is real life for lots of people, in lots of meaningful and important ways. There is no bookstore, independent or otherwise, in my neighborhood, or anywhere close to it. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. I engage, instead, in the literary culture found on this site, and on Goodreads, and countless other online venues. Russo also doesn’t consider the enormous boost that good Amazon reviews can give a first-time author. In his piece he asks people like Ann Patchett and Anita Shreve for their opinions on Amazon, and they are dutifully castigating. But Anita Shreve doesn’t have to worry about how her next book is going to sell, on Amazon or otherwise–she’s going to do just fine. I’d much rather hear from emerging writers, people for whom Amazon pre-orders dictate print runs. Their relationship with this dilemma must be much more complex.

Meanwhile, Manjoo’s argument that small bookstores are “inefficient” is as reductive as it is insulting. Buying a book is an act of intellectual and often emotional engagement that cannot be measured merely by the book’s purchase price. To point out, as he does with complete and completely annoying arrogance, that one can buy two books for the price of one on Amazon misses all of Russo’s points, and is unapologetically (and therefore very stupidly) a purely capitalist argument. Haven’t we learned where pure capitalism gets us? He also writes, “Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?” This is, to borrow Manjoo’s opening, totally boneheaded. Why wouldn’t you choose a movie based on what the guy at the box office recommends? He’s probably seen a thousand more movies than you, and he wants you to come back to his movie theater–he’s not going to recommend Saw XV when he knows you came in for tickets to Paris Je T’Aime the week before.

I could go on and counter lots of points made by both authors (and almost all of Manjoo’s, some of which are truly absurd–Amazon’s recommendations are often shitty; I have never had a “frustrating” experience shopping in an independent bookstore) but instead what I want to say is this: let’s all buy lots of books from lots of different retailers. Independent bookstores have their issues–I can’t always afford to shop at them, for one, though I do my best–and Amazon isn’t the devil incarnate, or rather, not incarnate. Their recent promotional move, because it’s occasioned such a backlash, and because it’s a slimy thing to do generally, certainly seems boneheaded, but they’ve also done a lot of good for book sales. Book sales, however, are not the bottom line. There is no bottom line here, and that’s what writers of complex fiction and poetry ought to recognize, and be talking about. Because continuing to have that conversation, which is more than a rant, is the only way we’re only going to save independent bookstores AND make books available to the masses as well.

(I’ve illustrated this post with four recent titles by emerging writers we’ve recently reviewed. The covers are linked to four different retailers, including Amazon. ‘Tis the season. Go forth, savvy book-buyers, and enjoy.)

Words: just another corporate gimmick

Celeste Ng — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 13:00:58 +0000

We don’t need writers. Here’s the proof, via web comic xkcd:

Image: xkcd

A new model for advances?

Celeste Ng — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:00:39 +0000

The traditional model of publishing–for books, at least–has become a large(ish) upfront advance, followed by royalties: a small percent of the book’s sale, once the book has earned enough to pay off the advance. Here’s a counteroffer: as an author, would you trade a larger advance for a smaller payment upfront PLUS a bigger slice of the proceeds?

That’s the new model of payment companies like Byliner and The Atavist are trying out. Reports The New York Observer:

Like most magazines, The Atavist pays a fee up front when a story arrives in decent shape. Mr. Dobbs called The Atavist’s fee “modest” when compared to the top-tier magazines. “It’s less than you would get either by word rate or total fee rate – unless you’re Michael Lewis,” he said. The big difference is that when the issue comes out, the writer gets roughly half the revenue the story generates. Which means a runaway hit by a mid-level writer, or even a run-of-the-mill piece by a marquee author, has the potential to rack up thousands, or in an extreme case, hundreds of thousands, in revenue for both the publication and the author.

“We give basically an even split with our authors,” said Evan Ratliff, co-founder and editor at The Atavist. “It’s not always that but give or take it’s usually around 50 percent.” Writers take on greater risk if the story fails, but also reap greater awards if it succeeds.

And many of those pieces have been succeeding. The Columbia Journalism Review notes:

While Kindle is strict about disclosing sales figures or letting publishers like Byliner disclose figures, plenty of Singles have been doing well. The Krakauer Single—a best-seller for all of Amazon, digital and print, was downloaded for free seventy thousand times in the seventy-two hours after it was first released, before Kindle started charging for downloads, and Bryant says they sold a number comparable to that immediately thereafter. Sarah Gelman, an Amazon spokeswoman, says seven Kindle Singles titles—including Krakauer’s— have broken into the top twenty bestselling titles in the Kindle store, which includes all Kindle books. Twenty-one of the seventy-five Kindle Singles published so far have been in the top one hundred Kindle best-sellers.

So far, this model has been applied mostly to long-form nonfiction pieces. Could this model work for novels or short story collections? Would you make the smaller-advance/larger-royalty tradeoff, and why (or why not)?

Further Reading:

The problem with Audrey Niffenegger’s $5 million advance for Her Fearful Symmetry
How do writers typically get paid? Here’s one breakdown.
Author Lynn Viehl analyzes her royalty statement for her New York Times bestseller–and comes to a sobering conclusion.

The End of Borders: A Daily Show Perspective

Celeste Ng — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:00:54 +0000

I admit it: when current events become a bit too much to handle, I turn to the Daily Show for some much-needed comedic perspective. Usually it’s politics that’s making me tear my hear out, but here’s Jon Stewart and John Hodgman (a fiction writer himself) finding the humor in the Borders closing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Borders Goes Out of Business

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Happy Monday. As John Hodgman would put it, “You’re welcome.”

Further Reading:

Does the end of Borders mean the bookselling industry is dying? FWR contributing editor Joshua Bodwell offers a different perspective.
MobyLives suggests the real take-home message of the Borders story isn’t what everyone thinks it is.

A More Interesting Period of Time: An Interview with Donald Lystra

Danielle LaVaque-Manty — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:00:02 +0000

Image courtesy author's website

For Donald Lystra, the nineteen-fifties wasn’t all Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Instead, it was an era of bubbling change, depicted poignantly in his novel, Season of Water and Ice, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy named Danny. The year is 1957. Danny’s father has given up a good job with General Motors to become a salesman and moved his family from Grand Rapids to a cabin by a lake in northern Michigan. Danny’s mother, accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle, has returned to her parents’ home in the suburbs of Chicago because, she tells Danny, “The country’s a wonderful place for men and boys but it’s not a place for a woman.” Danny strikes up a friendship with his seventeen-year-old neighbor Amber, who is pregnant, unmarried, and facing difficult choices. As Danny tries to understand the relationship between his parents and attempts to intervene in Amber’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend, he learns how different love can be from the what standard fifties images have lead him to expect.

Like his protagonist, Donald Lystra grew up in Michigan in the fifties, and he rejects oversimplified portrayals of a decade he experienced as rich in complication. Season of Water and Ice, Lystra’s first novel, offers a wonderfully character-driven corrective. The book won a 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction and was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan in 2010. While writing it, Lystra received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, Passages North, and The Greensboro Review. A story called “Family Way,” which eventually grew into Season of Water and Ice, appeared in Cimarron Review in 2006, and an excerpt from the novel appeared in Natural Bridge in 2009.

This interview was conducted in August, 2010.

Danielle Lavaque-Manty: You had a career as an engineer before you started writing. Had you always wanted to write?

Donald Lystra: Yes, I did. Or at least for a long, long time I did. As you say, I became an engineer in my workaday life, and I enjoyed it. I had some successful projects over my career. But I always had the idea—like many other people—that some time I would like to try my hand at writing. And I carried that idea around in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

Then, about the mid-nineties, there were some things that opened up some time for me. My kids were off to college right about then for one thing, so I had fewer family demands. I started scribbling, and just doing things on my own. I would give myself an assignment to describe something, trying to find the best words to do it, and then I would look at it the next day and critique it. Or I would try to write a vivid sentence, and then I would look at it a day or two later and compare it to sentences that I saw in books by authors I really admired, trying to find out why mine wasn’t as good as theirs. I did that for two or three years, that sort of self-education. And I wrote some stories that I sort of liked. But I didn’t think they were perfect by any means.

Then, in 1997, I saw a flyer on [The University of Michigan] campus by someone who was conducting a writing workshop—not under the auspices of the university, but as a separate thing he was doing on his own.

Who was that writer?

His name was Josh Henkin. He’d graduated from the Michigan MFA program, and he’s since published two novels [Swimming Across the Hudson (1997) and Matrimony (2007)]. A wonderful writing teacher, just a brilliant writing teacher in terms of the insights he was able to give me about what a story is, and how to control a story to create an effect of some kind.

The other good thing about that was it brought me in contact with other people who were aspiring writers, some of them very good. So I began to have a network of people. In fact, after Josh finally left town—I took two or three workshops from him over a period of a year and a half—a group of his students got together and had our own irregular workshop every week or two. Three of the five have gone on to publish books, and two of them have gone on to their own academic careers in writing: Valerie Laken is in Milwaukee, [teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee], and the other one, Nick Arvin, is out in Denver, [teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop]. They were all much younger than me. That was part of the fun of it too, frankly—to get together with people who are much, much younger than you, and to have them take what you’re doing seriously, to sort of span years that way.

Are you still in touch with any of them?

