An Alaskan author makes the New York Times bestseller list. How cool is that? Dana Stabenow reports that Whisper to the Blood will be on the list next week.
"It’s pretty far down," says Dana, "but it’s there, an almost unheard of appearance for the 16th book in a series that has never made the list before." If you've been following Dana's release of this new book, you know how beautifully she has used the Internet to create fantastic exposure. Well done, Dana.
On to another great Alaskan title. Remember that we'll be discussing Ordinary Wolves next weekend, March 7 and 8. We'll be posting a great interview with Seth Kantner next week, along with a review of his latest book, Shopping for Porcupine. Remember that if you leave a comment at 49 Writers between February 23 and March 8, you'll be entered in a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Bear Tooth. Yum! Plus blog comments get noticed. Check out this recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, quoting an author who commented on agent Nathan Bransford's blog.
I received a box of author copies a couple of days ago, so it's official: my latest, Picture This, Alaska, is now on the market. This was an amazing project - I got to pour over 25,000 archival photographs plus a huge number of primary sources, and the designer beautifully pulled it all together. Plus my publisher came up with a very cool marketing gig that I'll say more about as details unfold.
Alaskan author Michael Engelhard has added two more events to his promotion schedule for Wild Moments. On March 12, 2009 from 5:30-6:30 p.m., he'll be at an Alaska Geographic event at the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitor Center Theater, 101 Dunkel St., Fairbanks, Alaska. On March 27, 2009 at 7 p.m., he'll feature the book as part of the Midnight Sun Visiting Writers Series at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, Fairbanks.
Curated by Jeremy Pataky, the Still North Reading and Performance Series launches with a live poetry reading by Alaska Native poets dg nanouk okpik and Cathy Tagnak Rexford celebrating Effigies: Poems of the Inupiaq North. The reading marks the dual launch of Still North Reading & Performance Series, curated by Jeremy Pataky, and the forthcoming book, Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim, 2009, edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and published by Salt Publishing.
Effigies compiles four chapbooks by four exceptional emerging poets: Alaska Natives dg nanouk okpik and Cathy Tagnak Rexford; and Native Hawaiians Brandy Nalani McDougall and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. Their Pacific Rim relationship invited the opportunity to publish their four chapbooks in one collected volume. Released in Australia and the United Kingdom in February 2009, it will launch in the United States in April. The reading will be April 9th at 7:30 p.m. at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, 427 D Street in Anchorage.
Hopefully you noticed in yesterday's Movie Week post that experienced screenwriter Dave Hunsaker, mentioned already in posts this week, will be offering a free workshop to committed writers at APU on Saturday, April 25 at 2 PM. No rsvp or registration required.
Also, Mary Katzke's documentary "About Face," which was five years in the making, will get a courtesy community screening at Bear Tooth Theater before the documentary goes out into the world. The Bear Tooth event, on Monday April 27 at 5:30, will also be a "festival fundraiser."
Two self-pubbed authors are soliciting blurbs for forthcoming books. Mike Kincaid, a retired Alaska FWP Trooper, is in the final stages of his sequel to Alaska Justice , Alaska and Beyond, a high-adventure novel set in the Alaska Bush and are based on an actual state trooper case. If you're interested in blurbing the book, contact Mike at seaplanes@roadrunner.com, and he'll forward an electronic copy for your review.
Also, Merle Savage, author of Silence in the Sound, has written Miracles for the Asking, a memoir. Merle writes, "A girl grows up in rural Georgia– suffering under ignorant traditions, narrow-minded stigma and rigid religious doctrine – finds herself at age five, subjected to sexual molestation from a family member. Every day her only thoughts were to elude the tormentor with the valor of a determined child, in devising survival tactics . . . Miracles for the Asking will be as inspiring to the reader, as it is true to the writer. The collection of stories is condensed and precise, so the miracles are seen for what they are – a Divine Revelation from God woven in normal everyday occurrences." Email Merle at msavage12@cox.net (put "Miracles" in the subject line) if you'd like an electronic copy to review.
Have a short story you'd like to see in print? Publisher's Weekly reports that with six new short story collections on its summer and fall lists, Harper Perennial has decided to celebrate the form. Its 2009: Summer of the Short Story campaign will officially launch in May, but it got an early start in January with a new blog, Fifty-Two Stories. "Each week in 2009 Harper is posting a new short story," according to the article. "Some are new stories from Harper Perennial’s original collections or from upcoming hardcovers; some are original contributions never before published anywhere; and some are backlist classics. The publisher is also accepting submissions for new stories from readers, professional or amateur, published or not.
Harper Perennial and Harper Paperbacks director of publicity Alberto G. Rojas is encouraging viral marketing, suggesting visitors to Fifty-Two Stories link to it on their own blogs, their MySpace and Facebook pages, and on Twitter"
Finally, have you filed your claim in the $125 million settlement in Authors Guild v. Google? The Author's Guild reports that at least $45 million will be paid to authors and publishers to release claims for books that are scanned by Google by May 5th of this year. In addition, the licensing activated through this settlement would enable far more revenues for authors over the coming years, particularly with regard to out-of-print books.
The settlement covers essentially all in-copyright books of all types that were published by January 5, 2009. Go to www.googlebooksettlement.com to claim your books. If you file your claim by January 5, 2010, and a book in which you have a copyright interest is scanned by Google before May 5, 2009, you will be entitled to a small share (at least $60 per book, but up to $300, depending on the number of claims) in a pool of at least $45 million that Google is paying to release claims for works that were scanned without rightsholder permission.
Also, by registering you'll be able to share in potential revenues for uses of your works under several new licensing programs that the settlement enables. You'll automatically enroll in the new Book Rights Registry, which will give you a considerable amount of control over the rights to your works, including your right to withdraw your work from the licensing progams. Thanks to author Betty Monthei for passing on this information from the Author's Guild.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
"About Face" and Alaska film opportunities: Interview with Mary Katzke
Mary Katzke, a filmmaker who has put together several successful films through her Anchorage company AffinityFilms, was recently named head of the newly reopened Alaska Film Office. But before she got that post, she finished work on a major project -- a documentary called "About Face," which was five years in the making, completed Jan. 1 of this year. In advance of an official premiere, Bear Tooth will be providing a "courtesy community screening" before the documentary goes "out into the world." The Bear Tooth event, on Monday April 27 at 5:30, will also be a "festival fundraiser."Tell us about the documentary, which follows the poignant search of a young Alaska woman named Gwen for the mother who abandoned her as an infant. Before disappearing, the mother placed the baby in a campfire in Eagle River -- a nearly incomprehensible act that resulted in serious burns as well as long-lasting emotional damage. Mary, did you and your main character find the answers you were seeking?
I don't want to spoil the film for viewers but suffice it to say Gwen learned a lot about her mother during her search, including answers to her most basic questions. The film is really about our society's attitude and prejudice toward mental illness and how this could have been avoided with more awareness all the way around. The father feared ridicule, and had no understanding of the danger of postpartum depression when combined with mental illlness. Amazingly Gwen made it through [her school years in the Anchorage School District] with no counseling or other help but was silently suffering from taunting classmates. There are signs before an impending event like this and we can learn to recognize them and take actions. The lifelong impact of this one act has impacted at least three people's lives- profoundly.
How does someone make a film like this in Alaska? First, from the financial side, you had to get a sequence of grants, correct?
Yes, we had over ten funders along the way including a Rasmuson Fellowship, AK State Council on the Arts grants, AK Mental Health Trust grants, private donors, and two national funders- The Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg Pictures.
And you also hired various editors along the way? Summarize the lengthy process for us.
This was a true, independent film made in fits and starts over a very long process. ( It's not a process I care to repeat!) First we made a five minute trailer which led to the first half of our funding. The story naturally unfolded and fortunately it was blessed by timely funding breaks just in the nick of time, every time. Last spring I had small change left in the account and gambled by hiring a local editor to enact my vision (I'm not too technically inclined) and we cobbled together a rough ending which included the climax of finding her mom. It was rough, but it worked as we then got the final $80,000 we needed to hire an A-list editor, musician, and online completion.
We are ready to premiere the film, but still do not have the menu options, etc that we hope to include eventually so that it will become a "working film" which is useful in training social workers, counselors, teachers, psychologists, and post-partum caregivers to mention a few. The film is also a powerful story of the strength of one women fighting to save herself against so many odds- it is a portrait of the human spirit with grace in such dire circumstances you are left in awe, and hopefully more aware and appreciative of life.
As a filmmaker, why did you settle in Alaska?
I didn’t intend to settle here, but after arriving in 1979 for “summer work” I totally fell in love with the youthful spirit of the movers and shakers- feeling like one could do anything one chose. In fact, I directed the first film I ever worked on. In LA, I would have been toting coffee to some producer for years before having a chance to spread creatively. Then Alaska just kept on being super good to us, with grants, fellowships, and commissions that a filmmaker lives for. I simply had no reason to leave except for more education, which I did in 1988-1992 when I went back to graduate school for my MFA in Writing and Directing at NYU.
What are the positives and negatives of working here?
I feel respected and that is huge. I also feel like the subjects here are limitless, timely and interesting. The negatives are that it doesn’t pay as well as major markets (I made more in New York 18 years ago than I do now here) and the weather is always a challenge. Colleagues are harder to find, but are here if you are willing to search. We all need to wear so many hats to survive here that we have “many knives, none of which are sharp” enough in some ways. In others, we are never bored. Never.
Name an Alaska film you love.
Limbo- because John Sayles made it, and because I can’t stop laughing thinking about the scene where they DIVE INTO THE OCEAN in Southeast.
...and one that you really dislike, perhaps because it doesn’t portray Alaska in an authentic way.
Well, how about the Steven Segal one about the pipeline where everyone was snowmachinig from Valdez to Prudhoe?!
Let’s say I’m an Alaska writer wanting to break into filmmaking or screenwriting. What would I do first?
Study the format, and read books about it. Then go away to a weekend or week-long seminar at Rockport or somewhere like that- for the professional stimulation and challenge. It is a lot harder than people think- it is poetry- precise poetry- not an easy task.
What can you tell us about your new job heading the Alaska Film Office?
I am very excited, professionally challenged, and brimming with ideas as to all the opportunities in front of us. Of course we also have very real challenges, like unpredictable weather and transportation costs. We have a very competitive incentive program- one of the best in the country. We are now open for business and there are already projects in the queue. We will need to increase our crew base, and cross-train many people to support this influx of work, but I am confident we are going to meet this challenge and more. I encourage people to become familiar with the incentives program by going to the state website and beginning to envision how they will become part of this new wave of opportunity.
Mary has also included this late-breaking information for Alaska screenwriters: experienced screenwriter Dave Hunsaker, mentioned already in posts this week, will be offering a free workshop to committed writers at APU on Saturday, April 25 at 2 PM. No rsvp or registration required.
Also, the Alaska Film Office is creating a gallery of "set in Alaska" screenplays and treatments that will be used to showcase work that may interest Outside companies ready to work on films in Alaska. Note the following important rules, provided by Mary:
Please include title and genre. It must be registered with WGA or copyrighted. It must be in industry format- screenplay or treatment. Please include a one line description as well as a one page synopsis. Please include a link to your bio and contact info. Please let us know if you have any queries. I would recommend seeking representation if any offers are made.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Adapting "The Kids from Nowhere" : Interview with Deborah Schildt
Yesterday's post was about Hollywood coming after an Alaska writer's novella. Now imagine the process in reverse, with a twist -- a local reader (with lots of film experience) comes across an Alaska book, loves it enough to consider adapting it into a screenplay, and works hard to get it ready for Hollywood's attention. Thanks to Deborah Schildt of Anchorage for answering my questions about this inspiring and still-evolving project.
How did The Kids From Nowhere come to your attention and what did you like about it? What happened next?
I’m an NPR loyalist and frequently work with it on in the background. Two years ago an author from rural Alaska was being interviewed about his book, The Kids From Nowhere. The author was George Guthridge. He was passionate and articulate when he spoke about his teaching experiences in Gambell, Alaska in the early 80’s. His book documents the remarkable scholastic achievements of a group of Gambell High School students who won national acclaim by taking first place in The Future Problem Solvers of America competition. The students broke many barriers and went on as adults to become leaders in their community.
What’s not to like about that story? The success of the students and their teacher is inspirational. It made me curious enough to want to fill in the blanks and know more. I went to Title Wave and found a copy of the book. I read it, underlining favorite passages and noting where it brought me to tears. I felt the story would make a great film, one that could be shot here and showcase Alaska. I loved that it was an academic success story from rural Alaska where kids exceed scholastic expectations, including their own. I liked that their teacher, George Guthridge devised a way to reach his students utilizing their cultural strengths and stayed dedicated to teaching them in the face of many obstacles.
Filmmakers today still struggle to reach their target audiences. Too often it seems the first concern is box office success, not the quality of the story or how it might impact young minds or inspire us to think about things from a different perspective. This story seemed like it could work on many levels. It’s a true story and that always has a certain magnetism. It takes place in a world few people ever think about let alone get to see. It has the potential to change the way we view indigenous people and their way of knowing the world.
I talked to Mary Katzke, a colleague I frequently collaborated with and asked her to read it. She too felt it had a great potential for a film. Mary contacted her agent for advice on option agreements. I contacted George and found out he was coming through Anchorage the following week. A week later, George, Mary and I sat down at a local restaurant in Spenard. We all spoke from the heart and reached a verbal agreement. We roughed out a timeframe and signed an option agreement. Mary and I would take George’s story and fit those 325 pages into a screenplay. That was in the spring of 2007.
How long did it take you to write the screenplay? Have you written other screenplays?
We started with an outline and a pitch. We reached out to the Rasmuson foundation and to Native Corporations for financial support. We wanted to set up a film workshop up in Nome, while we researched and developed the first draft of the screenplay. We contacted Zack Kanuck, the director and writer on “Fast Runner” and asked if he’d be interested. Mary and I had both worked with director Chris Eyre up in Barrow on a project and we solicited him as well. Both directors were interested in offering a film 101 workshop for those interested in working on the film and other film projects but Rasmuson and the Native Corporations turned us down.
