My Good Intentions

I leave tomorrow to attend AWP Chicago, and my plan had been to post some ruminations this week on the subject of networking among writers: Does it do any good? Is it distasteful? A distraction from the real and actual hard work of writing? Occasionally useful and necessary? The subject seemed apropos, because I always feel a lot of anxiety about going to this conference. The atmosphere in those hotel lobbies and conference rooms and in the aisles of the book fair is just so charged with everyone's desires and insecurities, and I tend to believe--irrationally, I know--that I'm the only one who isn't having a good time, who isn't booked up with exciting social engagements, who tosses and turns each night with that one extra drink sloshing in her belly and a thousand frantic thoughts cycling through her mind about stupid things said and opportunities missed. 


To this end, I sent questions on the subject of networking to various writers, and several of them got back to me with some pretty insightful responses that were all pretty convincing even though they often contradicted each other outright. Such as:


"I think agents flourish because writers are such a selfish bunch, unwilling to help each other.  The fact is that they just help those who are in their graduate program or other invited group where it's kind of mandated that they help.... I'm limited by my lack of contacts but I'm doing my best, and it's amazing how much you can do.  I've seen how much I can do with very little so I begrudge those with a lot who won't do just a little for someone else.  To me it's a sign not just of selfishness but of utter mediocrity."


"Though I know that connections, to some degree or another, are helpful in finding success in any field, regardless of whether or not such a superficial relationship is mutually beneficial, I find myself disgusted by 'networking' (the very word leaves me cold.  What are we--computers?) and cannot, absolutely cannot, enter a situation for the sole purpose of such.  I mean I'm physically incapable of it.  Perhaps I would be more successful if I weren't."


"Maybe there was a time when a writer networking was a little like a lawyer advertising on the side of a bus. I don't think that's the case anymore. Could be just sour grapes on my part, but with every book published that's written by or about Sarah Palin , the industry seems to be more about marketplace than merit, and so it only makes sense for writers  as producers of commodities not so unlike any other widget to employ the tools of the market to get notices. But that's only for publication. I guess on the other hand, most writers I know yearn for community for support, reinforcement...a kick in the pants."


"I think that the best kind of networking happens at conferences. I met my agent at a conference, and I often meet editors at AWP who will ask me to send something their way. Sometimes these turn into publications. Often, they don't. But it's helpful to build a roster of editors and publishers who are interested in your career and your work. It helps you feel like you're not writing and sending your work out into a void. If nothing else, such networking gives you some sense of audience."


I also got comments like the one that follows, which were so refreshing and helpful because my own view of this issue tends to be a little myopic; that is, perhaps I have the luxury to sneer at networking because my education and job have automatically provided me with a network:


"As I never had a creative writing mentor and I didn't do graduate work in creative writing, building a network of other writers was absolutely vital for me to progress in my career."   


And other comments made me think differently about what networking might even mean: how it can provide something other than crass tit-for-tat:


"Personally, I’ve never been in a position to offer another writer anything more than information about workshops I know about, or an opportunity to join one of the writing groups I participate in. A writing group is a scarce resource, in a small-potatoes kind of way, and it can be stressful to have members who don’t play well with others, so I have to like and trust someone to invite him or her in."

What I wanted to do with all this feedback was create an artful little essay on the subject, with plenty of personal anecdotes and frank disclosure. I have a story that I sometimes share with my students, when I sense they're feeling blue, about the time I paid several hundred bucks to attend a writing workshop helmed by a Famous Editor, got my ass handed to me, and burst dramatically into tears before running out of the room. Well, that's basically the story, minus the entertaining hyperbolic flourishes. Perhaps I'll  post another day on the subject and include them.

Nor have I represented above the full range of responses I received. Each of the writers I quote said much more than what I've included, and what I've left out would offer fuller, more complex pictures of how most writers struggle with understanding what "professionalization" means to us, if anything.

So this isn't the post I had hoped to write. I almost failed to post anything at all, because I'm stressed about traveling and behind in several other tasks, but I hated the thought of so many good perspectives on the subject of networking just languishing in my archived email, especially after the writers put off their own important work to attend to this favor for me.

If you happen to be attending AWP, I'll be on a reading panel Thursday afternoon at 3:30:

R219. The Kentucky Women Writers Conference Celebrates Thirty-Three Years (Nikky Finney, Lynnell Edwards, Lisa Williams, Holly Goddard Jones) Honoré Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, Lobby Level The Kentucky Women Writers Conference is the longest-running literary festival of women in the nation. Born in the early days of Women’s Studies (1979) and encompassing generations of feminism, it has featured nearly 300 writers in the decades since, from Alice Walker to Joyce Carol Oates and three U.S. poet laureates. Celebrating this longevity are recent conference alumna with Kentucky ties, whose work demonstrates the profound impact such an event can have on a region’s literary history.