They’re not in Ann Arbor anymore, but we email and we go to each other for advice. It’s very hard to write in a totally solitary way, I found out. When I started out I was thinking, “Well, it’s a solitary pursuit, and you ought to be able to figure it out all on your own.” That’s somewhat true, but it’s certainly not entirely true. You need to have a certain amount of instruction, and getting feedback from other people is an immense help. So it went from being a solitary pursuit to a slightly more social activity.

The book itself started with a short story.

It did. As I said, I’d written a bunch of short stories, and some of them had been published. Then I got to where I thought, “Well, okay, I want to try a longer project.” I tried to think of what that would be, what would be a big enough subject or theme to warrant two or three hundred pages of treatment. I worked on a project for several months, and it wasn’t going very well and I got frustrated and I said, “Let’s go back to the basics here. Let me go back and look at the short stories I’ve written and see if in one of them maybe there’s a germ of an idea that can be expanded.”

I found one short story in particular that I thought might work. It was a story I had published in the Cimarron Review. I liked the characters I had created, and I liked the situation that I had created. The other thing about it, when I looked at it again—it was a short story that ended with a lot of loose ends still unresolved. There was one thread that ran through it and came to a conclusion, you might say, to make it a short story, but there were a lot of other issues that were not concluded. I thought, “Let’s see what would happen if I tried to move these characters forward through time.”

I already had fifteen pages of text, which was very encouraging—to have a running start that way. And I already had a pretty good grasp of who the characters were, and the setting, and the situation. The first draft went pretty fast. It was a rough first draft, but I think I finished it in only about three months. Then I went back and I spent another four months revising it before I got it to the point where I wanted to show it to anybody—to an agent who would want to represent it.

That is fast.

I keep trying to find that groove again. I think part of the problem of knowing more about writing—maybe even part of the problem of having published a book—is that you always know too much, and you are too quick to critique what you do when you sit down to write, and that inhibits the process. I want to go back to that innocent state that I had when I started that last project, when I had no particular expectations, just doing it more or less for the fun of it. I think that’s the best frame of mind to do it in.

Place is really important in this novel—the northern Michigan setting—and one thing I was wondering about is the move from the city to the really small town. How important do you think the past in the big city is to the rest of the novel? It opens after they’ve moved, but we do hear about the move.

When I was growing up, my family moved several times. We moved to different sorts of places—cites, suburbs, the country, small towns. I wanted the story to unfold in a relatively isolated place, creating that kind of crucible where things were going to happen removed from society or many other people. The idea of a family moving was an easy way to implement that. The young boy, the narrator, is new to the area, so he’s socially isolated. He hasn’t been there long enough to make friends. He’s physically isolated, too, because of the decision his father made of locating them out in the country on the shore of a lake, which he thought would be a good place to be, but turns out not to be so great, at least after the seasons begin to turn.

One thing that really struck me when I was reading your book—and this might be more about my own preoccupations than your intentions—was the gender constraints that the characters operate under. So I was wondering if you were thinking about that as you were writing. Not in the sense that you meant it as a social critique, but were you thinking about gender issues consciously?

I was, yes, I was. Particularly for the women characters in the book. And I’ve thought of this too with respect to my own family and my own mother. My mother was a typical post-war housewife. She didn’t have any kind of a career at any point in her life. She raised a family of four children. But as I grew up and began to understand her a little bit as a person, other than just as my mother, I can see where she—well, she’s passed away now, she’s been dead for fifteen years—I could see where she was an intelligent woman who had some very definite talents. She always said that if she’d had the chance, she would have loved to have gone into architecture. She had an artistic sense combined with a practical builder’s sense, you might say, that drew her that way. And I thought about a woman like that being constrained in this very tight role that was prescribed for many women back then, and how difficult that probably was.

The male characters, too, operated within a pretty narrowly prescribed role—the sense of being the breadwinner and having to shoulder that responsibility. That comes into play a little bit in this book because the father is pretty much failing at this new career that he’s taken for himself, and he feels the weight of that pretty heavily.

I think the relationship between Danny and Amber is really interesting, too, because he’s younger, and yet sometimes there’s this burden of wanting to be the protector, which he’s not really in a position to do.

That relationship turns a lot of things on their heads, in a way. She’s older than he is, more experienced in the world, and certainly more sexually experienced. Yet he, coming from the city, knows things she doesn’t know and sees into certain situations more deeply than she does. Maybe that’s why I liked that relationship; it did confound a lot of the stereotypes about boy meets girl. And because it was different, you couldn’t assume anything—you had to work through the issues one by one, based on this rather unusual situation.

And you’re right, as a boy he does feel this sense of responsibility. It goes towards Amber, and even towards his father. There are a couple of instances where his father shows weakness, so to speak, and Danny feels a sense of responsibility to help him out, to give him a little support, even if it’s just for a moment. So he’s being indoctrinated, you might say, into this sense of responsibility that boys were expected to assume when they grew up and became men. I think that is the reason that a lot of that is in there, that he’s aware of this burden that’s waiting out there for him to assume, and he’s not altogether comfortable about taking it on.

Before the book had found a home—when you had an agent but not yet a publisher—you were encouraged to revise the book to make it a young adult novel, which you resisted. I’m wondering how you thought about your audience when you were writing Season of Water and Ice.

When I was writing, I didn’t really think of an audience. But I guess I thought I was writing for an adult audience. I might not even have known there was such a thing as a young adult category of fiction, at that time. But when I found an agent, he was curious about considering it as a young adult novel because, I’ve since learned, this is a category of fiction that’s quite active and quite profitable.

So in the first round of submissions he sent it out to six editors who were adult fiction editors and six who were young adult editors. None of the six adult editors were willing to take it. They liked the book, many of them, and some of them seemed to like it quite a lot, but it just didn’t fit into their lineup of books or something. But a couple of the young adult editors indicated that they would take it if it was revised and made more clearly a young adult book, which would have required, oh, simplifying some of the language, and trying to make it more of an in-the-moment narrative style. The way I had written it the first time, there was quite a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness on the part of the character. Maybe to a fault. That can be tedious to a reader even in an adult book, but I guess it’s not appropriate for a young adult book, at least not to the degree that I was doing it. So they wanted that taken out, or greatly simplified.

And I tried to do it. I remember spending a good month because I wanted to sell the book. I was a little disappointed that my agent now was talking more about trying to sell it as a young adult book, but I figured, well, that’s all right, I’ll write other books. So I spent a month trying to make the changes, and at some point I just didn’t like the changes I was making, or the way it was turning out. I remember writing my agent an email and probably spending two or three days composing it, because I thought it was probably going to be the end of our relationship. I basically told him that I’d thought about it and I’d concluded that I didn’t want to do it. I gave him the reasons why, and tried to make as good a case as I could. Somewhat to my surprise, he said, “Well, that’s all right. We’ll go ahead and see if we can sell it as an adult work.” We made some changes to it still before we sent it out the second time, but they weren’t for the purpose of turning it into a young adult book.

I’m glad you didn’t lose the richness of Danny’s thoughts. I think that’s one of the real strengths of the book.

I’m glad, too. I was at the McDowell Colony a year and a half ago or so, and one of the other colonists there was a fellow in his thirties or forties, who I think graduated from the MFA program at Iowa. He’d written a novel and had gone through the same experience I had, where the agent, when he looked at it, thought it should be a young adult novel. And he actually did go through and make the changes, and they sold the book as a young adult novel. After he told me the story, I said, “Well, how did you feel about that?” And he looked at me and said, “I felt terrible.” Which is a heartbreaking thing to hear. This person has gone on to publish another book that has had quite a bit of critical success, so his career wasn’t over, and it wasn’t a blow that he wasn’t able to recover from, but that particular experience left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Am I remembering right that when Switchgrass took it, yours was one of the first works of fiction they’d published?

Yes. Northern Illinois University Press, which is the main press, is a scholarly publisher. They got a new director two or three years ago who had the idea of starting a fiction imprint and having it focus on Midwest themes and writers. The first two books they published in 2009 under the Switchgrass imprint were mine and another novel called Beautiful Piece.

What has it been like working with Switchgrass?

The editorial process was good, in the sense that they gave a lot of suggestions but let me have the final word in each and every case. And some of the things we had fairly sharp differences about. I don’t know if a larger publisher would have done that or not. They might have insisted on calling more of the shots.

The thing about a small press, or a university press—and you know this going into it—is that they don’t have the marketing resources that the New York publishers have. And yet, you sort of wish you could be sent on a round-the-country tour, or have ads taken in different places. But I can’t really fault them. With the constraints they had, they did a good job, and the book is finding its way to an audience.

One thing that is very good about a university press, or small presses in general, I think, is that they do stick with a book. Mine has not had great sales, but it has been steady, and it has been steadily increasing. In fact, just a few days ago, I was talking to the publisher and found out that they’re going to do a second printing. I mean, we’re not talking about huge numbers here, you understand, but still, it’s a nice milestone.

What have they been able to do, publicity-wise?

They introduced the book at a bookseller’s conference, The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. They had me set up to do a signing, which was kind of ridiculous, I thought, because nobody knew me or the book at that point. But still, quite a few booksellers came by and got to know about the novel. And they sent around press releases, and a certain amount of publicity to newspapers and magazines, mostly in the Midwest. The idea was that it would get a foothold in the Midwest and maybe spread farther, but the first emphasis was in the Midwest.