We trudged forward. We wrote a treatment. It was fall of 2007. We attended a screenwriter’s workshop with Dave Hunsacker. Mary had written several scripts before and I, one other many years ago. In 2008 we pushed forward again, on a spring break down in Girdwood we roughed it out and started writing in earnest. It was rare we both had time at the same time to write together. Sometimes Mary wrote scenes and passed them back to me and sometimes the reverse. Finally, in August we made it to magic page number 120. We had a first draft. Since then lots has happened. We passed it around to trusted friends for critique and remarks. Our intention was to see what was working, what wasn’t and start a second pass.
Mary was offered a job with the State of Alaska at the Office of Economic Development as a film specialist and took it. Her free time has been significantly impacted. Our option with George ran out this past fall. We showed him our first draft and he started combing through with comments.
In January, George and I started co-writing on the second draft. It’s roughed out. Our intent is to edit and refine through March. Our hope is to get the second draft out for comment and start a second push. We believe in its potential. Now that Alaska has a film incentive program in the works it’s certainly timely to get it out there. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Alaska is in peoples’ minds now more than ever.
What has to happen for it to get produced?
We need to finish the second draft final edit and polish. We need to get it into circulation with producers, directors and talent that would be interested in taking it on.
What is your film background and how do you pay the bills? Is it possible to make a fulltime income as a filmmaker or screenwriter here?
I’ve worked in the film industry for the past 25 years. My first 8 were spent in feature film production in Los Angeles. I run a small film production services company here in Anchorage. To survive and pay the bills in Alaska while working in film, you have to wear many hats. I work as a local producer/fixer, location scout and manager, I work as a casting director, an art director, an editor – those are the things that pay the bills. I’d like to believe it’s possible to make a living doing what you’re passionate about, if that’s writing screenplays then yes, if they’re well written any screenplay should have potential in today’s market. It always starts with a story, a good story, an inspirational story, a story well told.
What has to happen for it to get produced?
We need to finish the second draft final edit and polish. We need to get it into circulation with producers, directors and talent that would be interested in taking it on.
What is your film background and how do you pay the bills? Is it possible to make a fulltime income as a filmmaker or screenwriter here?
I’ve worked in the film industry for the past 25 years. My first 8 were spent in feature film production in Los Angeles. I run a small film production services company here in Anchorage. To survive and pay the bills in Alaska while working in film, you have to wear many hats. I work as a local producer/fixer, location scout and manager, I work as a casting director, an art director, an editor – those are the things that pay the bills. I’d like to believe it’s possible to make a living doing what you’re passionate about, if that’s writing screenplays then yes, if they’re well written any screenplay should have potential in today’s market. It always starts with a story, a good story, an inspirational story, a story well told.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Leave comments, get a chance to win a $50 Bear Tooth/Moose's Tooth gift card
Bear Tooth Theatrepub, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 1) salmon tacos. 2) habanero halibut tacos. 3) homebrewed root beer -- and cream soda, And real beer, too. 4) and wine. 5) a theatre environment that's as good for dates as it for kids with young children. 6) cheap ticket prices. 7) great service and cool decor. 8) arthouse movies and awesome movies of every kind. 9) steak tacos (can you tell I'm hungry)? 10) great pizza. I'd better stop there. I'm salivating all over my keyboard. The point is: Bear Tooth and Moose's Tooth have jumped into Movie Week to be our sponsor! They are supplying a $50 gift card, redeemable at either establishment. You get a chance to win each time you leave a comment. Everyone is eligible (except me and Deb. Groan.) Even if you're a guest-blogger, leave a comment or you'll miss out on this great opportunity.
In order to encourage people to leave not only film-related comments this week, but also during our upcoming Ordinary Wolves discussion, I'm counting all comments between Feb. 23 and March 8. Take that you lurkers!
Adapting "The Wedding Album" : A Story Heads South to Hollywood
In March 2006, New York Times Reviewer Dave Itzkoff had this to say about the short stories of Fairbanks-based David Marusek: Marusek's short works of fiction have "so far proven to be as concentrated and potent as a dwarf star. In The Wedding Album, a story first published in 1999, he fashions an ominous and surprisingly moving tale about a bride and groom who repeatedly discover, forget and rediscover that they are merely computer-generated re-creations of a flesh-and-blood newlywed couple, fated to watch as their living counterparts, their marriage and civilization itself decay over the centuries."
It's a great story -- recently re-issued in paperback, by the way. For Movie Week, I wanted to ask David about the Hollywood angle.
Tell me what’s happening with your story “The Wedding Album.” When/how was it optioned? Has a full screenplay been written? Is it heading toward production? And most importantly, what insights have you gained into the Hollywood Universe as your story continues along a path to the silver screen?
I wasn’t actively trying to sell an original screenplay or treatment to Hollywood. Film developers approached me about one of my published stories, and they found me by scouting the literary reviews. My novella, “The Wedding Album,” had just been mentioned in a review in the New York Times Book Review, and I started receiving unsolicited emails asking about the film rights. But even with pre-existing buyer interest, it still took about a year for my Hollywood representatives to strike an option deal with Focus Features, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, and another eight months of negotiations to iron out the contract. And what a contract it is--35 pages long and covering every conceivable eventuality from sound-track albums to film-inspired calendars and action figures.
Film studios, I have learned, prefer to use the Disney model of rights acquisition. That is, to own everything for all time. Part of the back and forth in our contract negotiations was about how much of my novella I would still own the film rights to. There are particular characters in “TWA” that appear in other stories of mine, as well as words that I coined. I was able to save most of my characters names, but I had to give up several terms. The one I regretted losing the most was “free-range people.” This refers to persons who were NOT cloned or excessively augmented with genetic improvements. I can continue to use the term in my prose stories, but if I ever sell more film rights, "free-rangers" is already spoken for.
So, a year to strike the deal, eight months to negotiate it, and I signed the stack of papers in November 2007, just days before Hollywood writers walked off the job in a three-month union action. Focus Features purchased an option for 18 months, but the clock didn’t start ticking until the strike was over. I believe I was one of the few people in Alaska who woke up each morning looking for news about the Hollywood writer’s strike. Anyway, my option runs until August 2009.
Have you explained to your readers what an option is? It just means that the studio has purchased the exclusive right to buy the film rights to your work if they want to within a certain period of time. Now I know that there are many ways to structure a movie deal, but the purpose of the option period is to let the studio or development company see how many of the pieces of the film they can put together--script, director, talent, money--before actually spending the $100,000 to $500,000 to purchase the film (adaptation) rights. If they succeed in getting enough commitments, they may green light the project. The way I hear it, less than one percent of all options are ever exercised, and those that are may have to languish through several option extensions before everything is in place. In my case, my reps worked with an independent development company who hired a screenwriter, who pitched his treatment to Focus. As far as I know, we’re still at the screenplay stage, trying to come up with something the studio likes, with only six months of the option term left.
In my deal, once I signed the contract, I relinquished all control over my story. I have always heard about authors bemoaning how Hollywood ruined their stories, and my attitude has always been that as long as the money is good, I don’t care what they do to my story. The development company didn’t ask me for any input and had no plans to share the screenplay with me, but I asked my reps if I could see it anyway. Although I am not interested in writing screenplays, I have the unique perspective of watching one of my successful literary stories go through the process of being adapted from prose to screen, and I thought I could learn something by it. This was probably a mistake. When I read the screenplay and saw what they did to my story, I could only shake my head in wonder. My story, as it turns out, was merely the springboard for someone else’s completely different story, and my story did not survive the exercise. Oh, well, I’d been warned.
It's a great story -- recently re-issued in paperback, by the way. For Movie Week, I wanted to ask David about the Hollywood angle.
Tell me what’s happening with your story “The Wedding Album.” When/how was it optioned? Has a full screenplay been written? Is it heading toward production? And most importantly, what insights have you gained into the Hollywood Universe as your story continues along a path to the silver screen?
I wasn’t actively trying to sell an original screenplay or treatment to Hollywood. Film developers approached me about one of my published stories, and they found me by scouting the literary reviews. My novella, “The Wedding Album,” had just been mentioned in a review in the New York Times Book Review, and I started receiving unsolicited emails asking about the film rights. But even with pre-existing buyer interest, it still took about a year for my Hollywood representatives to strike an option deal with Focus Features, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, and another eight months of negotiations to iron out the contract. And what a contract it is--35 pages long and covering every conceivable eventuality from sound-track albums to film-inspired calendars and action figures.
Film studios, I have learned, prefer to use the Disney model of rights acquisition. That is, to own everything for all time. Part of the back and forth in our contract negotiations was about how much of my novella I would still own the film rights to. There are particular characters in “TWA” that appear in other stories of mine, as well as words that I coined. I was able to save most of my characters names, but I had to give up several terms. The one I regretted losing the most was “free-range people.” This refers to persons who were NOT cloned or excessively augmented with genetic improvements. I can continue to use the term in my prose stories, but if I ever sell more film rights, "free-rangers" is already spoken for.
So, a year to strike the deal, eight months to negotiate it, and I signed the stack of papers in November 2007, just days before Hollywood writers walked off the job in a three-month union action. Focus Features purchased an option for 18 months, but the clock didn’t start ticking until the strike was over. I believe I was one of the few people in Alaska who woke up each morning looking for news about the Hollywood writer’s strike. Anyway, my option runs until August 2009.
Have you explained to your readers what an option is? It just means that the studio has purchased the exclusive right to buy the film rights to your work if they want to within a certain period of time. Now I know that there are many ways to structure a movie deal, but the purpose of the option period is to let the studio or development company see how many of the pieces of the film they can put together--script, director, talent, money--before actually spending the $100,000 to $500,000 to purchase the film (adaptation) rights. If they succeed in getting enough commitments, they may green light the project. The way I hear it, less than one percent of all options are ever exercised, and those that are may have to languish through several option extensions before everything is in place. In my case, my reps worked with an independent development company who hired a screenwriter, who pitched his treatment to Focus. As far as I know, we’re still at the screenplay stage, trying to come up with something the studio likes, with only six months of the option term left.
In my deal, once I signed the contract, I relinquished all control over my story. I have always heard about authors bemoaning how Hollywood ruined their stories, and my attitude has always been that as long as the money is good, I don’t care what they do to my story. The development company didn’t ask me for any input and had no plans to share the screenplay with me, but I asked my reps if I could see it anyway. Although I am not interested in writing screenplays, I have the unique perspective of watching one of my successful literary stories go through the process of being adapted from prose to screen, and I thought I could learn something by it. This was probably a mistake. When I read the screenplay and saw what they did to my story, I could only shake my head in wonder. My story, as it turns out, was merely the springboard for someone else’s completely different story, and my story did not survive the exercise. Oh, well, I’d been warned.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Take two: Your turn
Andromeda is trekking through new territory for me, and I'm excited to be tagging along. There was a little talk - nothing came of it in the end - of a film option for my first novel. But even the talk was exciting. There's something about projecting a story, about seeing it come to life, that has to be immensely satisfying for any writer.
Now for your turn: Which Alaskan book (sure, you can include your own) would you most like to see made into a film?
Now for your turn: Which Alaskan book (sure, you can include your own) would you most like to see made into a film?
Shot in Alaska -- or not?
According to Wikipedia: The psychological thriller Insomnia, starring Al Pacino and Robin Williams was extensively shot in Canada, but was set in Alaska. The 2007 horror feature 30 Days of Night is set in Barrow, Alaska but was filmed in New Zealand. Most films and television shows set in Alaska are not filmed there; for example, Northern Exposure, set in the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, was actually filmed in Roslyn, Washington.
The 1983 Disney movie Never Cry Wolf was at least partially shot in Alaska. The 1991 film "White Fang", starring Ethan Hawke, was filmed in and around Haines, Alaska. The 1999 John Sayles film Limbo, starring David Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Kris Kristofferson, was filmed in Juneau. Sean Penn filmed large portions of the film Into the Wild on location in Alaska.
The 1983 Disney movie Never Cry Wolf was at least partially shot in Alaska. The 1991 film "White Fang", starring Ethan Hawke, was filmed in and around Haines, Alaska. The 1999 John Sayles film Limbo, starring David Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Kris Kristofferson, was filmed in Juneau. Sean Penn filmed large portions of the film Into the Wild on location in Alaska.
Making a movie involves teamwork. So does creating a vital writing community. I want to take this thematically appropriate opportunity to point to another blog trying to stitch our writing community together -- Green Room, a blog hosted over the Anchorage Daily News, and written by Peter Porco, Mark Muro, Sandy Harper, and Ron Holmstrom. Check out their posts about theater workshops and news, auditions, and so on; I enjoyed a 2/14 post about writing lessons imparted by The Ballad of Soapy Smith author Michael Weller.
Quiet on the set! MOVIE WEEK starts here...
Every once in a while, good news takes us by surprise. In this case, our state -- and every writer, actor, filmmaker, movie buff or t-shirt vendor -- should be happy about the re-opening of the ALASKA FILM OFFICE, last September. I think it's one this year's biggest -- and most under-reported -- arts-community news stories.
The Alaska Film Office, now headed by Mary Katzke, is responsible for helping lure Hollywood folks to the 49th state, to roll their cameras and spend their money. Hollywood loves movies set in Alaska (or somewhere equally dramatic), but all too often, they have set those movies elsewhere -- like Canada or New Zealand (see mini-post about that, below). Until recently, Alaska was one of only five states without a film program. Now, with an office ready to do business and generous tax incentives ready to slide into place thanks to successful Senate Bill 230, we can put the real Alaska back into "Alaskan" movies.
Buzz is, much is already happening in AK filmland. If you want to be part of the excitement, you might think about joining -- or at least keeping an eye on -- the Alaska Film Group, a nonprofit trade association that brings together production people, animal wranglers, actors, writers, and more. (They have a meeting on Feb. 26, by the way.) I visited their meeting last month and was surprised to discover what a large film community we already have.