Literary Fraternity

In my first semester of graduate school, I took a class called Forms of Fiction with the man who would eventually become my thesis director, Lee K. Abbott. Lee’s a brilliant teacher—I’ve been thinking about that fact recently, because he’s in his last year of teaching before retirement—and I steal from him for my own classes all the time. This past week I used a reading he assigned me in that class eight years ago: the introduction to an anthology of fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times, published in Esquire back in 1973, when Gordon Lish was editor. This intro, written by Tom Wolfe, is a pretty entertaining document, and I feel moved to share a couple of quotes from it:

“The rules of the game in modern fiction changed decisively during the 1960s. In that brief interval the American short story moved from the vulgar stage to the poetic stage, in terms of cultural evolution, and the abruptness of the transition all but cost it its life….The upshot has been a type of short story that exhibits all the daring—and all the difficulties—of formalism. By the very nature of his task, the formalist is no longer writing for a vague ‘public.’ He is not out to entertain or arrest attention in the usual way. He is writing for a fraternity not merely of other writers but also of those readers who are sophisticated enough to appreciate form, technique, and the state of the art, who are able to read new work against the background of what has already been tried” (xx–xxii).

Stephen King talked about this same issue more recently in the introduction he wrote to Best American Short Stories 2007. You can read the intro in its entirety here if you missed the first time around, but he basically discusses the problem of writers writing for other writers, and reading not for the thrill of a story but for the sake of sizing up the marketplace, figuring out what sells. King calls it “copping-a-feel reading.”

You know, I’d like to write for a “vague ‘public’” rather than a fraternity, and I’d like to “entertain or arrest attention in the usual way.” The simple response to that is, of course, “Well, do it,” and I’ve tried. I tried it with my story collection, which seemed for the most part to only reach other writers, aspiring writers, and academics, and I guess I should just be happy that the fraternity ensures even that much of an audience. I’ve tried it again with my first novel, and maybe it stands a better chance, since (for now) general readers will still pick up a novel for entertainment’s sake. But who knows?

Wolfe’s Esquire introduction ends this way:

“Nihilism and Cosmic Anxiety are, after all, accepted literary conventions today, and conventions in literature are like conventions anywhere else: they are marks of grace and propriety, not wounds of the soul. Between the lines of this book, I am happy to report, I do not detect the slightest shred of real despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving, instead. I detect a group of fairly young writers, in good animal health, with high ambitions and cheery dispositions, people who have kept up their credit ratings and who buy their pillow shams at main-stem department stores and head for the French wine rack in the back of the liquor store and maintain god spirits and faith in the future, and who vote even in the primary….bringing, as ever, the rich and traditional glow of culture to those readers who are truly literate and sophisticated enough to belong to the noble fraternity” (xxviii). 

You can just feel the scorn radiating off of that quote, can’t you? I read it and think, “Guilty.” Almost forty years after the essay’s publication, here I am, me and my cohort: fairly young, healthy, ambitious, cheery (oh, basically—I understand it’s required of me, and I more or less deliver). The rest of the description fits in a general way, too. I don’t think that Wolfe, of all people, was trying to argue that only old, tormented, human wrecks can write good fiction, or have the agency to deal with subjects like despair, but I do think he’s pointing out an absurdity that occasionally troubles me—that troubles me more as I get older. Why’s a nice gal like me writing such dark, sad stories? Why do any of us? Most of the young writers I know are nice, and they have nice husbands and wives, and they toil very earnestly in university positions that they know they’re damned lucky to have. They have nice houses, and they drive Subarus and the like. Of course, I don’t know the private sadnesses of their lives, any more than they know the private sadnesses of mine. But it makes me groan a little to think of us—our hardened rural characters and wild landscapes and acts of sudden violence—snug in various versions of the middle class, going to AWP to pontificate on panels with topics such as “Writing Acts of Violence.” 

Or maybe I’m just dreading AWP. I generally do.

Holiday Card

Speechless

I watched this in tears, with chills. I am so happy for Nikky Finney that I can hardly type this. I'd rather just sit and beam.

Nikky Finney's 2011 National Book Awards in Poetry acceptance speech from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.

News

I've gotten a few emails about this recent item under the "Deal News" heading in Publishers Lunch, so I thought I may as well post it:

Rona Jaffe Award Winner and author of the collection GIRL TROUBLE Holly Goddard Jones's THE REMAINS, about the people surprisingly connected to the discovery of a dead woman's body in a small Kentucky town, following her editor Sally Kim to Touchstone, by Gail Hochman at Brandt & Hochman (World English).

Dog-o-Lanterns

I'm not the kind of dog owner who dresses her dogs in clothes or carries them around in a handbag, but I do occasionally get cheesy. Case in point: these dog-o-lanterns, one for Bishop and one for Martha, which my husband and I carved at a recent gathering with friends.

Martha's face has already collapsed, because we didn't take Martha Stewart's advice and seal the cuts with petroleum jelly.

See also the adorable jack-o-lanterns made by Risa (one of my only blog readers--hello!) and Matt.

Also, randomly: my publisher, Harper Perennial, was highlighted in an interesting recent article on Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/16/the_harper_perennial_model/singleton/. I get a very brief shout-out as a "new-breed Southern author" (hmm), and my book cover is peeping behind the shoulder of another book in the graphic, not unlike the way I end up appearing in most group photos.