And I threw myself into the marketing to some extent. I found out that that’s not uncommon even for authors who are published by New York houses. The expectation now is that authors will do things to promote their books with their own time and their own resources. Which is kind of crazy, I think, because their time ought to be better spent writing another book. But that’s starting to be the norm. You know, they want an author to have a web site, and if they can have a blog that’s even better. I don’t have a blog. I drew the line there. But I did put together a web site last summer.

Probably the best thing we did, though—and this was a joint decision—is that we submitted the book for award competitions. One was in the state of Michigan, what they call the Michigan Notable Books program, something the Library of Michigan has been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. They designate twenty books as being “notable books” from the standpoint of Michigan and Michigan history. Season of Water and Ice was selected, which was a nice accolade. A few months later we submitted for another program, which was the Midwest Book Awards, a program run by an organization of independent publishers in the Midwest. Season of Water and Ice was selected as the winner in the general fiction category, which was another nice round of publicity and attention.

What has the experience of having the book come out been like? You said it hasn’t been exactly energizing for your current work.

It’s the accomplishment of a long-term goal, and all the satisfaction that comes out of that. It is different in some ways than you expect. And I’ve talked to other writers, other first-time authors, and there’s a degree of anxiety you experience, particularly in the early days, because all of a sudden this thing that has been so private is out there in the big wide world, and anybody who wants to can pick it up and read it. Or, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to pick it up and read it. And if they do read it they’re free to like it or not like it, or think it’s stupid, or find some glaring error that you’ve overlooked. That was the initial fear, in spite of the fact that I’ve been very careful in writing it myself, and have gotten feedback from other writers, as well as the editor who I worked with. Yet I had this gnawing fear that took a while to go away that there was just something terribly wrong with it that had not yet been discovered. It’s crazy, it’s kind of irrational, I guess, because the book had been carefully handled by me and by other readers and by the publisher. But that went away after a month or two, that anxiety.

I think the reason I haven’t been productive with new writing is because of what we were talking about a few minutes ago. I did get caught up in the marketing of it. It’s surprising. It didn’t seem like it was a great effort, but it did seem like every day there were a few emails I had to send out or answer, or I was coordinating going to some event maybe, or maybe just thinking about what I could do to help my book along, what I could do that I hadn’t thought of yet. And all of that ate into my day, and maybe ate into my energy, to the point where I didn’t really have a lot left over to work on new writing.

So you’ve been going to all these readings and having all these people ask you so many questions. Is there a question you wish they would ask you that they haven’t yet?

I don’t know that there is. People ask you all sorts of things: How you work, what time of day you write, whether you use a notepad or a computer, where your ideas come from. At Nicola’s Books, the owner told me ahead of time that there are two things people always want to know about a writer. One is, “Where did you get the idea for this book?” And the other is, “How do you write?” Which are kind of the two extremes. A lot of people want to know whether it’s an autobiographical novel, and it’s not. But there are parts of it that I’ve drawn from things that I know, obviously. I had the experience when I was growing up of living in a lakeside cottage during the fall and winter. I remember that it turns into a fairly forbidding place as the season turns and all the cottagers go home for their winter months. Most of those places are summer-only communities. So that idea probably came out of that experience I had when I was young.

I don’t know. No one has ever asked me, I guess, “What did you think you were going to accomplish?” Or, “What do you want to have accomplished with this book?” And I’m not sure I can answer that. I mean, in the larger sense, why write a book, why put it out there, what do you think is going to happen as a result of it? You hope that people who connect with it will take away some insights they might not otherwise have had. Does an author want them to be better people after they’ve read his or her book? I guess maybe one thing I did hope—this is more mundane than that, and I’ve said this several times already whether I’ve been asked it or not—I did think that the period of the nineteen-fifties has kind of been relegated to a notch, a little place in history, and as someone who lived through it, I saw it as a more interesting period of time. It led to all the things that came ten years later—the big societal changes that broke things apart in the late sixties. The origins of all the things that were going to happen later were starting in the fifties. The conflicts, and the confusions, and the cross currents that people were caught in and trying to work their way through, I think, started in the fifties and people started to try to deal with them then. So I guess one thing—though maybe I thought this afterwards—I was hoping that people would think it was a more interesting time than what you see on Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. That there were families that were caught in difficult situations that they didn’t quite know how to deal with and feeling pressures that were new to them.

I suppose everybody hopes they grew up in a time that was interesting, or significant, but whenever I hear somebody refer to the fifties disdainfully, it makes me react, because I was there and I thought it was more complicated than that.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Gosh, I don’t know. We covered the ground pretty well. You know, one thing we talked about early on—and it’s true—is that transition I made from being a solitary writer to being a more sociable writer, which was an important step. It’s hard to say how much I appreciate that and do it justice—the little things you get, and big things, insights into what you’ve done. I have a sense of gratitude to all the people I’ve worked with.

Further Links and Resources:

Visit Don’s website for more on his work
Learn more about Switchgrass Books
Read Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin’s FWR interview with Donald Ray Pollock, another author who began writing later in life, as a second career
Read Valerie Laken’s essay, “The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages,” right here on FWR

Columbia Publishing Course takes on digital publishing

The FWR Interns — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:00:48 +0000

We’re delighted to present another post by our awesome FWR editorial intern, Nicole Aber. Enjoy!

Going into the publishing industry now requires a whole new skill set from the days when American classics like East of Eden and The Great Gatsby were released in the early and mid-twentieth century. Now, those interested in the publishing field are faced not only with print media, but also questions of how to keep publishing in pace with the ever-increasing digital world — questions of the utmost importance for those enrolled in a course all about publishing.

Students attending the Columbia Publishing Course this summer are tasked with answering these queries during their six-week graduate program before they’re thrown into the rapidly changing field. For the first time, the course is focusing on electronic publishing. Explains the New York Times:

So the summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.” Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master “e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not quite a book — which is so new, the genre doesn’t really have a name.

According to the article, over the last year, electronic sales outpaced print sales in some books’ first week of release. But despite print mediums’ apparent disappearing act, the Columbia Publishing Course isn’t going away anytime soon. From the New York Times again:

Lindy Hess, the director of the course for 24 years, said she designed it to evolve with the business. “The industry has changed,” Ms. Hess said. “My philosophy is for the course to reflect the industry as it is, so students graduate and they know exactly what’s happening. Students have to learn all the old stuff and get a grasp on the digital world.”

The shift to digital publishing is apparently not scaring off the students either. Instead, they’re incorporating these new dimensions into their course projects, which include conceiving ideas for their own publishing companies. As she reviewed one group’s project, Sarah Crichton, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Sarah Crichton Books, praised the students’ work:

“This is extremely impressive,” Ms. Crichton said, peering around the table. “You’re grappling with a lot of the same things we’re grappling with, which is the impact of e-books. You’re taking it into account and thinking about it, and that’s very impressive and difficult. It’s something that we wrestle with on an hourly basis.”

So perhaps these up-and-coming publishers have what it takes to transform the publishing industry so that it continues to thrive in the digital age. What do you think of the Columbia Publishing Course’s changing model? Do you think it has the potential to shape the future of publishing in a positive way? Or is it just another telling sign that the printed form is on its way out?

Further reading:

Don’t miss Michael Rudin’s fantastic essay “The Age of Binary Bookmaking.”
Here on the FWR blog, check out the possible future of e-reading, how one reader learned to love her Kindle, how ebook and print books might co-exist, and much more on digital publishing and e-readers.
Does all this talk of THE FUTURE have you craving some nostalgia? Take a deep breath and watch this video on how a book was made in 1947.

Readings as patronage events?

Celeste Ng — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:00:02 +0000

Should author readings be free?

That’s what the New York Times wondered recently in a story about indie bookstores that charge admission for author events.

Bookstores, including some of the most prominent around the country, have begun selling tickets or requiring a book purchase of customers who attend author readings and signings, a practice once considered unthinkable.

“There’s no one right now who’s not considering it,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson Books in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. “The entire independent bookstore model is based on selling books, but that model is changing because so many book sales are going online.”

The Boulder Book Store in Colorado caused a stir in April when it announced it would charge $5 a person to attend store events. In April, Kepler’s Books, an independent in Menlo Park, Calif., began charging customers a $10 gift card, which admits two people to each author appearance. (They also have the option of buying the book in exchange for admission.)

Now, there’s always been a tacit rule—at least among the writer-reader-teacher set I know—that if you attend a book reading, you should buy a copy of the book to support the author. (At the very least, you should NOT do what one woman at a recent reading did: say “I haven’t read your book—I’m sure I’ll get it out of the library at some point, though.”)

But charging admission? Or requiring a book purchase? On the one hand, I see the point: where else, besides a reading, would you expect to go and be entertained and enlightened for free? On the other hand, though, it just seems… crass. Forcing someone to buy a copy of a book feels like an intrusion: if there’s such a thing as Tea-Party literati, I can see them waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags as we speak. (And yet, demanding payment for a service rendered—in this case, the author’s and bookstore’s time and effort—is capitalism at its best.)

Maybe more people would be willing to pay if authors took this Millions essay about the (lost) art of the literary reading to heart.

What do you think? Are you less (or more) likely to attend a reading if you’ll be forced to pay admission or buy a copy of the book?