Those latest political/economic developments aren't only reason I'm devoting a week to movies at 49 writers. The other reason is: I've always been interested in screenwriting. Starting two years ago, I started nosing around the field, trying to learn how one breaks in, and also how to learn principles from screenwriting that can be applied to the non-screen genres (and vice-versa).
The Alaska Film Office, now headed by Mary Katzke, is responsible for helping lure Hollywood folks to the 49th state, to roll their cameras and spend their money. Hollywood loves movies set in Alaska (or somewhere equally dramatic), but all too often, they have set those movies elsewhere -- like Canada or New Zealand (see mini-post about that, below). Until recently, Alaska was one of only five states without a film program. Now, with an office ready to do business and generous tax incentives ready to slide into place thanks to successful Senate Bill 230, we can put the real Alaska back into "Alaskan" movies.
Buzz is, much is already happening in AK filmland. If you want to be part of the excitement, you might think about joining -- or at least keeping an eye on -- the Alaska Film Group, a nonprofit trade association that brings together production people, animal wranglers, actors, writers, and more. (They have a meeting on Feb. 26, by the way.) I visited their meeting last month and was surprised to discover what a large film community we already have.
Those latest political/economic developments aren't only reason I'm devoting a week to movies at 49 writers. The other reason is: I've always been interested in screenwriting. Starting two years ago, I started nosing around the field, trying to learn how one breaks in, and also how to learn principles from screenwriting that can be applied to the non-screen genres (and vice-versa).
What I love about movies, besides the visuals, the soundtracks, and all that other great stuff, is that they are STORY distilled. Even if you're writing fiction or creative nonfiction, I think you can learn a lot about clean, clear story arc (and characterization, and dialogue) from watching movies analytically. I think you can learn even more from reading screenplays.
Recently, I got my first small break into the film world: I'm working on a script for a nature documentary. (Hey, even F. Scott Fitzgerald had to write scripts in order to pay the bills, as Meg Wolitzer's how-to book, Fitzgerald Did It, points out.) I'm learning a lot from it -- and having a ball. When I get back to writing novel-length fiction, I'm sure I'll have more precise ideas about act structure and pacing. (I also appreciate being reminded what literature can do that movies can't.)
How does one find screenplays to read? One of my favorite sites, with absolute scads of free screenplays and teleplays, is Drew's Script-o-Rama. Which scripts should an aspiring writer or movie buff read? I've only started diving in myself, but I just came across a list that will guide me in future: the American Screenwriters Association list of top 100 feature film scripts of all time.
More commercial sites like the Writing Store sell nice bound versions of scripts, as well as expensive formatting software (formatting is key in the world of screenwriting), video lectures, silly mousepads and baseball caps, and everything else you need to become the next Marty Scorsese. They also link to a Writers University offering online screenwriting workshops. At Storylink, you can find some really good interviews with screenwriters -- including a recent chat with Slumdog Millionaire screenwriter Simon Beaufoy.
But back to Alaska. What's the latest gossip? Well, I'm interested in following the progress this year of Juneau screenwriter Dave Hunsaker's adaptation of Dan O'Neill's nonfiction book, the Firecracker Boys. Hunsaker is writing the script for HBO with co-writer George DiCaprio, father of the famous Leonardo. The Juneau Empire did a great job telling the story of Hunsaker and his glamorous screenwriting life, split between Southeast Alaska and Santa Monica, where he owns a second home. I'd love to take a workshop from Hunsaker. If he offers one, you'll hear about it here!
Book-to-film adaptation is a particular interest of mine, so I'm also interested in the stories of two other projects making their way to the silver screen -- no easy journey to make. But I'll save those for later this week, when we'll be featuring three interviews with people involved at various stages of the film writing and production process. Stay tuned...
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Wrangell Mountains Center Membership Drive -- With Free Books!
Do you dream of visiting McCarthy this summer? Love public lands? Want to support an Alaska non-profit that supports the arts, as well as the environment? The Wrangell Mountains Center, located at the toe of Kennicott Glacier in the heart of our largest national park, is trying to raise some fast money between now and March 15 to take advantage of a matching grant which will enable them to buy a much-needed truck.
49 writers wants to help. I'm offering two copies of a beautiful coffee-table book on the Chugach National Forest and two copies of Travelers' Tales Alaska, an essay anthology, as a matching donation to the next four
people who sign up as new WMC Members. Download a membership form from the website and mail it in with your check. Then email jeremy at wrangells.org and let him know which book you'd prefer and where you would like us to ship it. Subsistence and Student Memberships are just $15, and a Basic Membership is $25... act fast and let your membership contribution pay for itself while still supporting the mission of the Wrangell Mountains Center. Friday, February 20, 2009
49 writers weekly roundup
Next week is movie week at 49 writers. Stay tuned for interviews, articles, and general musings on filmmaking and what it means for Alaska. On a related note, author Ann Chardonnet shares news about a company that specializes in films made by women: Women Make Movies, Inc.
Also, don't forget the 49 writers online book discussion of Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves, slated for March 7 and 8. We'll be running a great interview with Seth prior to the discussion.
Author Gary Holthaus has recently returned to Alaska
and is scheduled to do a reading and discussion for the UAA Bookstore on February 24 from 5:00—7:00 p.m. His book, Learning Native Wisdom: What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability and Spirituality, is part of the series called “Culture of the Land” published by the University Press of Kentucky.
Don't forget Dana Stabenow's only Alaska signing of newly released Whisper to the Blood is this Saturday at Title Wave in Anchorage. At her web site, you'll find a reader's guide and a teacher's guide to the book, not to mention "Conspiracy," a mini short story set between A Deeper Sleep and Whisper to the Blood.
Anchorage Reads, the Loussac Library's annual winter reading challenge, is currently underway. The program features three books on the theme "being Alaskan": Storm Boy by Paul Owen Lewis, Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse, and The Trap by John Smelcer.
Good news for Alaskan authors: The Rasmuson Foundation has announced continued funding for their Individual Artist Grants. That means in addition to the grants awarded after the March 1 deadline, project applications will also be accepted for the September 1 deadline.
It has gotten great press in the Anchorage Daily News, including a review by Maia Nolan, but I'll add my own little plug for The Ballad of Soapy Smith, playing at Cyrano's through March 1. Expecting little more than standard tourist fare, I was impressed with the depth and power of Michael Weller's script.
If you've just crawled out from your snow cave, you may have missed the release of the first of what's reportedly one of a half-dozen or so unauthorized biographies of Alaska's governor Sarah Palin. Author Lorenzo Benet is already dodging criticism from the illustrious Meg Stapleton, Truth Squad gestapo turned Palin Family Spokesperson. Not to worry. According to a story in the Anchorage Daily News, high-powered Washington author's attorney Robert Barnett, who takes on only "clients who need no introduction," is repping Palin on her own book, as yet unwritten.
There's talk that Alaskan cruises will be a great value this season. They're even cheaper if you sign on as a destination speaker - plus it's a great opportunity to promote your books. If you're interested in applying, email me at debv@gci.net.
Also, don't forget the 49 writers online book discussion of Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves, slated for March 7 and 8. We'll be running a great interview with Seth prior to the discussion.
Author Gary Holthaus has recently returned to Alaska
and is scheduled to do a reading and discussion for the UAA Bookstore on February 24 from 5:00—7:00 p.m. His book, Learning Native Wisdom: What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability and Spirituality, is part of the series called “Culture of the Land” published by the University Press of Kentucky.
Don't forget Dana Stabenow's only Alaska signing of newly released Whisper to the Blood is this Saturday at Title Wave in Anchorage. At her web site, you'll find a reader's guide and a teacher's guide to the book, not to mention "Conspiracy," a mini short story set between A Deeper Sleep and Whisper to the Blood.
Anchorage Reads, the Loussac Library's annual winter reading challenge, is currently underway. The program features three books on the theme "being Alaskan": Storm Boy by Paul Owen Lewis, Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse, and The Trap by John Smelcer.
Good news for Alaskan authors: The Rasmuson Foundation has announced continued funding for their Individual Artist Grants. That means in addition to the grants awarded after the March 1 deadline, project applications will also be accepted for the September 1 deadline.
It has gotten great press in the Anchorage Daily News, including a review by Maia Nolan, but I'll add my own little plug for The Ballad of Soapy Smith, playing at Cyrano's through March 1. Expecting little more than standard tourist fare, I was impressed with the depth and power of Michael Weller's script.
If you've just crawled out from your snow cave, you may have missed the release of the first of what's reportedly one of a half-dozen or so unauthorized biographies of Alaska's governor Sarah Palin. Author Lorenzo Benet is already dodging criticism from the illustrious Meg Stapleton, Truth Squad gestapo turned Palin Family Spokesperson. Not to worry. According to a story in the Anchorage Daily News, high-powered Washington author's attorney Robert Barnett, who takes on only "clients who need no introduction," is repping Palin on her own book, as yet unwritten.
There's talk that Alaskan cruises will be a great value this season. They're even cheaper if you sign on as a destination speaker - plus it's a great opportunity to promote your books. If you're interested in applying, email me at debv@gci.net.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Many Voices: The Pleasures and Pains of Anthologizing
Guest-blogger Michael Engelhard' s newest anthology will be hitting stores next week. You can find an excerpt and more information about contributors at the University of Alaska Press website.
Guest post
By Michael Engelhard
Call me deranged, or hopelessly old-fashioned—but I like a good anthology. My third one, Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North, will be hitting the bookstores this spring. “No more,” I’ve said before, and I’m saying it again, burned not only by dealing with publishers, but also by unruly writers. (Fortunately, most proved to be rather easygoing and responsive this time around.) And yet, in some dim future an idea will pop up, too spare to fledge into a full-blown book, too different to stand with my other essays, or too strange to ever make it into print as an article. The rest will be déja vu…
Freelance, part-time writers have the luxury of simply writing a piece they feel inspired to write. Writers who depend on their words to make ends meet, on the other hand, better think about possible markets before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. As the former kind, I have on occasion indulged in the “unpublishable” odd duck. Failing to find venues, I have formed a habit of creating them—for myself and for others. A story about a disastrous first date on an Arctic river (rejected even by Paddler magazine) became the seed of my first anthology—the beginning of an enduring love-hate relationship.
My participation in a botched raven rescue in downtown Fairbanks sparked the idea for this latest project. Though the resulting essay turned out to be another mutt—mixing natural history with a tale of alcoholism and recovery—this time, the difficulty of finding a magazine to publish it was only a minor reason for turning it into the foundation of a new book. I began to wonder. What amazing wildlife encounters must other Alaskans have had? If you live in this state long enough—in town, in the bush, or in-between—you will have animal yarns worth recounting. Think about your most incredible animal encounter ever. Then think of writing a book of equally engaging tales showcasing all kinds of different animals. Impossible! As a wilderness guide, wild animals are my bread and butter, and for most visitors the highlight of their Alaska vacation. To us, they are neighbors, source of food, or a connection to the land we inhabit. Our eternal fascination with critters, seen against a backdrop of current issues like aerial predator control, the plight of polar bears, and most recently, our prom queen governor’s attempt to have the species removed from the “threatened” list, required some strong response. My voice by itself was insufficient; a multi-author approach seemed called for.
This has been, and remains, the greatest strength of anthologies since the format’s inception: polyphony, the dissolving of authorial hegemony (or solipsism), the multi-facetted description of reality, not based on one, but on numerous life experiences. (The caveat here is, that, as gatekeeper, the editor chooses the book’s selections and therefore introduces a personal bias. Ideally, however, his or her criteria will be literary quality and fit with the overall concept, rather than personal worldview or values.) Such books are good deals for the reader as well. Where else could you hope to find great takes on a favorite subject by some of your favorite writers in one handy volume? Out-of-print material, pieces scattered in obscure publications, “classics” you’ve never had the time to read, and “undiscovered gems”—they all may be assembled there.
It may come as a surprise, then, to hear that anthologies are a pain to sell. (Publishers refer to them as “collections,” as if the term itself were anathema; perhaps that moniker is meant to suggest single-author short story or essay collections to prospective buyers.) Unless the topic is baseball or some other all-American pastime, most anthologies end up with regional, specialty, or university presses. When I tested the waters for Wild Moments, I almost immediately got offers from one university and one regional press, based only on the proposal. This gave me hope, and I shopped the idea around with some agents. Elizabeth Wales in Seattle (whose agency specializes in Pacific Northwest writing) indeed took me on. I thought my fortune was made. We were talking five-figure advances—no mean deal for a mere “collection.” Despite initial interest, however, East Coast publishers were not willing to take risks with an unknown, regional, “nature” writer and his motley host of contributors. Even the regional publisher backed away from the initial offer, as its editorial board started having second thoughts about the book’s marketability. (At some point they batted about the idea of reducing the word content in favor of wildlife photos.) Another regional press wanted me to “tone down” the essay nature of my selections and favor adrenaline-infused writing instead. They more or less told me to turn this brainchild of mine into a bodice ripper in the tradition of Great Bear Attacks. None of my previous anthologies had even earned back their advances, so these publishers had a point. (The only thing harder to sell than a literary anthology must be an anthology that mixes nonfiction with poetry. I commend fellow wordsmiths Marybeth Holleman and Anne Coray for having done that with their timely and necessary compilation Crosscurrents North.)
I passed on these twisted offers, and, minus an agent, committed to the university press. The agent’s commission from my advance on royalties would have barely covered her phone bill for this project, and, graciously, she relieved me of my contractual obligations. My house of cards had been blown apart. A society that increasingly abandons books for less time-consuming magazine articles (or activities that require no literacy at all) had given its thumbs-down to what basically amounted to a highly selective sampler of just such “articles.”
At least, with a university press, I felt assured that my vision for the book would not be compromised. Because the need to make profits does not single-mindedly drive subsidized presses, I could hope that the book would exceed the typical shelf life of a few years: I might receive royalty checks of $ 50 per quarter to tide me over until retirement. (The publisher of another anthology perfectly summed up their potential: “They can be slow out of the gate, but often backlist beautifully.”)