Thrifting

I’ve suspected for a while that I’ve been developing a thrifting problem, but the truth came home to me the other day, when my husband and I were on one of our not-infrequent scavenging trips to a local consignment store, and I turned to him and said, “I think I might start collecting teacups. You know, old, funky teacups.”

He said, “I think you’re turning into an old lady.”

I pondered the evidence. Contemplating a teacup collection? Not a good sign. Also, I’ve started hanging old plates on the wall in our kitchen. But they look nice!

I really, really hate shopping at the mall, but I get a big kick out of shopping at thrift stores, flea markets, and antique malls. I think it’s taken me so long to own up to this because of the Poor Person Paradox, whereby a person who can’t afford to shop full-price retail, and would benefit from shopping used, feels ashamed of buying used, and doesn’t. Even when I went through my late-high school/early-college phase of pseudo-hippiedom, I drew a distinction between thrift stores and vintage stores, and I saved my work money to buy crappy new stuff that looked old.

Many of the items my husband and I have acquired to furnish our house were bought used: the oriental rug in our living room, the secretary where we keep our bills, our dining room china hutch and sideboard, and (my favorite) our pale green, metal kitchenette set with vinyl-upholstered chairs. It was fairly easy for me to get into the mindset to do this kind of spending (though I sweated the rug a little—a used rug seems…used…in a way that a wooden piece of furniture does not), mostly because we couldn’t really afford to fill our house with new furniture, or at least new furniture that would last us more than a couple of years.

Deciding to thrift for clothes took me longer, and actually, I think the only reason I manage now is because I don’t care as much as I used to about how I dress. I was trying to figure out the other day if I even have a style anymore. Now, I should qualify this: I’ve never had good style. I’m too cheap to buy nice clothes, because I have ingrained in me a totally arbitrary list of figures for what certain items of clothing should cost brand new. For example:

T-shirt: $5

Nice blouse, the kind I could wear to work: $25

Jeans: $30

Nice pants, suitable for work: $30, maybe $40 if the cut is really flattering

Dress: $50, unless it’s a Special Occasion item.

Running shoes: $75 (and it pains me to spend that much)

Leather shoes: $40 - $50

Any other kind of shoe: <$20

There are only two categories of Special Occasion items, in which case I might be willing to spend $100 to $150:

Really Special Dress, purchased because I have to attend some kind of Really Special event, such as my graduate school farewell reading or, the once, when I went to the Rona Jaffe reception in NYC.

Interview Suit. I have two now, one which no longer fits, plus one velveteen jacket, all purchased for MLA conferences. I considered them investments each time, and I think they were worthwhile investments. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have gotten my job without a suit, but I'm sure it didn't hurt that I came looking as if I'd made an effort.

Anyway, I’m cheap, and I also don’t have good instincts. I know a delightful, adorable young woman who shops thrift and can pull off ensembles of funny old-man golf pants and layers of shirts and funky costume jewelry, but if I were to attempt such a thing, I’d look like I escaped the asylum. Also, it seems to me that the women who look delightful in garb like that look pretty much delightful in anything, because they have nice, slim figures and 22-year-old complexions and loads of confidence. No one wants to see me in the high-waisted, tapered trousers this girl was rocking over the summer, even if I paired them with a neat-o pair of high-top Chuck Taylors.

For most of my life, I’ve at least aspired to a certain style, even if I couldn’t exactly call myself stylish. I put thought into how I wanted to be perceived and made efforts toward that end. I favored certain brands, even if I wouldn’t often plunk down money to purchase them.

Now? Eh. I bought half a dozen short-sleeve, button-up, plaid shirts at the thrift store this summer because they were comfortable and not quite as sloppy as a t-shirt. Do I look like somebody’s kid brother in them? Perhaps. At another point in my life I would have cared about that, but now, not so much. At another point in my life, I also would have spent time most days fussing with my hair and applying make-up. Now I just wish I didn’t have these lines on my face.

Let’s end this on a cheerier note. In the category of random thrift purchases, I’ve gotten in the habit of picking up funny old cookbooks, and for some reason I tend to fix on the early 70s-era ones, perhaps because I find those 70s notions of entertaining so—well—entertaining. Here are two of the coolest:

Stewed to the Gills: Fish and Wine Cookery

I like the concept of this one--fish, booze, what's not to like?--but my first attempt at one of the recipes was so-so. I had bourbon on hand (as usual), and so I tried a recipe that called for bourbon, cream, and little tiny “salad shrimp” which taste (I rediscovered) like squishy metal.

Casseroles by Candlelight

Now this one was worth it just for the title, which I like to sing to the tune of “Ebony and Ivory.” One day, I definitely hope to delight my friends with a tasty casserole by candlelight, but for now, I’m just dipping into the offerings, experimenting. Again, the results have been mixed. The recipe for “Carbonnade Flamande,” which called for cubes of round steak, a full pound of onions, beer, and brown sugar, was…odd. Should I have been surprised that it was odd? That it tasted real oniony?