Unbound: a Kickstarter for books

Celeste Ng — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:00:26 +0000

Unbound allows authors to pitch book ideas and interested readers to fund those books. Says the site:

Unbound is a new way of connecting with writers. Most of the writers on our site will be well known, others will appear here for the first time.

What’s different is that instead of waiting for them to publish their work, Unbound allows you to listen to their ideas for what they’d like to write before they even start. If you like their idea, you can pledge to support it. If we hit the target number of supporters, the author can go ahead and start writing (if the target isn’t met you can either get your pledge refunded in full or switch your pledge to another Unbound project). [...]

This part also caught my eye:

But that’s not all. As soon as you make a pledge to support an Unbound project you gain access to the author’s private area or ’shed’. Here you can get updates on the book’s progress, watch exclusive interviews, read draft chapters, find out information about the author’s backlist and join discussions with the author and other supporters. It’s a portal into a new community of writers and readers: a place to comment on and contribute to a work in progress.

Then comes the exciting bit. The book is written, designed, edited and printed and we send it to you, either as an e-book or a beautifully bound, limited edition hardback (or both). For the first time, you will be able to hold in your hands a book that wouldn’t have existed without you.

Whoa… The pressure to keep writing while your funders watch your progress? That could either help hold you accountable—or be completely paralyzing.

Currently, the site isn’t open to just anyone—at the moment, only agented submissions are accepted. But authors like Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) are already on board.

Here’s the company’s video on how it all works.

What do you think? Is this the future model of publishing? Would you fund a book this way—or try to get funding this way?

The Humpbacked Minaret: An Interview with Mahmoud Saeed

Stephen Morison, Jr. — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 16:20:20 +0000

When my family and I moved from Beijing to Amman last summer (2010), I began to update my library of books by Middle Eastern writers. I read a memoir about dating in Saudi Arabia that reminded me of youthful novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and China’s Chun Sue, an Egyptian epic that shared a kinship with Lawrence Durrell, and a collection of stories authored by a Palestinian full of the ghosts of Albert Camus and Paul Bowles. While these books balanced light and darkness, Iraqi writer Mahmoud Saeed’s novel I Was the One Who Saw (translated as Saddam City) was more emotionally challenging. Inspired by his experiences in Iraqi jails during the reign of Saddam Hussein, Saeed’s novel joins the list of works that detail the process by which humans survive imprisonment, deprivation and torture, works that include Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Chol-hwan Kang’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang, and Elie Wiesel’s Night.

The following interview with Mr. Saeed, who currently teaches Arabic and Arabic Culture at DePaul University in Chicago, was conducted via telephone and email over the course of several weeks in March and April of 2011.

Interview:

Stephen Morison, Jr.: Could you describe where you are from in Iraq and tell us a little bit about your family background?

First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest in me, and I appreciate deeply the interest of Fiction Writers Review and its readers of contemporary novelists, poets and short story writers. This delights me. I wrote a novel about my childhood and my city environment. A novelist friend, Alan Salter translated it into English for me and it won the prize in translation at the University of Arkansas. This novel, entitled The World Through the Eyes of Angels, will be published by the University of Syracuse in the fall. I was born in the city of Mosul, one of the oldest cities in the world, which was built at the same time as the city of Nineveh. Arab writers accurately described Mosul more than 1300 years ago. These writings mention a market that partially remains to this day, and in which my father had a shop. Mosul’s population was comprised entirely of Arabs who practiced different religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism. In that time, all religions fraternized as one family, not like today, when everyone wants to kill everyone else. Living in the city depended on agriculture, so the city depended on rainfall. The city became very poor because the rains did not come every year, and when it did rain, it was not enough. In the summer when the harvest ended, people flocked to the city from the surrounding villages. These people included Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Aramaic, Hebron, Shabacs, and Yezidis and they came to sell their crops and shop in the city.

The climate in Mosul is divided into four seasons, each exactly three months. There is a cold winter in which temperatures drop to freezing. The spring is very beautiful and mild. Summer reaches ninety five degrees, followed by a temperate fall. Thus, Mosel is called “the mother of two springs.”

Our ancestors in Mosul engineered a plaster which was stronger than concrete. They used this plaster to build the highest minaret in the world in Mosul, more than nine centuries ago. Seven centuries after the minaret was built, it began to lean to the east, so severely that people thought that it would fall. The minaret has remained leaning this way for over two hundred years, thus the origin of Mosul’s nickname “The Humpback.” Mosul is also the only city in Iraq that used alabaster in its architecture. The city is also famous for its cuisine, including unique types of pickles, sweets and sausages.

The Humbacked Minaret - Mosul, Iraq

Where were you educated?

I attended secondary school in Mosul, then the University of Baghdad, which was a very significant time in my life. I was such an avid reader that by the age of twelve I had read all the novels, collections of stories and history books in Mosul’s public library.

What writers were you exposed to as a young person?

Before completing high school I had read most of the authors whose work had been translated into Arabic including Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, Melville, Poe, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Chekhov and others. In addition, I read the works of Arab writers including Naguib Mahfouz and Tewfik al-Hakim. I enjoyed reading modern translations as soon as they were published. I often read at least three hours a day, books by both Arab and non-Arab writers.

What motivated you to begin writing? When did you begin writing?

My writings were motivated by conflict in the world, the disparities between wealth and poverty, strength and weaknesses, oppressed people versus an arbitrary system of government, knowledge and ignorance, the old and the new, the constraints of customs and traditions versus liberation. I saw that conflict usually meant that those who are strong are victorious and those who are weak are defeated. I found that it was not always possible to speak your opinion frankly in life, at the risk of severe punishment. I found, however, that in the act of communicating by writing one can be free. If you are unable to resist evil in life, you can resist it through writing. Likewise, if you witness hunger and you cannot help the hungry, your pen can create a perfect world where people do not stay hungry.

Writing is an alternate world trying to solve the puzzle of man and his actions. One can attempt to answer questions through writing which seem intractable in life.

What most motivates me to write is the evil, brutality, and destruction inherent in the human spirit, questions about why we persecute each other, why we wish to control each other, why so many live lives of hunger, war, and injustice. All my writing is around solving this puzzle. This makes me feel weak, sometimes like I am nothing, because I feel that only politicians can answer these questions, not thinkers and philosophers. Politicians have an abundance of tools to help them make decisions and answer questions: money, power, agents, systems, and on and on.

The second part of the question, when I started writing, is delicate. At first I was not familiar with writing essays; I wrote stories and novels only, but I wrote articles after that, I summarized or commented on them. I first began to write in school at the age of thirteen, when my teacher asked us to write about a new topic every week. The subjects were traditional, such as describing a village, a natural sight, specific weather, and I thought these topics boring, so I decided instead to write from my imagination. I would write stories or summaries of books that I had read before. This infuriated my teachers, and they punished me. This is why I failed in my Arabic class as a boy. I did not, however, fail other topics like arithmetic. I was faced with some fortunate circumstances during my last secondary school year when a talented poet named Shathel Taqa came to teach our Arabic class. He chose a topic and asked us to write about it, but I did not adhere to the topic, as usual. Instead I summed up the last novel I had read, and assumed I would be punished, as usual. To my surprise, he gave me the highest grade in the class and told me, don’t adhere to the topics that I give, write what you love. That was the starting point of my writing.

How do you define “success” as a writer? What were your first successes as a writer?

When I write any novel or short story, I feel like a man whose horse is participating in a race with lots of other horses. I always feel very concerned, and often I fear that my horse will fail or fall apart before it reaches the finish line. The comments of some critics make me feel at ease. I feel comfortable with my degree of success as a writer. Serious critics and avid readers lead to success, and it seems those are few in the Arab world. For example, if a writer occupies a senior position, or he oversees a magazine or newspaper, many critics will praise his work regardless of whether his work deserves it or not. In return, he will allow them to publish in his newspaper or magazine. My first success as a writer was winning a short story prize in Mosul when I was eighteen. The newspaper was called Fata al-Iraq.

What was it like to be a writer in Iraq when you began your career? Was there a government-sponsored writers’ union in Iraq? If so, what role did it play? Were you a member? How independent were writers permitted to be in Iraq?

It is a struggle to gain notoriety as an author in Iraq. In the Arab world, if you want to publish a book you have to pay for its publication, or contribute to it. There are few publishing houses that will publish a book at their own expense. Getting your work published in a magazine or newspaper depends greatly on your relationship with the editor or the owner of the magazine. In Iraq, for example, an author was only allowed to publish a book if he or she was affiliated with a government party. This was the case in the era of Saddam and after. I have not been allowed to publish anything in Iraq from 1957 until now. All of my books have been published outside of Iraq in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE, and Egypt. I submitted a novel in 1970 entitled Rue Ben Barka, however censorship prevented its publication. I finally published this novel in Egypt in 1984, then twice in Jordan, in 1992 and 1993. A friend of mine submitted my book in a contest at the Ministry of Information in Iraq, and after some months it won the first prize. When the authorities discovered it, however, the book was banned and they canceled the delivery of my prize. I had been prevented from publishing until recently. The Writers Union in Iraq had supported Saddam’s regime and now supports the new authorities.

How has the experience of being a writer in Iraq changed as you have grown older?

My experience has been very painful. The coup authorities destroyed two of my novels, one of which was published, the second of which was a manuscript. Both these novels were lost while I was imprisoned for one year and one day.