I soon found out that economic prospects also are bleak for contributors to nonprofit or university press-produced anthologies. The University of Alaska Press (which has begun to distinguish itself by publishing non-academic, narrative nonfiction under its Snowy Owl imprint) had no budget to pay for anthology contributions. University presses typically don’t. The underlying assumption is that they do educational work and that writers should “donate” their work and feel proud of being part of something bigger. This may be fine for novices who try to break into print or need to feel at the cutting edge of modern thought. But like any professional (or even semi-professional), those of us who feed families, and pay for fuel, and scramble to meet deadlines for paying assignments can hardly do “pro bono” work. And perhaps, we shouldn’t. It might raise false expectations and create unfair advantages for those who offer their written words for free. Authors deserve compensation, if only token compensation, even for the inclusion of previously published material in an anthology. Amazingly, many will still write original work or allow reprints for chump change or for free if they believe in a project’s “mission” or worthiness. May they be blessed!
After much wheedling and cajoling and a handshake to seal the deal (I kid you not!), the press granted a slim budget to dole out to contributing writers, which hopefully set a precedent for future projects. Submissions started to arrive, and I settled into the routine of selecting and editing. Ironically, I ended up ditching the essay that had inspired the book for a better-suited one by another writer.
This, at long last, brings me to the pleasures of anthologizing—and there are many. Much has been made of the solitary nature of writing. Writers often complain that time spent alone at a desk or doing research curtails the necessary exchange of ideas. Like blogging, enlisting writers for a joint effort has provided me with a virtual community and sense of solidarity. Reading submissions has made me a more critical and sensitive reader and thereby benefited my own writing. I have gained new appreciation for full-time editors and the hard places in which they can find themselves. I have been able to repay old debts, giving the occasional leg up to an unpublished writer. With their clearly defined focus and parameters, calls for anthology submissions I received have spawned some of my better essays—delivered for paltry or no pay.
The gathering of forces, the juxtaposition of personalities, the variations on one theme that are the hallmark of anthologies remind us that no artist lives—or creates—in a vacuum. I consider the twelve months between this book’s conception and its completion time well spent. Like one of my mentors, the Colorado writer Dave Petersen, I could live without writing but not without the things about which I write. If nothing else, Wild Moments should stand as a modest monument to the grace and importance of wild animals.
Some “green” anthologies I’ve enjoyed reading or participating in:
This American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (The Library of America, 2008. Bill McKibben.)
From the Island’s Edge: A Sitka Reader (Graywolf Press, 1995. Carolyn Servid.)
The Glen Canyon Reader (University of Arizona Press, 2003. Mathew Barrett Gross.)
Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004. Susan Zakin.)
Comeback Wolves: Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home (Johnson Books, 2005. Gary Wockner, Gregory McNamee, and Sue Ellen Campbell.)
Wyoming Fence Lines: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (Wyoming Humanities Council, 2007. David Romtvedt.)
Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Laura Pritchett.)
Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment (University of Alaska Press, 2008. Marybeth Holleman and Anne Coray.)
Guest post
By Michael Engelhard
Call me deranged, or hopelessly old-fashioned—but I like a good anthology. My third one, Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North, will be hitting the bookstores this spring. “No more,” I’ve said before, and I’m saying it again, burned not only by dealing with publishers, but also by unruly writers. (Fortunately, most proved to be rather easygoing and responsive this time around.) And yet, in some dim future an idea will pop up, too spare to fledge into a full-blown book, too different to stand with my other essays, or too strange to ever make it into print as an article. The rest will be déja vu…
Freelance, part-time writers have the luxury of simply writing a piece they feel inspired to write. Writers who depend on their words to make ends meet, on the other hand, better think about possible markets before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. As the former kind, I have on occasion indulged in the “unpublishable” odd duck. Failing to find venues, I have formed a habit of creating them—for myself and for others. A story about a disastrous first date on an Arctic river (rejected even by Paddler magazine) became the seed of my first anthology—the beginning of an enduring love-hate relationship.
My participation in a botched raven rescue in downtown Fairbanks sparked the idea for this latest project. Though the resulting essay turned out to be another mutt—mixing natural history with a tale of alcoholism and recovery—this time, the difficulty of finding a magazine to publish it was only a minor reason for turning it into the foundation of a new book. I began to wonder. What amazing wildlife encounters must other Alaskans have had? If you live in this state long enough—in town, in the bush, or in-between—you will have animal yarns worth recounting. Think about your most incredible animal encounter ever. Then think of writing a book of equally engaging tales showcasing all kinds of different animals. Impossible! As a wilderness guide, wild animals are my bread and butter, and for most visitors the highlight of their Alaska vacation. To us, they are neighbors, source of food, or a connection to the land we inhabit. Our eternal fascination with critters, seen against a backdrop of current issues like aerial predator control, the plight of polar bears, and most recently, our prom queen governor’s attempt to have the species removed from the “threatened” list, required some strong response. My voice by itself was insufficient; a multi-author approach seemed called for.
This has been, and remains, the greatest strength of anthologies since the format’s inception: polyphony, the dissolving of authorial hegemony (or solipsism), the multi-facetted description of reality, not based on one, but on numerous life experiences. (The caveat here is, that, as gatekeeper, the editor chooses the book’s selections and therefore introduces a personal bias. Ideally, however, his or her criteria will be literary quality and fit with the overall concept, rather than personal worldview or values.) Such books are good deals for the reader as well. Where else could you hope to find great takes on a favorite subject by some of your favorite writers in one handy volume? Out-of-print material, pieces scattered in obscure publications, “classics” you’ve never had the time to read, and “undiscovered gems”—they all may be assembled there.
It may come as a surprise, then, to hear that anthologies are a pain to sell. (Publishers refer to them as “collections,” as if the term itself were anathema; perhaps that moniker is meant to suggest single-author short story or essay collections to prospective buyers.) Unless the topic is baseball or some other all-American pastime, most anthologies end up with regional, specialty, or university presses. When I tested the waters for Wild Moments, I almost immediately got offers from one university and one regional press, based only on the proposal. This gave me hope, and I shopped the idea around with some agents. Elizabeth Wales in Seattle (whose agency specializes in Pacific Northwest writing) indeed took me on. I thought my fortune was made. We were talking five-figure advances—no mean deal for a mere “collection.” Despite initial interest, however, East Coast publishers were not willing to take risks with an unknown, regional, “nature” writer and his motley host of contributors. Even the regional publisher backed away from the initial offer, as its editorial board started having second thoughts about the book’s marketability. (At some point they batted about the idea of reducing the word content in favor of wildlife photos.) Another regional press wanted me to “tone down” the essay nature of my selections and favor adrenaline-infused writing instead. They more or less told me to turn this brainchild of mine into a bodice ripper in the tradition of Great Bear Attacks. None of my previous anthologies had even earned back their advances, so these publishers had a point. (The only thing harder to sell than a literary anthology must be an anthology that mixes nonfiction with poetry. I commend fellow wordsmiths Marybeth Holleman and Anne Coray for having done that with their timely and necessary compilation Crosscurrents North.)
I passed on these twisted offers, and, minus an agent, committed to the university press. The agent’s commission from my advance on royalties would have barely covered her phone bill for this project, and, graciously, she relieved me of my contractual obligations. My house of cards had been blown apart. A society that increasingly abandons books for less time-consuming magazine articles (or activities that require no literacy at all) had given its thumbs-down to what basically amounted to a highly selective sampler of just such “articles.”
At least, with a university press, I felt assured that my vision for the book would not be compromised. Because the need to make profits does not single-mindedly drive subsidized presses, I could hope that the book would exceed the typical shelf life of a few years: I might receive royalty checks of $ 50 per quarter to tide me over until retirement. (The publisher of another anthology perfectly summed up their potential: “They can be slow out of the gate, but often backlist beautifully.”)
I soon found out that economic prospects also are bleak for contributors to nonprofit or university press-produced anthologies. The University of Alaska Press (which has begun to distinguish itself by publishing non-academic, narrative nonfiction under its Snowy Owl imprint) had no budget to pay for anthology contributions. University presses typically don’t. The underlying assumption is that they do educational work and that writers should “donate” their work and feel proud of being part of something bigger. This may be fine for novices who try to break into print or need to feel at the cutting edge of modern thought. But like any professional (or even semi-professional), those of us who feed families, and pay for fuel, and scramble to meet deadlines for paying assignments can hardly do “pro bono” work. And perhaps, we shouldn’t. It might raise false expectations and create unfair advantages for those who offer their written words for free. Authors deserve compensation, if only token compensation, even for the inclusion of previously published material in an anthology. Amazingly, many will still write original work or allow reprints for chump change or for free if they believe in a project’s “mission” or worthiness. May they be blessed!
After much wheedling and cajoling and a handshake to seal the deal (I kid you not!), the press granted a slim budget to dole out to contributing writers, which hopefully set a precedent for future projects. Submissions started to arrive, and I settled into the routine of selecting and editing. Ironically, I ended up ditching the essay that had inspired the book for a better-suited one by another writer.
This, at long last, brings me to the pleasures of anthologizing—and there are many. Much has been made of the solitary nature of writing. Writers often complain that time spent alone at a desk or doing research curtails the necessary exchange of ideas. Like blogging, enlisting writers for a joint effort has provided me with a virtual community and sense of solidarity. Reading submissions has made me a more critical and sensitive reader and thereby benefited my own writing. I have gained new appreciation for full-time editors and the hard places in which they can find themselves. I have been able to repay old debts, giving the occasional leg up to an unpublished writer. With their clearly defined focus and parameters, calls for anthology submissions I received have spawned some of my better essays—delivered for paltry or no pay.
The gathering of forces, the juxtaposition of personalities, the variations on one theme that are the hallmark of anthologies remind us that no artist lives—or creates—in a vacuum. I consider the twelve months between this book’s conception and its completion time well spent. Like one of my mentors, the Colorado writer Dave Petersen, I could live without writing but not without the things about which I write. If nothing else, Wild Moments should stand as a modest monument to the grace and importance of wild animals.
Some “green” anthologies I’ve enjoyed reading or participating in:
This American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (The Library of America, 2008. Bill McKibben.)
From the Island’s Edge: A Sitka Reader (Graywolf Press, 1995. Carolyn Servid.)
The Glen Canyon Reader (University of Arizona Press, 2003. Mathew Barrett Gross.)
Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004. Susan Zakin.)
Comeback Wolves: Western Writers Welcome the Wolf Home (Johnson Books, 2005. Gary Wockner, Gregory McNamee, and Sue Ellen Campbell.)
Wyoming Fence Lines: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (Wyoming Humanities Council, 2007. David Romtvedt.)
Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Laura Pritchett.)
Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment (University of Alaska Press, 2008. Marybeth Holleman and Anne Coray.)
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What Fiction Writers Taught Me About Darkness
A Guest post
By Kathleen Tarr
January in Anchorage. No sun for days. Ice everywhere. Main roads impassable without a Hummer. I am forced to stay home from my day job at UAA.
Bless the universe. Savor, not gulp, the coffee. More time for new year reflections, and to think about where I’ve been as a writer, and where I might be going.
I work in an MFA program and have earned one myself which is why it’s a bit strange and embarrassing to admit I’ve had to banish some of my grad school attitudes toward writing.
Like how I used to approach certain pieces of creative writing with a vow to be literary, to appeal to the upper-most echelon of the reading public.
I look back now and wish I would have done a few things differently, or at least learned them a lot faster than I have.
For one, as a nonfictioneer, I wish I had taken more fiction classes because I suffered from what I can only call, abstraction-itis.
In creative or literary nonfiction we admit we’re stealing or borrowing fiction techniques to create more vivid pictures in the readers’ minds. We talk about using scene, dialogue, and integrating those intimate and telling details. We discuss pacing, the central driving questions, where the conflicts and tensions are.
I was grateful to be learning something about the fundamentals of narrative (it was also good to drink Rolling Rocks with budding Faulkners and Updikes). It’s just that even after finishing a three year, full-time program, I hadn’t yet learned how to tell a story, and it was my fault.
As a writer, it was as if I had discovered a literary mold—an elegant, literary bundt pan—constructed from the precious content of my intellect. To fill up the bundt pan (the manuscript I was working on), my recipe called for matching up all the incidences and personal anecdotes and well-crafted research to my Main Idea. I worked in this forced, stilted, and backwards way because I didn’t have, or I didn’t know what my real story was.
I could have continued beating myself up, questioning my own audaciousness: What gives me the right to think I can move from an essay to a full-length book?
It was far healthier, though, to admit an emerging writer needed to emerge from somewhere, right? I was in love with my Main Idea. And from there I could move to the next phase of groveling in the depths of my tormented artistic soul.
Long winters passed. I had to endure the process of writing and rewriting without ever knowing where any of it would lead. In the end, I finally shelved the elegant, literary bundt pan and approached the material in a completely new way. I wandered around in it, got lost, and eventually smiled when the writing was no longer allowing me to impose my pre-ordained structure and so-called story outline.
When the great short story writer Ron Carlson spoke at UAA last summer about how to begin a story, he said the word meaning scared him. Carlson said he never begins a story by thinking about the meaning he wanted to convey. Frankly, he hadn’t a clue about such erudition. He might begin with a single word, one recalled moment about a pick-up truck on a dusty highway, or a piece of overheard dialogue.
“Constant attention to inquiry, not certainty is the key,” Carlson said. “I will do anything to survive the draft. A writer with no net and nowhere to go must stay in the room. Doubt up, belief down. Attention is more important than talent.”
I’ve come to see that this holds true in good nonfiction, too, whether you’re writing narrative nonfiction, essays, or memoir.
Richard Chiappone, fiction writer and UAA associate faculty member, says if he gets even one whiff of a lesson or lecture in a piece, whether in fiction or nonfiction, he is soooooo out of there.
On 49 Writers two weeks ago, guest blogger, Melissa DeVaughan, talked about her meeting with Willie Hensley which led her to think about her own work and the whole daunting process of writing books. How do you really get started? she asked on her blog.
If we are anguished over the first sentence because we falsely believe that first sentence is going to be THE FIRST SENTENCE, and therefore we are unduly pressuring ourselves that it must be exactly right, we may never go past the first page to write a story.
The dictum holds true: stay in the mess. Go into the vortex, the zone, the place of mystery and uncertainty, and don’t surface expecting answers and outlines and “just-the-right-opening-sentence.” This may be especially difficult for nonfiction writers because many of us have magazine or journalism backgrounds and we are accustomed to beginning our work with something resembling a structure already at-hand. We assume things must proceed logically and in a unified way, for our draft has to cohere and hang together. We may have it all figured out ahead of time what it is we want to say. Words cannot be wasted. We want to be clear, precise, and present the story with a beginning, middle, and end.
In nonfiction, we are often satisfied if we have devised a serviceable structure for our ideas. And as long as we find one that’s adequate, which gives us some narrative juice, we may stick with it for the duration of the book.
But to be more “fiction-like” perhaps what we ought to do is stay in the material long enough until the more perfect, more organic, more inevitable structure is found. We might have to run through hundreds of first sentences, shift the narrative voice many times. We might have to live in the muck and uncertainty until we find the real story that’s been lurking out-of-sight for so long, underneath all the piles of precious research we have gathered.
How to start a book? Melissa wondered.
Start right in the middle of that chaos. And don’t let go.
You could also pray for more black ice, Chinook winds, erupting volcanoes—anything Mother Nature can do to help keep you inside and stuck to your chair on “free” winter days.
By Kathleen Tarr
January in Anchorage. No sun for days. Ice everywhere. Main roads impassable without a Hummer. I am forced to stay home from my day job at UAA.
Bless the universe. Savor, not gulp, the coffee. More time for new year reflections, and to think about where I’ve been as a writer, and where I might be going.
I work in an MFA program and have earned one myself which is why it’s a bit strange and embarrassing to admit I’ve had to banish some of my grad school attitudes toward writing.
Like how I used to approach certain pieces of creative writing with a vow to be literary, to appeal to the upper-most echelon of the reading public.
I look back now and wish I would have done a few things differently, or at least learned them a lot faster than I have.
For one, as a nonfictioneer, I wish I had taken more fiction classes because I suffered from what I can only call, abstraction-itis.
In creative or literary nonfiction we admit we’re stealing or borrowing fiction techniques to create more vivid pictures in the readers’ minds. We talk about using scene, dialogue, and integrating those intimate and telling details. We discuss pacing, the central driving questions, where the conflicts and tensions are.
I was grateful to be learning something about the fundamentals of narrative (it was also good to drink Rolling Rocks with budding Faulkners and Updikes). It’s just that even after finishing a three year, full-time program, I hadn’t yet learned how to tell a story, and it was my fault.
As a writer, it was as if I had discovered a literary mold—an elegant, literary bundt pan—constructed from the precious content of my intellect. To fill up the bundt pan (the manuscript I was working on), my recipe called for matching up all the incidences and personal anecdotes and well-crafted research to my Main Idea. I worked in this forced, stilted, and backwards way because I didn’t have, or I didn’t know what my real story was.
I could have continued beating myself up, questioning my own audaciousness: What gives me the right to think I can move from an essay to a full-length book?
It was far healthier, though, to admit an emerging writer needed to emerge from somewhere, right? I was in love with my Main Idea. And from there I could move to the next phase of groveling in the depths of my tormented artistic soul.
Long winters passed. I had to endure the process of writing and rewriting without ever knowing where any of it would lead. In the end, I finally shelved the elegant, literary bundt pan and approached the material in a completely new way. I wandered around in it, got lost, and eventually smiled when the writing was no longer allowing me to impose my pre-ordained structure and so-called story outline.
When the great short story writer Ron Carlson spoke at UAA last summer about how to begin a story, he said the word meaning scared him. Carlson said he never begins a story by thinking about the meaning he wanted to convey. Frankly, he hadn’t a clue about such erudition. He might begin with a single word, one recalled moment about a pick-up truck on a dusty highway, or a piece of overheard dialogue.
“Constant attention to inquiry, not certainty is the key,” Carlson said. “I will do anything to survive the draft. A writer with no net and nowhere to go must stay in the room. Doubt up, belief down. Attention is more important than talent.”
I’ve come to see that this holds true in good nonfiction, too, whether you’re writing narrative nonfiction, essays, or memoir.
Richard Chiappone, fiction writer and UAA associate faculty member, says if he gets even one whiff of a lesson or lecture in a piece, whether in fiction or nonfiction, he is soooooo out of there.
On 49 Writers two weeks ago, guest blogger, Melissa DeVaughan, talked about her meeting with Willie Hensley which led her to think about her own work and the whole daunting process of writing books. How do you really get started? she asked on her blog.
If we are anguished over the first sentence because we falsely believe that first sentence is going to be THE FIRST SENTENCE, and therefore we are unduly pressuring ourselves that it must be exactly right, we may never go past the first page to write a story.
The dictum holds true: stay in the mess. Go into the vortex, the zone, the place of mystery and uncertainty, and don’t surface expecting answers and outlines and “just-the-right-opening-sentence.” This may be especially difficult for nonfiction writers because many of us have magazine or journalism backgrounds and we are accustomed to beginning our work with something resembling a structure already at-hand. We assume things must proceed logically and in a unified way, for our draft has to cohere and hang together. We may have it all figured out ahead of time what it is we want to say. Words cannot be wasted. We want to be clear, precise, and present the story with a beginning, middle, and end.
In nonfiction, we are often satisfied if we have devised a serviceable structure for our ideas. And as long as we find one that’s adequate, which gives us some narrative juice, we may stick with it for the duration of the book.
But to be more “fiction-like” perhaps what we ought to do is stay in the material long enough until the more perfect, more organic, more inevitable structure is found. We might have to run through hundreds of first sentences, shift the narrative voice many times. We might have to live in the muck and uncertainty until we find the real story that’s been lurking out-of-sight for so long, underneath all the piles of precious research we have gathered.
How to start a book? Melissa wondered.
Start right in the middle of that chaos. And don’t let go.
You could also pray for more black ice, Chinook winds, erupting volcanoes—anything Mother Nature can do to help keep you inside and stuck to your chair on “free” winter days.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Barnum comes to Barrow
When I first moved to village Alaska in 1979, I had no television, no telephone, and of course no internet. Not because I was trying to live pure and simple. The technology just wasn't available.
If those were the good old days, they are gone for good. Will we soon be taking a similar look back at the golden days of publishing? Maybe we already are. In a recent New York Times article "See the Web Site, Buy the Book," author Brad Meltzer says, “The days of just holing up and writing in solitude are gone. Today, you can’t be a successful writer without having a little Barnum in your bones.”
It used to be that Alaskan writers spent a fair amount of time complaining that distance hampered our careers. Promotion was a problem. New York was a world away. They didn't understand us. No one wanted to pay for book tours. It was the price of living in a place we loved.
Fast forward to the era of no excuses. Interactive web sites. Eye-popping book trailers. Author blogs and twitters. If Barnum's in your blood, it doesn't matter whether you live in Kipnuk or Kalamazoo, Barrow or Baltimore, as long as you've got an internet connection.
And maybe some money. Authorbytes, a multimedia company, has built over 200 author websites, to the tune of $3500 to $35,000 apiece. Eighty-five percent of the time, it's the author who foots the bill.
"But I just want to write," you say. "I don't want to hustle my books." Fair enough. I feel the same, most days. Maybe Barnum's not in my blood, or yours. But do we really have a choice?
If those were the good old days, they are gone for good. Will we soon be taking a similar look back at the golden days of publishing? Maybe we already are. In a recent New York Times article "See the Web Site, Buy the Book," author Brad Meltzer says, “The days of just holing up and writing in solitude are gone. Today, you can’t be a successful writer without having a little Barnum in your bones.”
It used to be that Alaskan writers spent a fair amount of time complaining that distance hampered our careers. Promotion was a problem. New York was a world away. They didn't understand us. No one wanted to pay for book tours. It was the price of living in a place we loved.
Fast forward to the era of no excuses. Interactive web sites. Eye-popping book trailers. Author blogs and twitters. If Barnum's in your blood, it doesn't matter whether you live in Kipnuk or Kalamazoo, Barrow or Baltimore, as long as you've got an internet connection.
And maybe some money. Authorbytes, a multimedia company, has built over 200 author websites, to the tune of $3500 to $35,000 apiece. Eighty-five percent of the time, it's the author who foots the bill.
"But I just want to write," you say. "I don't want to hustle my books." Fair enough. I feel the same, most days. Maybe Barnum's not in my blood, or yours. But do we really have a choice?
Monday, February 16, 2009
Independent People: A guest post by Ann Dixon
Open season has ended on our Northern Favorites shelf, but we'd like to keep loading it with your favorite books. So if there's one you'd like to add, email a short guest post explaining why it's favorite-worthy. (No spoilers, please.) We'll add your selection to our shelf and post your thoughts - short ones in the weekly round-up, longer in separate posts as we're doing here.
Alaskan author Ann Dixon writes beautiful books for children, published with Whitman, Alaska Northwest, McElderry and Scholastic. She has also published on outdoor and environmental topics. A recipient of the Contribution to Literacy in Alaska award (2000), Ann will be posting as a 49 writers featured author in July. Here she explains why Independent People is her current Northern Favorite.
For me, a Favorite Book is impossible. Even when the range is limited to Northern books the choices are too numerous and my tastes too varied. Are we talking fiction, nonfiction, or poetry? For adults or children? Genre or literary? Contemporary or classic? My mind can manage only “favorites,” plural and sans caps.
With that grain of salt, and a “for adults” qualifier, I’m eager to spread the word about my most recent literary love, which just happens to fall conveniently into the Northern category. Independent People is set in early-twentieth century Iceland, a North recognizable to Alaskans, yet different enough to stimulate new imaginings. The novel, by Icelander Halldór Laxness, is probably not for everyone, yet I find it difficult to predict who will like it and who will not. On the surface, the story is about a subsistence sheep farmer who struggles relentlessly to obtain and maintain his independence within a near-feudal economic system and a punishing environment. But the novel sprawls, uniquely and unexpectedly, with a storytelling style unique to Laxness yet certainly steeped in the poetic sagas and oral tradition. Laxness writes with a vision of humanity that is wry, overarching, and sublimely tragicomic – if you have the attention span for understated Nordic humor. A several-page passage describing a young boy’s imagination as he moves from a state of dreaming to waking is astounding and alone worth reading the book for.
Shortly after finishing Independent People I was so excited about Laxness that I read another of his novels, World Light. Half-way through, I thought perhaps it would overtake Independent People as something I could call my “most recent” favorite. I finally decided to stick with Independent People for reasons owing to a certain plot development in World Light, which I won’t spoil by mentioning. But I can’t keep from loving World Light as well, not just for its plot and characters but for descriptions like this: “From the brow of the glacier there shone the kind of light one can only read about in more advanced doctrines.”
The beauty of nature, the harshness of nature; the kindness of people, the idiocy of people; the pleasures and sufferings of the flesh, the joys and struggles of the spirit; the injustices of society, the tyranny of individuals; isolation and community; and above all, the pursuit of poetry as life – or is it life as poetry? -- these are the themes of Laxness that I’ve discovered so far. Fortunately, I’ve got The Fish Can Sing waiting by my bedside. With a title like that, how can an Alaskan resist?
FYI: Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Several but not all of his works are translated into English. He died in 1998.
Friday, February 13, 2009
49 writers weekly roundup
Friday the 13th followed by Valentine's Day. I know it happens every seven years or so, but it seems like a karma klash. Yes, I hate those kitschy k's too, but this one was just too tempting. I'm thinking of coining it as one word: karmaklash. But I'm not sure if it can compete with some of the cool new words from the 2009 Washington Post Mensa Invitational. Sarchasm? The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it. Dopeler Effect? The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. And in what has to be the Alaskan favorite, beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
With no transition from beezelbug either intended or implied, Alaskan author Dana Stabenow has a great guest post this week on Jungle Red this week. This title (by the Jungle Red host) will surprise no one who knows Dana: "Dana Stabenow makes us need a nap." It's great dialogue on internet marketing. Supplement your reading with this recent Publisher's Weekly piece on social media as a marketing tool.
Speaking of social media, guess what I learned on Facebook? Effigies, an anthology of writing by indigenous peoples,will be released in the UK and Australia in about three days. The US/North American release is forthcoming. Effigies is a new series, from Earthworks of Salt Publishing, collecting four chapbooks by emerging Indigenous Poets into one volume to introduce essential voices to the field and canon. According to the promotional piece, "dg okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt are four exceptional emerging poets. Their
Pacific Rim relationship invited opportunity to publish these four chapbooks in one collected volume. Like effigy earthworks, stone, and bone carvings, the books included in this volume portray representational imagery as testimonies to the stunning spirit, landscapes, and lives from which these poets derive. A significant statement as to the changing state of the world, this collection is a rich pleasure — an honor to undertake."
Ketchikan librarian Charlotte Glover, fresh back from the American Library Association mid-winter conference in Denver, reports that she came across a new first person memoir/life in Alaska book by an author from Homer in one of the mainstream publisher booths: Tide, Feather, Snow - A Life in Alaska by Miranda Weiss. Always great to see an Alaskan title get shelf space in a national venue. Anyone know the book? Miranda, are you reading? Charlotte also reminds us that poet Tom Sexton has a new book out from the University of Alaska Press.
Finally, a small personal plea. This week I was assigned a travel guide update - 390 pages, due in four weeks. Yikes. The good news is that the physical production of books is very fast these days. I turn the manuscript in on March 9, and the book's on the shelves in May. Bad news: it's tough for me to get the inside scoop on everything in such a short time - and in the winter, no less. So if any of you who are reading from Seward, Homer, Kenai/Soldotna, Valdez, or the Valley have an hour or so to spare, I'd love to email a Word file on your area for you to QUICKLY peruse. I'll do all the nitpicky fact-checking. What I really need to know are tidbits I can't get from a distance - maybe a restaurant changed hands and isn't so great anymore, or there's a new bakery that everyone's raving about. I'd need your input within the next week or so. All I can offer as compensation is a shout-out in the acknowledgements, a couple of free books, and of course my undying gratitude. If you're able to help, please email me at debv@gci.net.