I also lost three novels because I was arrested or had run away for fear of arrest. Censorship has prevented all of my novels from being published in Iraq, so far. I must publish my work outside Iraq at my expense. The publishing cost is high, because I have never belonged to a political party in Iraq. The government has made it a point to distort my reputation, which puts me in a state of permanent hostility. What hurts me is my constant feeling that I am in a lasting state of siege, and I feel I will likely die with fear, and that destroys my nerves.

What caused at least two of your novels to be banned in Iraq?

As I said earlier, not two, but all of them. As I mentioned, I was not able to publish any fiction books or short story collections in Iraq, because I did not belong to the party regime. Since the year 2003, I have been prohibited from publishing in Iraq because I announced that I am against the death penalty, ransom killings, and the displacement of innocent people and the stealing of public money.

When and why did you leave Iraq?

I left Iraq in 1985. They wanted me to cooperate with them and forced me to sign papers stating that I would be put to death if I were to ever open my mouth to criticize the regime. I returned in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I was working in Dubai at the time and my work frequently required me to visit Iraq. The government began to harass me in 1994, so in 1995 I moved my family permanently to Dubai. I have not seen Iraq since.

What writers have influenced you in the past?

Books that have impacted me considerably include, A Thousand and One Nights and Tales of Arab Heritage Before Islam. These novels translated life and intellectual depth into Arabic. In my view, the novel is real life, not what we see in reality. Reality without human feeling is dead, but literature brings back life. Look at ancient myths; they turn creation stories into something similar to animals and imaginary objects of light, water, mud, spirit, and devils. Our long journey began with nothing and ended with rockets sailing around the universe.

Who are the other writers you most admire today?

I admire many novels. I think that there are many good novels, but no one writer wrote everything well. I think it is enough for a writer to have one or two good works. Some of the writers I admire include Naguib Mahfouz, Marquez, Kafka, Turgenev, Graham Greene, Herman Hesse, Mishima, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Yasunari Kawabat, Jose Saramago, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hemingway and Steinbeck. I do not enjoy all of what they wrote; very great books are very few.

Can you describe your writing process? For example, when you wrote I Am the One Who Saw (Saddam City) did you begin with an outline? Did you utilize character sketches? Did you incorporate personal experiences or nonfiction stories? How long did it take you to write this book?

Yes, I created the outline or “skeletons” of the novel before I started, and then I wrote point by point. If I encountered an obstacle or difficulty, I stopped and worked on another story, since I’m always working on several novels at the same time. I began writing the novel Daughters of Jacob in the year 1973 and I completed it in 2006. I had been thinking of I Am the One Who Saw since the time when I was arrested, and I started writing it one week after they released me. So as not to forget the details, I completed it in six months, but bad luck struck this novel when censorship in Syria deleted two perfect chapters. I didn’t consider it a healthy novel, it was sick, and when it was selected by Dr. Ahmad Sadri to be translated into English, I told him that this work of fiction is disabled and incomplete. I asked him to choose another of my stories, but he insisted. When the company changed the title I suffered a lot, because I had been inspired to choose the title that I did. I said to myself, it will fail completely, but the readers loved it in English and Arabic, which I didn’t expect.

What is your opinion of the current American involvement in Iraq?

Before the intervention in Iraq began in 2003, a reporter from Chicago’s Channel 11 said to me, “You are opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein; no doubt you will support the U.S. intervention in Iraq.” I replied, “No. Intervention means warfare, and the war does not worry whether it kills innocents, children, the elderly, the sick or women.” Now you ask me the same question. I would like to tell you, I am a peaceful man, against violence, I want to see all the countries of the world abolish the death penalty, and the whole world live under a democratic system, with philosophers and intellectuals organized and elected by the people instead of corrupt politicians. A wounded child crying is a stab in the heart to everyone who creates war.

What do you think of the protests and uprisings that occur in the various countries of the Middle East today? What do you think the impact of these protests will have on the lives of writers in Iraq and the Middle East?

Perhaps the best news I saw and heard was that they changed the systems of Egypt and Tunisia in a peaceful manner, and this is what pleased me most, but unfortunately things went wrong in Libya. I hope that democracy prevails in Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and I hope this also applies to Iraq, but I want from the bottom of my heart to change the situation in Syria, precisely because I know the suffering of the people there, I visited Syria more than twenty times. I described people, who are suffering there and the situation of prisons in my last novel, Ashshahena, or, The Truck, which was published in Cairo in late 2010. The torture of prisoners in Syria is worse than it was in Saddam Hussein’s era.

In your opinion, is it acceptable to speak of Iraqi literature as a national literature (distinct from Jordanian, Syrian and Saudi literature), or should Iraqi literature be taught and discussed as a part of Arabic literature as a whole?

I feel that the literature of each Arab country like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon should be taught in public schools in all parts of the Arab world. They should be taught as Arabic literature, but they should say this poet is from Iraq, and this novelist is Egyptian, this is how they describe works from the region in all Arab magazines and newspapers. I did not read in the fifties or sixties the so-called literature of Iraq or Egypt, but critics in the seventies and eighties began chanting in newspapers, magazines, and undergraduate studies terms like: Literature of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, etc… I think that this phenomenon will be reinforced. There is a similar condition to it, in the countries of Latin America. There is Columbia’s distinct literature, Mexico’s literature, and Cuba’s literature, regardless of the language.

How have the political movements and conflicts inside Iraq in the last fifty years affected Iraqi literature?

The political movements have affected literature in Iraq more than any other Arab country. In the forties and fifties literature was affected by left-wing movements: communism, socialism, peace movements, etc. Then it changed. After the sixties, the biggest political influence was the Baath Party, and a large portion of writers repeated what that the Baath government said. The Party would withhold enormous rewards—the equivalent to ten times their salaries—if they did not write what they were told to write. The writers who did not support the Baath party, like me, were prevented from publishing and stayed in the shadows so nobody knows them.

What projects are you currently working on?

I recently finished a novel about the bombing of cities during the Iran-Iraq war. At that time I was in Basra, and the Iranians bombarded Basra every day with dozens of bombs. Iraqis bombed Iranian cities in response. In both countries, civilians were falling dead, and the ones who didn’t die were suffering. Ahmad Sadri, the interpreter of my novel I Am the One Who Saw has read it and has told me he will translate it this summer. I am putting the finishing touches on another work of fiction that occurs in the sixties, which I wrote in 1991.

How do your students at DePaul University compare to the students you knew in Iraq?

Of course, they are different. Here students grew up with freedom and peace, so you see those good, spontaneous, light-hearted, honest, and non-complicated minds. I love them also for being outspoken and innocent. They adopt positions that are anti-war and anti-discrimination between religions and races, and this always pushes me to ask myself: Why did such torture happen at Abu Ghraib? And why do we see the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The students in Iraq live under severe psychological pressure; they are afraid of death, threatened each moment, and so reluctant to express what they feel and afraid to show their opinions openly.

What are your hopes for your former students and friends back in Iraq?

The last time I was teaching in Iraq was in 1981. I had transferred to the main teaching department and was responsible for curriculum and official books. I had to oversee the development of writing of some of my ex-students. Some of them had become famous writers, but they unfortunately were Ba’athists. They had begun writing reports to Security about me and continued to attack me in print after I left Iraq. These attacks continued even until last year. In 2010, one of them attacked me in eight different articles in an Iraqi newspaper. My experience with them was so bad. They never invited me to any of the large number of literary festivals which have been held in Iraq since the sixties. Even now they behave this way because I refused to cooperate with the current Authorities.

What do you hope the future holds for Iraqi writers in the near term?

There will be no change in near term. Current politicians have imposed these classifications on Iraqi writers:

A – Literary collaborators with the former regime, who should be killed or prevented from publishing.
B – Writers who support the current ruling religious parties, and who enjoy tremendous wealth and are permitted to publish anything they’d like, no matter how trivial or superficial.
C – Writers who oppose both of the two regimes, who are mostly outside Iraq, like me.

To illustrate this reality, the writers who support the current ruling religious parties in Iraq issued a list of more than thousand writers who should be killed because they cooperated with Saddam’s regime. As a result of this, some were indeed killed, while others fled.

I have written several articles in Arabic newspapers published in London and websites that reject this bloody and dark trend, but my writing is used against me. My name has been added to other lists of writers who should be killed. Since the occupation began, I have wanted to visit Iraq one last time. However, I’m hesitant to go back there because of these lists. Literature in Iraq will not flourish unless it can be removed from beneath the power and the control of the regime. Even now, writers in Iraq depend on state aid to publish their work. They are poor, and cannot afford publishing’s costs inside Iraq or abroad.

Do you see the circumstances in Iraq changing in the next five years?

I am kind of optimistic, and I would love to see things improve in the future. It does not matter if it takes two years or two decades, but I want to see Iraq be rid of the influence of domination and the behavior of the religious parties and the criminal supervision of their militias.

Religious parties have destroyed Iraq, they’ve looted its wealth and have led the country to the bottom of the corruption in the world. They have stolen by force a fortune of more than 500 billion dollars, while at the same time 42 percent of the Iraqi people live by picking through trash. Still, I have great faith that Iraqi literature can be on an equal level with literature in other countries after Iraq overcomes these criminals and their influence.

Further Links & Resources:

Visit PBS station WTTW’s Online Arts page for a glimpse into the political turmoil that Mahmoud Saeed endured, and which inspired his novel Saddam City. You can find the brief write-up and video here.

Explore the University of Syracuse Press to learn more about their forthcoming translation of Mahmoud Saeed’s novel, The World Through the Eyes of Angels. The book has been translated by Samuel Salter, Zahra Jishi, and Rafah Abuinnab.

You can also browse through Syracuse University Press’s full selection of Middle Eastern Literature in Translation, which is “is designed to make writing from the languages of the Middle East (Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, but also Kurdish, Urdu, Turkmen, Uzbek, etc.) available to English-speaking readers. The books in the series include short stories, novels, poetry, memoirs, and works on literary criticism.”

Founded in 1998, London-based Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature devoted much of their Issue 37 to twenty-one Iraqi writers, many of whom had never appeared in English before. From the magazine’s website:

Banipal is an independent literary magazine publishing contemporary authors and poets from all over the Arab world in English translation, and was founded in 1998 by Margaret Obank and Iraqi author Samuel Shimon. The three issues a year present established and new Arab authors and poets in English for the first time through poems, short stories or excerpts from novels, and include author interviews, profiles and book reviews. Each issue is well illustrated with author photographs with the full colour covers featuring prominent Arab artists.

Banipal’s latest—Issue 40—is devoted to Libyan fiction. Chock-full of short stories, novel excerpts, poetry and commentary, uncover the astonishing range of Arab literature through this wonderful project of translation.

Woman to Woman: An Interview with Mary Gaitskill

Emily McLaughlin — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:00:22 +0000

Mary Gaitskill was born in Kentucky and received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Award. Her first book of stories, Bad Behavior, was published in 1988. She is also the author of two other collections, Because They Wanted To and Don’t Cry, and two novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories (1993 and 2006) and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). The 2002 film Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, is based on her story of the same title from Bad Behavior.

Gaitskill is also the recipient of many literary accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for Because They Wanted To. In 2005, her novel Veronica was a National Book Award nominee, as well as a National Book Critics Circle finalist. She is currently a 2010 Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.

In February of 2011, Mary Gaitskill returned to her Alma Mater as part of the University of Michigan’s Zell Visiting Writers Series. I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon in her company in Ann Arbor, including a lunch with MFA students, a roundtable discussion in the Hopwood Room, and this one-on-one conversation. Listening to Mary in person had a similar effect to rereading her books: I walked away from each a wiser woman, with a deepened understanding of and curiosity for the world I’m traveling through and the people I’m passing by.

Interview:

Emily McLaughlin: Because we’re sitting here in Angell Hall, at the University of Michigan, my first question is this: Have you gone back to read your winning undergraduate Hopwood Manuscript in the Hopwood Room?

Mary Gaitskill: I have. It was a few years ago. I think my story “The Woman Who Knew Judo” holds up pretty well as a young story. The others are a bit embarrassing. But that’s okay.

I went back and read it. The three stories had all of your trademarks: the steady hand of your sentences, the humor, the intelligence. Your voice and style were very apparent. Did you try to publish those stories?

I tried to publish “The Woman Who Knew Judo” and got nowhere with it.

Are you able to remember writing the initial drafts and where you were emotionally at that time?

Well, it was a terrible time. I remember that. I entered the Hopwood a number of times and didn’t win.

Wow.

They were probably bad stories. I don’t remember them anymore. Though there was a story of mine, “Something Better Than This,” that was published [in the late 1970s] in a small Canadian magazine called Branching Out. An online publication called Fictionaut recently approached me about republishing that first story of mine and so I gave it to them. It’s actually pretty good. It’s young, certainly not how I would write now. A lot of the stories I wrote in Ann Arbor were really bad. I try to remember this when I’m teaching because most of my stories would not have stood out to me at all as a teacher. They don’t show exceptional promise. What they do show is someone who is aware of style, and most students are not. Literary style is quite important to me; it’s not superficial, it’s the means through which your content becomes known. I clearly had a sense of style and was trying to work with it. But other than that, I wrote pretty average undergraduate work.

Do you remember any point or instant in your life when you felt you had something special? That you were gifted?

I knew that writing was the only thing I cared about outside of my personal life. I knew it was the only thing I was good at. I did briefly experiment when I was a teenager with painting. I left home at an early age and there was simply no way I could afford painting. I couldn’t afford canvas and paint and they were bulky. For writing I only needed a notebook and pen. I didn’t even have a typewriter. So that was part of it. But I wasn’t told I was talented very much. In fact, when I was here there was a particular contest which, unlike the Hopwood, you needed the recommendation of a professor to even enter. So I went to my creative writing teacher and he said, “No, you’re not good enough.” And I said, “Oh, okay.”

Did you have any contact with him in the future?

Yeah. When I came to read here the first time, back in ‘89, he was elderly at that point, and he actually came in a wheelchair. He was clearly so happy I had done well. He wasn’t trying to be mean, he was simply telling me the truth. He didn’t think I was good enough.

There are so many students who want to write. As a teacher, do you ever believe in telling any of them, “Maybe you should try something else, this isn’t for you”?

No, I’ve never said that because I don’t think I know that. As a teacher, you just don’t know enough, especially if you are only with them for a semester. Someone can write twenty bad stories and then they write a good one; people can potentially develop very fast when they’re young. On top of that, my idea of what’s good or not may be irrelevant—a lot gets published that I don’t like at all.

Avery Hopwood

Also, I was going to mention, the first couple of times I entered the Hopwood, I wrote stories about strippers. I wrote some family stories, too, but with the stripper stories, I think people thought they were nonsense because how could I possibly know what I was talking about? So I began to look at the Hopwood stories that won. I went to the Hopwood room and I saw what they were about. I actually calculated. I thought, these middle-aged judges aren’t going to want to read something from a little girl writing about strippers. The stories that won were about wholesome families, childhood realizations, and moments of truth. I thought, “I can do that.” [Laughter.] What’s funny too is one of my stories about a bunch of strippers was based on an event that actually happened. I kept that one, so I can objectively say it’s bad, artistically it stinks, but the dialogue and events were real. I workshopped this story and everyone thought it was unbelievable, especially the teacher who kept saying he couldn’t believe strippers would say these things or act this way.

When did you first publicly come out to the literary world about the stripping?

Immediately. I was asked to write a biographical statement, and I just included it. And, of course, that was really seized upon. It was probably a little stupid of me.

Do you think your career would have gone differently if you were not so forthcoming?

I think it would have been better if I had not stated it as one of the first things I said about myself when I appeared. I think it would’ve been fine to talk about as time went on. A friend had said to me, “Wait, you can talk about that when you’re fifty.” And I should’ve listened. But in the long run, I don’t think it mattered that much. Now, it’s almost become accepted. But at the time, it was still a bit taboo. Yet I knew so many women and girls who did things like that so I didn’t think it should be this horrific secret.

Are you able to rattle off all of your stories and character names?

No. Well, I haven’t written that much, actually. I’m not that prolific. I can remember all of my stories, but I often don’t remember the point of view or names or what I intended. The things I was thinking when I wrote them are harder to remember.

Do your characters in various stories overlap to you? Are they a few characters voices filling out all of the stories? Do you think that matters?

I think all writers have their themes and characters that one way or another they return to and develop. If you look at Nabokov, how many times does he have an older man and a bewitching young girl? Not in every book, but in many. Look at Bellow’s vulgarity-beleaguered heroes, or Updike’s sexy family men. With Virginia Woolf, many of her books are about this sort of switching of consciousness and taking a very small moment and unraveling it as far as it will go.

It seems fitting to talk about your story “College Town,” which appears in Don’t Cry, since we’re here in Ann Arbor. You originally wrote this story around the time you were writing “Orchid,” which has similar characters and was collected in Because They Wanted To. What was it like to go back and work on “College Town” more than twenty years later? Does writing ever get harder?

Surprisingly easy in that case; I didn’t even have to rewrite it that much. I edited it more than I rewrote it because there was some clunky stuff in there. It was a fairly simple process. However, in answer to the question, does writing ever get harder, yes, it does. It never stops being hard and if you try something you haven’t done before, that likely will be harder than before too, because there’s nothing to fall back on.

In your story “The Agonized Face,” did you feel you were defending anything? What was your intention for the reception of that story? It’s such a complex story.

I was trying to hit as many facets of it that I could. It’s based on an experience I had at a festival in Toronto. The whole thing struck me as so crazy; it was kind of a media bazaar—which was wonderful in a way; God bless Toronto for giving that much media attention to writers—which attached personas to people in a way that was unintentionally grotesque and which then got amplified by people semi-consciously trying to live up to these images. If your persona gets very intensely attached to (ahem) subjects like prostitution and violence, or, say, war, well, those subjects arouse a lot of emotion. About the story, I had no intention for how it would be received because I can’t control that. In terms of myself, I was trying to comically come at it from as many angles as I could.

The feminist author in the story has obviously affected the reporter, in that she made her stop and formulate her own opinions, which cleverly forces the reader to think, “What do I really make of this situation?” Was this a device? Were you intending to get readers thinking about feminist issues?