With no transition from beezelbug either intended or implied, Alaskan author Dana Stabenow has a great guest post this week on Jungle Red this week. This title (by the Jungle Red host) will surprise no one who knows Dana: "Dana Stabenow makes us need a nap." It's great dialogue on internet marketing. Supplement your reading with this recent Publisher's Weekly piece on social media as a marketing tool.
Speaking of social media, guess what I learned on Facebook? Effigies, an anthology of writing by indigenous peoples,will be released in the UK and Australia in about three days. The US/North American release is forthcoming. Effigies is a new series, from Earthworks of Salt Publishing, collecting four chapbooks by emerging Indigenous Poets into one volume to introduce essential voices to the field and canon. According to the promotional piece, "dg okpik, Cathy Tagnak Rexford, Brandy Nālani McDougall, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt are four exceptional emerging poets. Their
Pacific Rim relationship invited opportunity to publish these four chapbooks in one collected volume. Like effigy earthworks, stone, and bone carvings, the books included in this volume portray representational imagery as testimonies to the stunning spirit, landscapes, and lives from which these poets derive. A significant statement as to the changing state of the world, this collection is a rich pleasure — an honor to undertake."
Ketchikan librarian Charlotte Glover, fresh back from the American Library Association mid-winter conference in Denver, reports that she came across a new first person memoir/life in Alaska book by an author from Homer in one of the mainstream publisher booths: Tide, Feather, Snow - A Life in Alaska by Miranda Weiss. Always great to see an Alaskan title get shelf space in a national venue. Anyone know the book? Miranda, are you reading? Charlotte also reminds us that poet Tom Sexton has a new book out from the University of Alaska Press.
Finally, a small personal plea. This week I was assigned a travel guide update - 390 pages, due in four weeks. Yikes. The good news is that the physical production of books is very fast these days. I turn the manuscript in on March 9, and the book's on the shelves in May. Bad news: it's tough for me to get the inside scoop on everything in such a short time - and in the winter, no less. So if any of you who are reading from Seward, Homer, Kenai/Soldotna, Valdez, or the Valley have an hour or so to spare, I'd love to email a Word file on your area for you to QUICKLY peruse. I'll do all the nitpicky fact-checking. What I really need to know are tidbits I can't get from a distance - maybe a restaurant changed hands and isn't so great anymore, or there's a new bakery that everyone's raving about. I'd need your input within the next week or so. All I can offer as compensation is a shout-out in the acknowledgements, a couple of free books, and of course my undying gratitude. If you're able to help, please email me at debv@gci.net.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The skill we all need
With Obama in the house, the age of ineloquence is over. W is back in Texas, where he can goof up in private. The mumblers and perspirers among us have to face the fact that speaking poorly just isn't in style.
Being able to speak more confidently off the cuff, deliver a public testimony, or design a complex public presentation is important in nearly everyone's jobs. But I want to talk to the published writers out there first and foremost.
Books aren't selling so well right now and editors may not be biting -- but that makes this the best time to 1) look deep within one's heart and commit to writing what matters most 2) slow down and spend more time on revision and 3) develop some of the other professional skills that will matter when the economy wakes up again. I truly believe that.
I signed up for a writing class about 12 years ago just in order to learn how to read my writing out loud -- and to learn how to suffer a public critique -- without shaking uncontrollably and turning bright red in the face. I've spent years trying to get more comfortable at the podium or with a mic in hand, and I've made some progress, but I still get the sweats whenever I stand in front of a group. Last year, after hearing an experienced public speaker say he stank until he'd given his first 200 or so public lectures (I think that was the number), my girlfriend and I challenged each other to give as many lectures as possible. We made it to 20 or 30 before we stopped counting. It's really hard to rack up that much experience.
Lately, I've had to make some quick story pitches relating to both books and film -- a briefer but equally essential kind of public speaking. Every author knows what it's like trying to explain their book, elevator-pitch-style, over and over (to an editor, to a bookseller, to a stranger on a plane). Until one learns how to do it well, a lot of emotional energy gets wasted, energy most of us would rather spend writing. Wouldn't it be great just to learn how to speak well, once and for all?
This isn't just about getting over nerves. There is a whole continuum of growth. I used to be content just to survive a reading or interview without choking up. Now I'd appreciate it if I could slow down and actually be more attuned to the audience -- rather than the sound of blood whooshing in my own ears -- so that I can connect and appreciate. I'd like to learn to read with fewer -- or no -- notes. I'd like to become more spontaneous and confident. I'd like to learn how to design an interactive reading that doesn't go too long, peter out, or suffer from technological glitches: Powerpoint gone awry, fuzzy mic. I'd like to get more efficient at preparing for talks so the preparation isn't so overwhelming. Mark Twain, I believe it was, said a lecture took him 3 weeks to prepare; that's an awful lot of unpaid labor. It's worth it if the lecture really rocks; not so much if you go home groaning and wincing at your own stumbles.
Ironically, my writing persona often interferes with my speaking persona -- something I only figured out in recent years. The writer in me favors creativity and hates to repeat (which is why I can't tell a joke), reserves the right to edit and revise endlessly, and needs control. The speaker in me must accept that a good speech is the result of many rehearsals and repeats, must speak without editing or apology, and must embrace the unexpected, including small turnouts or fritzing computers or occasionally unhelpful bookstore staff.
Little things count. I just read some advice suggesting that authors shouldn't take questions last, because it's anticlimactic, especially when there are few questions. Sometimes, the confused audience doesn't even know when to clap. (Better to announce the talk is almost but not quite done, then take questions, then wrap up with a final anecdote or short reading. So simple, but I never thought of that.)
Naturally comfortable speakers also fail. I just heard a very good poet at a multi-poet reading in another city read some of her latest work, which people liked so much she decided to read just one more poem, then just one more, and then just one more, including even a partially finished poem. The audience response dropped off, of course. She should have stopped when she was ahead.
What other observations have you made? Which public speakers or presenting authors knock your socks off and why? If you attend readings, what mistakes do you see authors making again and again? What are your worst public speaking moments, and what skills would you like to develop?
Being able to speak more confidently off the cuff, deliver a public testimony, or design a complex public presentation is important in nearly everyone's jobs. But I want to talk to the published writers out there first and foremost.
Books aren't selling so well right now and editors may not be biting -- but that makes this the best time to 1) look deep within one's heart and commit to writing what matters most 2) slow down and spend more time on revision and 3) develop some of the other professional skills that will matter when the economy wakes up again. I truly believe that.
I signed up for a writing class about 12 years ago just in order to learn how to read my writing out loud -- and to learn how to suffer a public critique -- without shaking uncontrollably and turning bright red in the face. I've spent years trying to get more comfortable at the podium or with a mic in hand, and I've made some progress, but I still get the sweats whenever I stand in front of a group. Last year, after hearing an experienced public speaker say he stank until he'd given his first 200 or so public lectures (I think that was the number), my girlfriend and I challenged each other to give as many lectures as possible. We made it to 20 or 30 before we stopped counting. It's really hard to rack up that much experience.
Lately, I've had to make some quick story pitches relating to both books and film -- a briefer but equally essential kind of public speaking. Every author knows what it's like trying to explain their book, elevator-pitch-style, over and over (to an editor, to a bookseller, to a stranger on a plane). Until one learns how to do it well, a lot of emotional energy gets wasted, energy most of us would rather spend writing. Wouldn't it be great just to learn how to speak well, once and for all?
This isn't just about getting over nerves. There is a whole continuum of growth. I used to be content just to survive a reading or interview without choking up. Now I'd appreciate it if I could slow down and actually be more attuned to the audience -- rather than the sound of blood whooshing in my own ears -- so that I can connect and appreciate. I'd like to learn to read with fewer -- or no -- notes. I'd like to become more spontaneous and confident. I'd like to learn how to design an interactive reading that doesn't go too long, peter out, or suffer from technological glitches: Powerpoint gone awry, fuzzy mic. I'd like to get more efficient at preparing for talks so the preparation isn't so overwhelming. Mark Twain, I believe it was, said a lecture took him 3 weeks to prepare; that's an awful lot of unpaid labor. It's worth it if the lecture really rocks; not so much if you go home groaning and wincing at your own stumbles.
Ironically, my writing persona often interferes with my speaking persona -- something I only figured out in recent years. The writer in me favors creativity and hates to repeat (which is why I can't tell a joke), reserves the right to edit and revise endlessly, and needs control. The speaker in me must accept that a good speech is the result of many rehearsals and repeats, must speak without editing or apology, and must embrace the unexpected, including small turnouts or fritzing computers or occasionally unhelpful bookstore staff.
Little things count. I just read some advice suggesting that authors shouldn't take questions last, because it's anticlimactic, especially when there are few questions. Sometimes, the confused audience doesn't even know when to clap. (Better to announce the talk is almost but not quite done, then take questions, then wrap up with a final anecdote or short reading. So simple, but I never thought of that.)
Naturally comfortable speakers also fail. I just heard a very good poet at a multi-poet reading in another city read some of her latest work, which people liked so much she decided to read just one more poem, then just one more, and then just one more, including even a partially finished poem. The audience response dropped off, of course. She should have stopped when she was ahead.
What other observations have you made? Which public speakers or presenting authors knock your socks off and why? If you attend readings, what mistakes do you see authors making again and again? What are your worst public speaking moments, and what skills would you like to develop?
Three weeks to read Ordinary Wolves
Heads-up: three weeks until our online book club, when we'll discuss Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner. It's not too late to order a copy or start reading the one that's been sitting on your shelf for months. (If you're like me, you have a TBR pile dozens-thick and a heart full of good intentions. Me personally, I usually need a nudge, deadline, or book club date to tackle many books, just because there are so many crying out to be read!)
A little background on the novel:
In 2004, Kanter told a PW interviewer he was inspired to write the novel based on his experience of growing up in a northern Alaska that is "greatly changed by progress." He says, “The Alaska that I knew as a kid is gone." The novel is autobiographical in the sense that the Alaska of boy narrator Cutuk mirrors that of Kantner’s youth. Is it a story of man vs. nature? “If I had to have a theme, that would be it—and racism,” says Kantner. Cutuk’s story chronicles his family’s migration from Chicago, the death of his mother and his relationship with an Inupiaq family, all set against the Alaskan tundra. “It’s going from a simple land-based way of life to this heap of technology dumped around you and trying to figure it out,” Kantner notes.
The PW review glowed: "In the small but growing genre of ecological fiction, the great challenge is to balance political and environmental agendas with engrossing storytelling. This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society."
A little background on the novel:
In 2004, Kanter told a PW interviewer he was inspired to write the novel based on his experience of growing up in a northern Alaska that is "greatly changed by progress." He says, “The Alaska that I knew as a kid is gone." The novel is autobiographical in the sense that the Alaska of boy narrator Cutuk mirrors that of Kantner’s youth. Is it a story of man vs. nature? “If I had to have a theme, that would be it—and racism,” says Kantner. Cutuk’s story chronicles his family’s migration from Chicago, the death of his mother and his relationship with an Inupiaq family, all set against the Alaskan tundra. “It’s going from a simple land-based way of life to this heap of technology dumped around you and trying to figure it out,” Kantner notes.
The PW review glowed: "In the small but growing genre of ecological fiction, the great challenge is to balance political and environmental agendas with engrossing storytelling. This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society."
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
And now for something completely different...
Y'all were getting real serious in the comments box yesterday. You know the fur is just starting to fly when issues like authenticity, cultural appropriation, how they do things "Outside," etc. etc., are all raised in the same (more or less) discussion. Hoo boy. Well, I'm in a less serious mood today. And I recall I never pointed out, dear readers, that the name of this blog changed back in Jan. 1 from "49 writers, no moose" to the simpler, albeit potentially less intriguing, "49 writers."
Which means it's open season now on posting the occasional photo of -- just guess -- as I have done here.
Photo one, you'll see, is taken from my kitchen window yesterday. This is my own portrait of my version of the "authentic Alaska life." Or at least the "authentic Anchorage life." In my case, it involves a new Aerogarden, a gift from my husband Brian on my midwinter birthday (Dec. 29) when I was feeling down in the dumps. About 5 weeks later, seeds have grown into plants so big I have to trim them back. I've never succeeded at growing basil before owning this device, which -- second to a SAD light -- should be owned by every Alaskan suffering through dark winters. (Is this product placement? Will I get any free seed plugs for this? Somehow I doubt it.)
Notice that the dark spot above the Aerogarden is -- bigger photo below -- a moose out my window. I don't care what anyone says, life in Anchorage is not like life in Los Angeles or any other big or medium-sized city. Moose in the front, back, and sideyards are commonplace. Yes, I sit around slurping espresso and working on my laptop, but I also keep a thick garbage bag ready in case the volcano blows (has it changed its mind yet?) and I'm suddenly required to protect our electronica from the glassy dust. Meanwhile, I just got a new writing gig -- more on that at some point -- which requires me to watch dozens of hours of amazing sea otter and orca and shark footage. From Prince William Sound, just a short drive away, where I've enjoyed spending time with real sea otters and orcas. (I've never seen a shark, though. I'll admit that.)
It's all pretty amazing. Especially in these dismal days, when I spend far too much time griping about the economy and worrying about the state of publishing, I don't want to take my own Alaska life for granted. I don't care what anyone else has to say about how my life compares to someone else's life in Seattle or Nome, Portland or Kotzebue. I'm pretty happy here, in this strange inbetweenland, where I watch wildlife, dipnet salmon, write whatever the hell I want to write, and still get to be ridiculously picky about my coffee.
That's all I have to say. More serious topics -- maybe -- tomorrow...
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Olson's Fox Island Cabin: Resurrection Bay's First Writer's Residency
A guest post by Jonas Lamb:
The discussion at 49 Writers about writers' residencies and retreats prompted me to take a historical look at an artist whose work has had a profound influence on my own. Rockwell Kent, like many of us today, felt the need to leave behind the pressures of daily life and spend some focused time with his art.