I never think about provoking thought, but I’m glad if I do. I try not to think about readers because if I do, I get confused. I get out of my own perception in a way. I had a concern about that story, that the narrator sounded too crazy. It turns out people didn’t feel that way about her, and I’m glad. But while feminism was certainly part of it, I was focused on the media madhouse aspect more—how feminism is perceived has to do with that too!

Did you give her a daughter to…

…to make her normal? Yes! Also, having a daughter makes the subjects of prostitution and rape far more loaded for her.

Have you ever received backlash from mothers? Is that another reason you gave this narrator a daughter?

The daughter in the story gives the narrator a kind of grounding, because otherwise she seemed like a disembodied voice. I wanted to give some sense of where she was coming from, and why these things meant so much to her. Otherwise she just seemed like a maniacal talking voice. I would not say I’ve felt a backlash. At times I have felt—this is very vague—but I have felt that women with children sometimes consider me outside the realm of the normal. That they might read me for entertainment, but that they can’t relate to me. I don’t know how true that is, but occasionally I’ve felt it.

How do you carry the influence of alcohol so well through that story and others? Your story “Turgor” also comes to mind.

I’ve been drunk! Part of the thing about making the narrator of “The Agonized Face” drunk, too, was because I was afraid of her sounding nutty. Personally, I can think that way without being drunk, but I thought in this case the reader would cut her more slack for thinking kooky while drunk.

It also generates more empathy for her.

Yeah. Also, she never gets a chance to be out in the world. So she’s a bit out of her comfort zone and thinking out of the box already. Plus feeling a bit defensive. I’ve only once actually written something when I was drunk. Normally, I think it’s a bad idea. You can’t think as clearly. I was at a writing colony, and they are wonderful, but they can also be kind of scary, because you feel like, Okay, I’m here, I’ve got to get work done. I’d gone three days without being able to work and I was getting into a complete panic. So one night after dinner, I drank too much and I stomped back to my cabin and thought, “Goddamnit, I will write!” And actually, it wasn’t bad. I used it in Veronica. The character is kind of drunk, she breaks up with this guy and meets him at the benefit, and he’s there and they go in the bathroom and have sex, and he takes her home in a cab and hands her her underpants.

That’s a good tidbit of knowledge. Another thing you do so well is create these sort of invisible plotlines. Sort of like a good drink. You don’t really taste it until it hits you. So many of the shifts in your stories are internal. For example, Dolores in “College Town” just sits and sorts through rantings and flashbacks. How do you squeeze a plot out of this? Do you do this by keeping the reader wondering, “What will be revealed here that only Mary Gaitskill can reveal at the end of a story?” Sort of like dangling your carrot?

[Laughter.] Well, actually, I don’t like it that I write so much like that. I need to develop a stronger ability to be in the world of action. Interiority is something you cannot do in a film, so it’s a strength for a fiction writer, but I think you can lean on it too much. It works beautifully sometimes, but I think I need to develop an ability to develop action more.

The major shift in “College Town” is that Dolores can’t orgasm in the beginning and then at the end, she can.

That’s big! [Laughter.] Though I wouldn’t say it’s all about that. She’s making peace with the hell in her, integrating her past and present through the daily things she experiences through the people around her. Also integrating how she is privately with how she is publicly, through very quotidian experiences.

Yeah. You’re an expert technician, able to clearly sustain a reader’s attention paragraph to paragraph, line by line, through darting thoughts, time jumps, musings. Has this always come naturally or do you work at that?

It comes naturally and I work at it. The natural part is in how I perceive; the work comes in conveying that non-verbal perception in words. It was difficult in Veronica because there were so many time jumps. It was almost like a palimpsest, rather than flashbacks—it was like one time bleeding through another. Sometimes I changed the time frame by decades in one paragraph or even in one sentence. But mostly, it’s not so difficult. “The Girl on The Plane”: line breaks. In that story, that’s enough to let you know you’ve changed the time frame.

How do you decide which line of dialogue a character will speak or say? They could often be interchanged. Do you switch thoughts and dialogue in revision? Does it come organically as well?

I honestly don’t recall that. I think its usually pretty clear to me, though sometimes I go over and think, “No, that’s enough to keep it as a thought, the character wouldn’t say that.”

I would love to see your characters speak to each other in their intelligent, electric way on the stage. Have you ever written a play?

I tried. I was terrible at it.

Do you have any interest in writing a screenplay?

I don’t think I’m any good at it. Its such a different technique. Yes, I’m good with dialogue, but I also rely very heavily on interiority, and a lot of how I make things happen is by describing things in the room. I did write a screenplay once. I was commissioned to write it. Part of the reason it didn’t work was it wasn’t my idea. I took it because I needed the money, but I thought it was really a screwball idea. It started with a gang rape. It was supposed to be this working-class student at Harvard and an upper-class guy falls for her but he’s embarrassed by his love for her. His evil friend lures her to the frat house and they rape her. This is an early scene. We are supposed to believe she then becomes a famous artist and the gang rape is romantic somehow. And then she takes revenge on them by having sex with them later in life. It was impossible, I thought. The person who wanted it said, “I see it as a combination of The Way We Were and Fatal Attraction!”

Do you think of yourself as a funny writer?

Sometimes, yeah. “The Agonized Face” is definitely a funny story in my mind. So is “Secretary,” actually. Very dark comedy there, but there is an element of comedy.

Do you think of yourself as a funny person?

Sometimes. [Laughter.] If I’m with people I feel relaxed with.

In one of your earlier stories, “Comfort,” the narrator Daniel says, “I always knew there was something wrong with [his girlfriend] Jackie.” How do you allow a reader to see that something seems off about her, but to not be able to identify exactly what? Yet I feel so sorry for her, for both of them. How do you control what the reader thinks of your characters with such command?

Thank you for the compliment, but I’m not trying to control what readers think at all. I don’t think that kind of control is desirable or even possible. People think things about my stories that shock me, and it’s uncomfortable. That is how it is in life—you can’t control people’s reactions and that’s as it should be. But about the characters in “Comfort,” they are both a bit lost and just ill-suited for each other. Yes, there is something stunted about her emotionally, but he’s also not the person she could connect with.

In “Secretary,” Debbie’s boss kind of points out to her that she’s stunted, or emotionally blocked. What’s that process like, creating that block? Sometimes the reader wants the character to act in ways that we know they cannot.

If you workshopped that, people would probably say you need to know more about the male character in that story. He’s like a cipher. He just kind of exists to do things to her. We don’t know where he’s coming from other than he just gets off on doing things to her. For the purposes of that story, I don’t think it’s wrong. It would be interesting to see his point of view, but it would take away some of its power. There’s something about it being all one direction that’s intense, like a big wave. Besides, it’s about her. Part of her experience is she has no idea what’s going on with him. She’s on the receiving end of all of this stuff, which she has no grip on, yet which she finds herself responding to. That’s what makes it a powerful story. And I feel free to say that because it’s one of my favorite stories. And I almost didn’t put that story in the book, by the way.

Good thing you did. Reviewers use the word mentally unstable—

They do? About my characters or about me? [Laughter.]

No, no. About your characters! Do you feel your characters have as many psychological problems as readers seem to think they do? They get a lot of attention for being unstable, bizarre, or weird.

I think most of them are not that weird. I have some characters I’d perhaps describe as mentally ill. I mean, some of them are strange. Dorothy in Two Girls Fat and Thin is a strange person, but her life has been strange. She’s reacting to the circumstances of her life. People are shaped by events, and often what looks strange to an outsider would make a lot of sense if you could see what they were responding to. The family in “Secretary” is a little strange. The father is, anyway, but in a really human way that is both pathetically sad and absurd-funny. Dolores is mentally ill, but not totally, she’s not crazy. She’s in a lot of pain, which, again, is very human. And very absurd, the way she handles it, but also brave.

Just because someone’s different doesn’t mean disturbed.

It doesn’t shock me that people describe my characters that way, although mentally ill is a little strong. In the context of their lives, they’re not that strange. People are strange. The strangeness hits you when you see it written down, but people are weird. Readers sometimes react to something almost too strongly because secretly they know they’re weird. We fail to see the obvious craziness every day, especially if it’s socially sanctioned craziness. Shows like The Bachelor and Want To Marry A Millionaire—OMFG.

You create so much empathy for all of your characters. Can you think of a character you couldn’t create empathy for?

Yeah, I’m sure there are such characters.

If “Secretary” was written by a male, do you think it would be perceived as more entertaining than shocking?

No. I think men are judged more harshly for writing sex scenes.

Really?

Unless things have changed. Do you know a book by Nicholson Baker, The Fermata? It’s about a guy who can stop time. The guy, instead of pursuing world domination or stealing lots of money, he takes women’s clothes off and masturbates on them. He doesn’t rape them and he cleans everything up, and sometimes if he really likes her, if he knows her, he’ll write some porn and leave it where she can find it. Then he’ll come in while she’s reading it, and he’ll stop time again. [Laughter.] I thought it was really funny, but, my God, it got attacked. People just jumped all over him. They thought he was a pervert, a rapist, absolutely filthy. And if a woman had written something this, I think they would’ve been treated much better.

That makes me feel better as a female writer.