In 1917, Kent was making preparations for an extended retreat in Iceland. Having grown tired of the social expectations of New York life, Kent had spent the better part of three years living and working in Newfoundland, supporting his family on a $50 a month stipend from his mother and whatever he could earn from the sale of his paintings. With the United States' entrance into the War in 1917, Kent was forced to turn from Iceland because of unfounded rumors declaring him a German spy mapping the Newfoundland coast.
Kent took on varied work from cartooning to architecture, turning down an offer of free transportation from the Southern Pacific Railroad in exchange for series of paintings of the Apache trail because he preferred cold, maritime climates. At last Kent received an offer from collector and art patron Ferdinand Howald to financially support the family while Kent took sabbatical to explore new work. Arrangements began immediately for a new voyage, one to a land as mystical and transcendent as Iceland - Alaska. Despite his excitement at the prospect of the trip he feared the possible loneliness and following much debate between the parents, it was decided their son, Rockwell, would accompany him.
The two Rockwell Kents rode by rail across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, spending much of the time on the observation deck, bewildered by the majesty of "land so monotonously bare and flat that it suggests the infinite as the sea and sky do". From Vancouver and then Seattle they went via the Inside Passage through narrow inlets between island mountains of "land that seem to have been made for poets or romantic painters to live upon." Despite his admiration of the landscape, Kent was disgusted by the filth of Petersburg and at man's destruction of the lands surrounding their communities.
Arriving in Yakutat Bay, Rockwell senior took a job in the cannery and spent evenings exploring the surrounding lands in hope that this wild river bay would be suitable for a winter residence. Finding the area too wild, the Kents went on to Seward where they explored the Resurrection River valley. This time, they found the land too tame. Gifted with two large cigars, a tinsmith took Kent and his son on a berry picking trip near the mouth of the bay. The Kents rowed from there. But after an hour at the oars brought the Kents no closer to Fox Island, an old Norwegian, Olson, threw a tow line to the dory and brought them across the bay and ashore at his homestead. Having two cabins in a small clearing at the back of a cove, one for himself and one for his goats, Olson offered to put out the goats, making the second cabin a winter home for the artist. This was exactly what they were looking for.
After purchasing provisions for the better part of the winter, the Kents set off in an overloaded dory powered by a 1 HP outboard, sitting high atop burlap sacks of flour, potatoes, piles of books and, in the stern, a Yukon stove and 6 feet of pipe. The motor promptly quit and the young Rockwell took up the oars, demonstrating to his father that he was most certainly ready for the challenges that lay ahead, rowing the craft 13 miles to Fox Island in the fog. I once did this same paddle in a double sea kayak when the fog prevented our water taxi from picking us up on Fox Island. Maybe it was because we rounded Cape Resurrection in 6 foot swells, but young Rockwell must have been twice the man I'll ever be.
The winter of 1919-1920 was spent cutting endless cords of firewood (which would be burned green), drawing and writing both inside and out, and building the relationship between father and son. Kent's descriptions and samples of the many drawings, which resemble woodcuts in their detail, were published in the 1920 book, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. I was introduced to this book by a fellow librarian in the fall of 2006 and have been returning to it each winter since, longing for that isolated retreat where despite difficulties, great work was created and notions of what it means to live and work were put to the test by choice. While I find many of Kent's views on "pioneering" in conflict with my own views of conservation and land use, they were rather common for the time.
Landscape cannot help but exert its influence on a writer who seeks a quiet, magnificent place in which to work. The folks at the National Park Service figured this out a while back and offer Artist In Residence programs at many parks across the country, including one at the Grand Canyon.
Here is the first in a series of poems which emerged from my own sort of retreat within the pages of Rockwell Kent's book chronicling his stay at Olson's Cabin, Resurrection Bay's first writer's residency:
"Zaruthstra himself led the ugliest man by the hand, in order to show him his night-world and the great round moon and the silvery waterfalls nigh unto his cave"
By Jonas Lamb
for the first time
crossing
Resurrection
Bay
calm this late summer day
departing Seward
September 1918
in oar driven dory
the artist and son
"on a dreamer's search"
across southward
facing bay
opening upon
"limitless, Pacific Ocean"
for some forgotten shelter
on the shores of
a lost coast
then enter
in motor-driven dory
one old Norwegian
call him Olsen or Zaruthstra
if you prefer
without hesitation
a tow line thrown
an insistent invitation
"come and I show you the place to live"
a carefully cleared cove
and three cabins
home to Angoras, bluefox
and now
a man and a boy
guests for the old man
in "his night-world beside
the great round moon
and the silvery waterfalls"
For more poems inspired by the book, visit http://jonaslamb.wordpress.com/2007/01/05/poems-for-kent/; for an abbreviated review of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure, http://juneaubookblog.wordpress.com/?s=Wilderness
The discussion at 49 Writers about writers' residencies and retreats prompted me to take a historical look at an artist whose work has had a profound influence on my own. Rockwell Kent, like many of us today, felt the need to leave behind the pressures of daily life and spend some focused time with his art.
In 1917, Kent was making preparations for an extended retreat in Iceland. Having grown tired of the social expectations of New York life, Kent had spent the better part of three years living and working in Newfoundland, supporting his family on a $50 a month stipend from his mother and whatever he could earn from the sale of his paintings. With the United States' entrance into the War in 1917, Kent was forced to turn from Iceland because of unfounded rumors declaring him a German spy mapping the Newfoundland coast.
Kent took on varied work from cartooning to architecture, turning down an offer of free transportation from the Southern Pacific Railroad in exchange for series of paintings of the Apache trail because he preferred cold, maritime climates. At last Kent received an offer from collector and art patron Ferdinand Howald to financially support the family while Kent took sabbatical to explore new work. Arrangements began immediately for a new voyage, one to a land as mystical and transcendent as Iceland - Alaska. Despite his excitement at the prospect of the trip he feared the possible loneliness and following much debate between the parents, it was decided their son, Rockwell, would accompany him.
The two Rockwell Kents rode by rail across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, spending much of the time on the observation deck, bewildered by the majesty of "land so monotonously bare and flat that it suggests the infinite as the sea and sky do". From Vancouver and then Seattle they went via the Inside Passage through narrow inlets between island mountains of "land that seem to have been made for poets or romantic painters to live upon." Despite his admiration of the landscape, Kent was disgusted by the filth of Petersburg and at man's destruction of the lands surrounding their communities.
Arriving in Yakutat Bay, Rockwell senior took a job in the cannery and spent evenings exploring the surrounding lands in hope that this wild river bay would be suitable for a winter residence. Finding the area too wild, the Kents went on to Seward where they explored the Resurrection River valley. This time, they found the land too tame. Gifted with two large cigars, a tinsmith took Kent and his son on a berry picking trip near the mouth of the bay. The Kents rowed from there. But after an hour at the oars brought the Kents no closer to Fox Island, an old Norwegian, Olson, threw a tow line to the dory and brought them across the bay and ashore at his homestead. Having two cabins in a small clearing at the back of a cove, one for himself and one for his goats, Olson offered to put out the goats, making the second cabin a winter home for the artist. This was exactly what they were looking for.
After purchasing provisions for the better part of the winter, the Kents set off in an overloaded dory powered by a 1 HP outboard, sitting high atop burlap sacks of flour, potatoes, piles of books and, in the stern, a Yukon stove and 6 feet of pipe. The motor promptly quit and the young Rockwell took up the oars, demonstrating to his father that he was most certainly ready for the challenges that lay ahead, rowing the craft 13 miles to Fox Island in the fog. I once did this same paddle in a double sea kayak when the fog prevented our water taxi from picking us up on Fox Island. Maybe it was because we rounded Cape Resurrection in 6 foot swells, but young Rockwell must have been twice the man I'll ever be.
The winter of 1919-1920 was spent cutting endless cords of firewood (which would be burned green), drawing and writing both inside and out, and building the relationship between father and son. Kent's descriptions and samples of the many drawings, which resemble woodcuts in their detail, were published in the 1920 book, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. I was introduced to this book by a fellow librarian in the fall of 2006 and have been returning to it each winter since, longing for that isolated retreat where despite difficulties, great work was created and notions of what it means to live and work were put to the test by choice. While I find many of Kent's views on "pioneering" in conflict with my own views of conservation and land use, they were rather common for the time.
Landscape cannot help but exert its influence on a writer who seeks a quiet, magnificent place in which to work. The folks at the National Park Service figured this out a while back and offer Artist In Residence programs at many parks across the country, including one at the Grand Canyon.
Here is the first in a series of poems which emerged from my own sort of retreat within the pages of Rockwell Kent's book chronicling his stay at Olson's Cabin, Resurrection Bay's first writer's residency:
"Zaruthstra himself led the ugliest man by the hand, in order to show him his night-world and the great round moon and the silvery waterfalls nigh unto his cave"
By Jonas Lamb
for the first time
crossing
Resurrection
Bay
calm this late summer day
departing Seward
September 1918
in oar driven dory
the artist and son
"on a dreamer's search"
across southward
facing bay
opening upon
"limitless, Pacific Ocean"
for some forgotten shelter
on the shores of
a lost coast
then enter
in motor-driven dory
one old Norwegian
call him Olsen or Zaruthstra
if you prefer
without hesitation
a tow line thrown
an insistent invitation
"come and I show you the place to live"
a carefully cleared cove
and three cabins
home to Angoras, bluefox
and now
a man and a boy
guests for the old man
in "his night-world beside
the great round moon
and the silvery waterfalls"
For more poems inspired by the book, visit http://jonaslamb.wordpress.com/2007/01/05/poems-for-kent/; for an abbreviated review of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure, http://juneaubookblog.wordpress.com/?s=Wilderness
Monday, February 9, 2009
What's the matter with blurbs?
Last week Lesley Thomas (Flight of the Goose, Far Eastern Press, 2005) tackled the sticky subject of blurbs. A spirited discussion ensued, wherein I for one learned that authors routinely blurb books they haven't read. No wonder Wharton's Age of Innocence is one of my favorites.
Apparently it does matter what authors say about one other's books, whether they read them or not. While we batted around the issue of blurbs, blockbuster author Stephanie Meyer recommended a first novel, The Girl Who Could Fly, on her website. The publisher is rushing another 10,000 copies into print to meet the fresh demand.
Meanwhile, Stephen King sent the writing world into a tailspin with another genuine opinion, comparing Meyer with Rowling in an interview with USA Weekend: "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."
My oh my. Dueling authors. Name recognition gone wild. In a world where even bad publicity is good publicity, look for skyrocketing sales all around.
Read on for more from Lesley Thomas on blurbs.
I don't want to write about blurbs and other icky marketing devices anymore.
Maybe it feels too whorish now, my old conditioning kicking in, suffusing me
with hot-faced shame when blurbs become self-serving rolls in bed with
strangers - though as cultural anthropologists and sociobiologists know,
there is a noble tradition in all circumpolar and probably all archaic
cultures to do just that, in order to expand the gene pool and secure a
possible future shelter from a storm, or sharing of a meal in famine times -
something maybe we all should start thinking about.
Suffice to say, most famous types who agreed to blurb my novel were kindly
and sharing Alaskans. Famous Outsiders - with a few exceptions - simply did
not respond to my queries, or a card was sent by a secretary: "Ms So and So
does not write blurbs." (Sorry, a kind lie: Ms So and So does indeed blurb,
but only for someone with a high status press.)
The famous Alaskans seemed sincere - like they had read the story, liked
it and wanted to support its ideals. It is one of those "socially conscious"
novels that you are not supposed to write, because literary fiction with
"ethnic" themes by a "non-ethnic" person with a social conscience or a
progressive stance was agit-prop or pedantic non-art according to critics; I
say "was" because the tides have swiftly turned and novels with climate
change and Big Oil and draft-dodging are okay now, but my book was born in
the dark depths of the Bush era and was a reaction to it too, so could be
called reactionary.
Alaskan blurbs and blurbs by big name anthropologists did not seem to have an effect on Outside bookstores or lure the big fish: a deal with a big NY press.
And I have to tell you a sad adventure cold-calling an indie Alaskan bookstore in a town where the 10,000 tourists get off the megaships - to get Flight of the Goose into that store would've been a big fish indeed. The buyer said, "I see the blurbs, but you have to understand, we are not the Arctic here, this is Southeast Alaska and we are very far from the Arctic and Eskimo culture." I said, "I know that. But you are far from India and you carry novels set in India, don't you? And novels set in New York? Memoirs of a Geisha? And - and - my story may be set in an Inupiaq village but there are white people too, it's really cross cultural just like all of Alaska, and the story is just as applicable to a Tlingit village --"
Click (the sound of the book buyer hanging up the phone).
Actually I never said that about India and villages. I was so flabbergasted
about the "we are far away from the Arctic so we can't carry an arctic book"
that I just clammed up.
I failed at the Anchorage airport too: "We see the great blurbs by Alaskan
writers but we already have a novel set in an Inupiaq village in the 70s."
Apparently there can be only one. So the blurbs have been helpful - my novel
has sold well for a small literary press - but they are not always helpful.
Apparently it does matter what authors say about one other's books, whether they read them or not. While we batted around the issue of blurbs, blockbuster author Stephanie Meyer recommended a first novel, The Girl Who Could Fly, on her website. The publisher is rushing another 10,000 copies into print to meet the fresh demand.
Meanwhile, Stephen King sent the writing world into a tailspin with another genuine opinion, comparing Meyer with Rowling in an interview with USA Weekend: "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."
My oh my. Dueling authors. Name recognition gone wild. In a world where even bad publicity is good publicity, look for skyrocketing sales all around.
Read on for more from Lesley Thomas on blurbs.
I don't want to write about blurbs and other icky marketing devices anymore.
Maybe it feels too whorish now, my old conditioning kicking in, suffusing me
with hot-faced shame when blurbs become self-serving rolls in bed with
strangers - though as cultural anthropologists and sociobiologists know,
there is a noble tradition in all circumpolar and probably all archaic
cultures to do just that, in order to expand the gene pool and secure a
possible future shelter from a storm, or sharing of a meal in famine times -
something maybe we all should start thinking about.