[Laughter.] Well, unless it’s changed again. That was back in the nineties. Women are allowed to go places that men won’t be allowed to go. For example, a Japanese writer named Natsuo Kirino, the last scene in her book Out is incredibly violent. I won’t tell you the whole thing, but there is a sex scene in the end, it’s really intense sadomasochism and it’s very romantic. It ends in one of them being killed, but they’re saying, “I love you, I love you.” If a man wrote that, he would be pilloried. He’d be ridden out of a town on a rail. Reviewers were shocked by it, but I didn’t see any condemnation. One British reviewer said, “I don’t dare comment on what I think of this absurd last scene, in deference to the gender of the writer.” Meaning if it was a man, he would’ve clobbered it. And he was making that clear.

I don’t know actually if that should make you feel better though. It is good to have freedom wherever you can, but I think women are allowed more in this case because the body is considered the realm of feminine authority. Also male sexuality is taken more seriously for obvious reasons; a man writing a bloody sadomasochism scene feels more dangerous because men murder women on the regular. Basically, it’s coding what’s allowable in terms of gender on the same traditional criteria. Though somebody like Kirino really pushes it. Most women still seem to fall back on charm and she doesn’t do that for an instant—and good for her.

We were speaking earlier about your profound essay in Harper’s Magazine “On Not Being A Victim.” You undercut Camille Paglia in this essay for stating that if any girl who goes alone into a frat house and proceeds to tank up is cruising for a gang bang, and if she doesn’t know that, then she’s an idiot. We’re on a college campus surrounded by fraternity houses—can you talk some more about your reaction to Camille’s stance?

Camille Paglia / photo credit: Misa Martin

Hey, let’s not call her by her first name! I think Paglia was saying that girls are more vulnerable and if they are not aware of that and if they don’t act accordingly, they’re stupid. It’s true. Girls are more vulnerable. However, in most cases, you don’t have to walk into a room assuming that if you’re drunk and there are mostly men in the room, you’re going to be raped. It’s just putting it too simply and much too harshly to then be calling people stupid. Its actually not realistic. I mean, sometimes, yes. I remember years ago, I had neighbors. They weren’t rapists, I don’t think. One early evening in summer, I was walking home past their open door and one of them said, “Hey, Mary, come in, we’re having a party.” I looked in. It was all dark, there were no women there, they were all smashed. And I got a bad feeling, so I smiled and said, “No, thanks.” I probably wouldn’t have been raped, but I easily could have been in a situation that was unpleasant. Okay, it could even have turned into rape. But it’s also true that I’ve been in that situation—all guys—and there was no danger. In most cases, you don’t have to walk in assuming that if you’re drunk they’re all going to wind up on top of you.

It’s interesting, I’ve known women who have fantasies about gang rape, and I know they don’t want to be raped—it’s like they want to have some control over the possibility through fantasy. My feeling is it’s not a masochistic fantasy, it’s more like, I can take all of you. I can satisfy all of you and still have more left over. I am powerful. There’s so much in me. With men, I’ve gotten the impression maybe it’s about fear. Because with all of them together, they can take her.

Collectively, yeah.

But I think it’s also about bonding with each other, like having a sexual experience together. Like getting drunk together. Sharing this woman.

When I teach, I see insecurity, pain, and confusion about understanding sex in a lot of young female students here, in their writing. Do you have any advice for these girls?

It seems to have gotten actually worse. I’m not sure if I can speak to girls now because it’s a really different world and it’s been influenced by the proliferation of heavily sexual images, and things that have always been true have gotten more so. For instance, there were always ideals of beauty. When I was young, it was much broader, what was considered attractive. But now it’s very rigid. There’s a certain ideal, and if you’re not it, you’re shit. And almost nobody is it, and even people who are it, don’t feel good enough.

It’s not just about appearance either—I meet women in their twenties who are in an absolute panic because they aren’t “successful,” and they have a very high standard of what that is supposed to be—the young women who have expressed this to me have all been more successful than I was at their age. Also, they criticize themselves mercilessly if they haven’t got a boyfriend, and it doesn’t seem to be about being lonely as much as feeling like there must be something wrong with them if they are single. I have been just plain revolted to hear celebrity women publicly worrying that they are the only one in their family to remain unmarried, or that they haven’t got a baby—who expects men to talk this kind of shit?

Women have always been prone to feeling like that, I think, and that isn’t about appearance. Men of course suffer from this stuff too. But it gets heightened when one’s appearance is so relentlessly focused on as an indicator of worth, and that is much, much more extreme now for girls and starting at a younger age. My nieces were obsessed with their looks at the age of seven; I didn’t even know about it when I was seven. I mentioned being a stripper. When I was doing that in the ’70s, only a handful of women who worked that way were really beautiful. They weren’t all tall, thin blondes with breasts of a certain size. There were people who were completely flat-chested, and people who were actually kind of fat. There were women of all shapes and sizes, and some of the most popular ones weren’t even pretty.

But the men were attracted to them.

Yeah. The men liked them anyway because they were open to how the women expressed their sexuality and personality; what they really liked was the feeling that the woman liked them. Whereas now, they all look the same, and they’re all on stage at once, so there’s not so much room for individuality. They’ve all got fake tits, or many of them do. I guess I should admit that my knowledge is limited because I’ve only been in maybe two strip clubs in the last ten years. But in both cases I was really struck by the uniformity, that they were all trying to be the same thing.

It’s a dumb thing to bring up, maybe, because most people aren’t strippers. But compared to what it was like when I was young, it’s just gotten much more rigid what’s expected of young women. Supposedly, they have more opportunities and they’re more equal. Yet they are made to feel worse about themselves. Women are in the army now—big difference, right? Yet there’s a popular TV show on, “Military Wives” or “Army Wives” or whatever—like being a wife is a drama! Can you imagine a show called “Military Husbands,” advertised by a perfectly coiffed young man wistfully staring?

Then there’s the phenomenon of porn being everywhere via the Internet. About a year ago I had a conversation after a story a student had turned in. She was saying that men are not interested in their girlfriends anymore because of porn, and how they expect their girlfriends to be like porn stars. I just couldn’t believe it. I said, “That’s absurd, porn is an act, men want a real response from women.” Well, the cover story in New York Magazine a few weeks ago says I’m wrong, that men are obsessed with and addicted to Internet porn and the way porn stars look and behave to the point that they have trouble responding to real women. The article didn’t say that men actually want their girlfriends to behave like porn stars–in fact, they don’t-but that they almost can’t respond to “real” anymore. Which is a nightmare. I mean, it is New York Magazine, so consider the source. Still, it’s creepy if its half-true.

They can’t get turned on by the live woman in front of them? That’s scary.

And it’s worse for the men, really. It’s like they’re being manipulated to the point where they’ve lost themselves. For the women, though, that is really hideous. If you can’t even be yourself in the most intimate physical way with your boyfriend or husband, that is insecurity on a scale that is going to subvert everything about you.

Do you feel any regret or embarrassment when you look back? With life? With writing?

In my life, yes. But, that’s life. In writing, no. Well, except I do wish I’d written more.

All writers deal with loneliness at some point in their lives. How did you overcome those younger times when you felt bruised inside?

I gradually learned how to be more comfortable in the world. It was harder than I can describe. But eventually I learned to be a better friend to myself.

What types of female characters would you like to see more of in the future?

Never thought about it. I’m not sure I could define it. I do hope that women become better, but I don’t know if I could say particular qualities they need to have in order to do that. Except that they need to forget about being charming or pretty on the page. Charm and prettiness are irrelevant in art and in heavy doses they are deadly.

Do you think there’s a male equivalent to Mary Gaitskill writing right now?

That’s an interesting thought. If there was, I might not have read him, but I don’t know how you would make that comparison.

One of our professors here, Nicholas Delbanco, gave a reading and talk last week from his new book, Lastingness, about artists producing work in the face of aging. What do you think if you think of mortality?

Well, I do think about lastingness. I think I have a good shot to last for maybe fifty years or something like that. Lasting longer than that, I’m not sure. I would like to. Especially because I don’t have children, I like the idea of being part of a group of writers that leaves something behind. I know how meaningful it was to me when I was young to read, oh gosh, not even writers I consider that great now, but Colette, say—she was one of the first literary writers I loved and really responded to. D.H. Lawrence was another one. Flannery O’Connor, too, whom I consider great. It was the most amazing thing to be that young and living in such a different world and yet to be reading people describing a life that was so different from mine, but which I could still respond to.

A way to propel yourself into the future.

And to connect with the past and to feel a continuum. If I could do that for people—and I do mean people, not just women—that would be a justification for my existence. I think there’s real beauty and hope in that. My fear is that it just won’t matter anymore, or that people won’t read, or that the world will actually be destroyed, or that I just won’t last that long. But even fifty years is pretty good.

How does it feel to be so successful?

I don’t consider I am that successful. I’m grateful for what I have. I have a degree of success and I’m happy about it, but I think I could do better.

And what’s next?

I’m working on a couple of novels now. They are both hard.

One last simple question: Do you feel you’ve affected women?

Yes. [Smiling.]

Further Links and Resources:

Read some of Gaitskill’s work online:
- “The Other Place” in The New Yorker
- “Something Better Than This” in Fictionaut
- “College Town” in Vice
Read Gaitskill’s essay “On Not Being A Victim” in Harper’s Magazine (unfortunately, for Harper’s subscribers only)
Find Gaitskill’s collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry, and her novels, Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica, at an indie bookstore near you