Suffice to say, most famous types who agreed to blurb my novel were kindly
and sharing Alaskans. Famous Outsiders - with a few exceptions - simply did
not respond to my queries, or a card was sent by a secretary: "Ms So and So
does not write blurbs." (Sorry, a kind lie: Ms So and So does indeed blurb,
but only for someone with a high status press.)
The famous Alaskans seemed sincere - like they had read the story, liked
it and wanted to support its ideals. It is one of those "socially conscious"
novels that you are not supposed to write, because literary fiction with
"ethnic" themes by a "non-ethnic" person with a social conscience or a
progressive stance was agit-prop or pedantic non-art according to critics; I
say "was" because the tides have swiftly turned and novels with climate
change and Big Oil and draft-dodging are okay now, but my book was born in
the dark depths of the Bush era and was a reaction to it too, so could be
called reactionary.
Alaskan blurbs and blurbs by big name anthropologists did not seem to have an effect on Outside bookstores or lure the big fish: a deal with a big NY press.
And I have to tell you a sad adventure cold-calling an indie Alaskan bookstore in a town where the 10,000 tourists get off the megaships - to get Flight of the Goose into that store would've been a big fish indeed. The buyer said, "I see the blurbs, but you have to understand, we are not the Arctic here, this is Southeast Alaska and we are very far from the Arctic and Eskimo culture." I said, "I know that. But you are far from India and you carry novels set in India, don't you? And novels set in New York? Memoirs of a Geisha? And - and - my story may be set in an Inupiaq village but there are white people too, it's really cross cultural just like all of Alaska, and the story is just as applicable to a Tlingit village --"
Click (the sound of the book buyer hanging up the phone).
Actually I never said that about India and villages. I was so flabbergasted
about the "we are far away from the Arctic so we can't carry an arctic book"
that I just clammed up.
I failed at the Anchorage airport too: "We see the great blurbs by Alaskan
writers but we already have a novel set in an Inupiaq village in the 70s."
Apparently there can be only one. So the blurbs have been helpful - my novel
has sold well for a small literary press - but they are not always helpful.
Friday, February 6, 2009
49 writers weekly roundup
I love opening my inbox to find that another Alaskan author is getting national press. This week, Lew Freedman, author of Thunder on the Tundra (Alaska Northwest Books, 2008) is featured in an interview in School Library Journal.
Alaskan poet Ken Waldman is making the rounds in the Lower 48, doing shows in Cincinnati and Dublin OH (outside of Columbus). From there it's on to the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference in Chicago, where he's also co-producing a show of a dozen writers who play music (Stephen King and Dave Berry, Ken?) at Buddy Guy's Legends, a local club in town. Later this month he'll be in Portage WI, Stevens Point WI, Madison WI, South Haven MI, and Saginaw MI.
Dana Stabenow is guest blogging this month at Jungle Red (February 11) and Minotaur's Moments (six days beginning February 19). She'll also be a guest on the Big Alaska radio show on 750 KFQD at 9 a.m. on February 14. And author Michael Englehard has added another stop on his tour of Anchorage and Southcentral: a signing of Wild Moments at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art on March 6, from noon to 3 pm.
At the February 19 meeting of the Anchorage Audobon (BP Energy Center, Anchorage, 7 p.m.) Alaskan nature writer Bill Sherwonit will discuss the wild nature that surrounds us -- even in Anchorage -- and that we carry within us, while sharing some short excerpts from his new book, Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey.
On Friday February 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Juneau Public Library, Alaskan author Dan O’Neil will talk about his life in Alaska and his New York Times Award Winning book, A Land Gone Lonesome: an Inland Voyage along the Yukon River. O’Neill has run dog teams, worked construction, built log cabins, and experienced Alaska since 1975. He was a research associate at the University of Alaska’s Oral History Program where he produced television and award-winning radio documentaries for public broadcasting. He is also the author of The Firecracker Boys and The Last Giant of Beringia.
Members of Alaska Citizens for the Chugach (ACC) are soliciting essays from anyone who visits, lives, or works in the Chugach and its wild watershed. Tell what the Chugach National Forest means to you in two pages or less (four pages handwritten). Send submissions to Deb Carlson, PO Box 702, Cooper Landing, AK 99572; email carlsons@arctic.net. A quilted wall-hanging goes to the winning essay. The deadline is April 2.
Looking ahead, the Skagway Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Skagway Arts Council are currently soliciting ideas for a writers conference in Skagway for next year - tentatively, May 2010. Contact Skagway News owner Jeff Brady at skagwaynews@aptalaska.net with your ideas. Brady also urges authors to contact him about possible signings if they're traveling to Southeast Alaska this summer.
And don't forget our upcoming 49 writers online book club discussion of Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves on March 7 & 8. If recent comment threads are any indication, we're looking forward to a lively dialogue.
Alaskan poet Ken Waldman is making the rounds in the Lower 48, doing shows in Cincinnati and Dublin OH (outside of Columbus). From there it's on to the AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) Conference in Chicago, where he's also co-producing a show of a dozen writers who play music (Stephen King and Dave Berry, Ken?) at Buddy Guy's Legends, a local club in town. Later this month he'll be in Portage WI, Stevens Point WI, Madison WI, South Haven MI, and Saginaw MI.
Dana Stabenow is guest blogging this month at Jungle Red (February 11) and Minotaur's Moments (six days beginning February 19). She'll also be a guest on the Big Alaska radio show on 750 KFQD at 9 a.m. on February 14. And author Michael Englehard has added another stop on his tour of Anchorage and Southcentral: a signing of Wild Moments at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art on March 6, from noon to 3 pm.
At the February 19 meeting of the Anchorage Audobon (BP Energy Center, Anchorage, 7 p.m.) Alaskan nature writer Bill Sherwonit will discuss the wild nature that surrounds us -- even in Anchorage -- and that we carry within us, while sharing some short excerpts from his new book, Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey.
On Friday February 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Juneau Public Library, Alaskan author Dan O’Neil will talk about his life in Alaska and his New York Times Award Winning book, A Land Gone Lonesome: an Inland Voyage along the Yukon River. O’Neill has run dog teams, worked construction, built log cabins, and experienced Alaska since 1975. He was a research associate at the University of Alaska’s Oral History Program where he produced television and award-winning radio documentaries for public broadcasting. He is also the author of The Firecracker Boys and The Last Giant of Beringia.
Members of Alaska Citizens for the Chugach (ACC) are soliciting essays from anyone who visits, lives, or works in the Chugach and its wild watershed. Tell what the Chugach National Forest means to you in two pages or less (four pages handwritten). Send submissions to Deb Carlson, PO Box 702, Cooper Landing, AK 99572; email carlsons@arctic.net. A quilted wall-hanging goes to the winning essay. The deadline is April 2.
Looking ahead, the Skagway Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Skagway Arts Council are currently soliciting ideas for a writers conference in Skagway for next year - tentatively, May 2010. Contact Skagway News owner Jeff Brady at skagwaynews@aptalaska.net with your ideas. Brady also urges authors to contact him about possible signings if they're traveling to Southeast Alaska this summer.
And don't forget our upcoming 49 writers online book club discussion of Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves on March 7 & 8. If recent comment threads are any indication, we're looking forward to a lively dialogue.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Guest blog by Melissa DeVaughn: How do you begin?
Andromeda here. One of the joys of co-piloting this collaborative blog is watching more Alaska writers get online, and hearing from people about their new projects. I really feel like our community is getting to know each other better. New websites and blogs keep getting added to our blogroll. If you see we've missed one (your own or someone else's) please give us a nudge. My latest blog-trawl turned up this post which I asked Melissa's permission to re-post. If you've ever wondered what the life of an outdoorsy Alaska freelance writer -- one who runs sled dogs, no less -- might be like, her blog is a chance to find out.
By Melissa DeVaughn, from her Deadlines and Stopwatches Blog
So, how do you begin writing a story? As I sat across the table from Willie Hensley today, sipping Kaladi coffee and listening to him talk about his new book, "Fifty Years From Tomorrow," I wondered, "How could this guy, who has done so much for Alaska, and been so influential in the state's development condense it all into this cluster of pages that I'm holding?"
Listening to him talk, I thought about my own work, mentally compared it to a kindergartner's scribble, and felt it lacking.Willie's story took more than three years to tell, but I've started reading it and can't put it down. His honesty about growing up in a village is so refreshing after so many Outsider stories that glorify the life of Native Alaskans. That's not to say there is nothing worth glorifying, either, the way he describes summer camp and the beauty of the region outside Kotzebue where he grew up. The descriptions conjure a purer, albeit harder time, and I felt a certain naivety to my own life here in the suburbs of Anchorage, which really isn't what the rest of the state is about at all.
So, having this conversation with Willie made me think: How do you start a story? How do you put one sentence down, keep going and keep going, until you have a book in hand? I should be able to answer that, having written my own book -- but it was a guidebook, more of a resource than the putting-down of feelings and emotions on the page. I've written articles, too -- some of them thousands of words long. But those, too, were the compilation of a specific topic -- a person, a place, a destination -- and the focus became clear early on, making it safe to take that first step.What I'm getting at is the larger picture of telling a story on many levels. Willie's story, for instance, is about more than just "growing up Native." He touches on morality, humanity, religion, politics, family, love and struggle. He somehow weaves it into a tale that tells more than just the story of his life, but represents an entire culture that is being ambushed by outside influences on a daily basis.
So, he got started on this story. And it grew. And grew. It got so long, his editor made him cut it by 50 percent. He didn't like it, but that's the writer's life, so he did his best.
We talked for an hour. I could've listened to him all afternoon. Articulate, funny, thoughtful and a little bit of a rebel, his stories kept me planted in my seat until he finally announced he had to get back to work. My reason for meeting with him -- to write a short profile on his book for a magazine assignment -- seemed so inconsequential after hearing him talk.
After more than an hour of chatting, I thanked him for his time, tucked my notebook into my bag and got up to leave. Crossing Sixth Avenue to head back to my car, though, I realized I forgot to ask him -- "How did you start? What was that first line that got the book moving along? Is there some easy answer that can make the idea of sitting down to write a book that less daunting?"
I'm dragging my heels. I know it. The book is in there, like a tiny dervish that I'm scared to let free. My nickname, after hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1993, was Chaos. I was named so after the times I'd come into the trail shelters and have what the other thru-hikers called a "pack explosion." One by one, each piece of gear came out of the pack, until a pile of fleece, camp food, cooking gear and sleeping bag/pads were strewn across the shelter floor.
Then, like a bird cleaning its nest, I'd reorganize each piece creating my "home" for the night from my few posssessions.I want to look at my writing that way, as if I can just have a "word explosion" and then reorganize all that chaos once it's down on paper.
But I'm scared, I guess. I haven't let myself do it, for fear that the words will be empty, the possessions worthless. The Chaos in me remains buried, waiting for that secret formula -- that "first sentence" to propel me forward.
By Melissa DeVaughn, from her Deadlines and Stopwatches Blog
So, how do you begin writing a story? As I sat across the table from Willie Hensley today, sipping Kaladi coffee and listening to him talk about his new book, "Fifty Years From Tomorrow," I wondered, "How could this guy, who has done so much for Alaska, and been so influential in the state's development condense it all into this cluster of pages that I'm holding?"
Listening to him talk, I thought about my own work, mentally compared it to a kindergartner's scribble, and felt it lacking.Willie's story took more than three years to tell, but I've started reading it and can't put it down. His honesty about growing up in a village is so refreshing after so many Outsider stories that glorify the life of Native Alaskans. That's not to say there is nothing worth glorifying, either, the way he describes summer camp and the beauty of the region outside Kotzebue where he grew up. The descriptions conjure a purer, albeit harder time, and I felt a certain naivety to my own life here in the suburbs of Anchorage, which really isn't what the rest of the state is about at all.
So, having this conversation with Willie made me think: How do you start a story? How do you put one sentence down, keep going and keep going, until you have a book in hand? I should be able to answer that, having written my own book -- but it was a guidebook, more of a resource than the putting-down of feelings and emotions on the page. I've written articles, too -- some of them thousands of words long. But those, too, were the compilation of a specific topic -- a person, a place, a destination -- and the focus became clear early on, making it safe to take that first step.What I'm getting at is the larger picture of telling a story on many levels. Willie's story, for instance, is about more than just "growing up Native." He touches on morality, humanity, religion, politics, family, love and struggle. He somehow weaves it into a tale that tells more than just the story of his life, but represents an entire culture that is being ambushed by outside influences on a daily basis.
So, he got started on this story. And it grew. And grew. It got so long, his editor made him cut it by 50 percent. He didn't like it, but that's the writer's life, so he did his best.
We talked for an hour. I could've listened to him all afternoon. Articulate, funny, thoughtful and a little bit of a rebel, his stories kept me planted in my seat until he finally announced he had to get back to work. My reason for meeting with him -- to write a short profile on his book for a magazine assignment -- seemed so inconsequential after hearing him talk.
After more than an hour of chatting, I thanked him for his time, tucked my notebook into my bag and got up to leave. Crossing Sixth Avenue to head back to my car, though, I realized I forgot to ask him -- "How did you start? What was that first line that got the book moving along? Is there some easy answer that can make the idea of sitting down to write a book that less daunting?"
I'm dragging my heels. I know it. The book is in there, like a tiny dervish that I'm scared to let free. My nickname, after hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1993, was Chaos. I was named so after the times I'd come into the trail shelters and have what the other thru-hikers called a "pack explosion." One by one, each piece of gear came out of the pack, until a pile of fleece, camp food, cooking gear and sleeping bag/pads were strewn across the shelter floor.
Then, like a bird cleaning its nest, I'd reorganize each piece creating my "home" for the night from my few posssessions.I want to look at my writing that way, as if I can just have a "word explosion" and then reorganize all that chaos once it's down on paper.
But I'm scared, I guess. I haven't let myself do it, for fear that the words will be empty, the possessions worthless. The Chaos in me remains buried, waiting for that secret formula -- that "first sentence" to propel me forward.
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