The Klatch

Jewcy giddily presents the second in our series of Book Klatches, wherein five authors spend five days dishing over e-mail about the writing life. On the fifth and final day, below, moderator Ed Schwarzschild asks the group to share their best and worst moments from the book tour circuit.

From: Ed
To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter

Good morning gentlemen. Here's a simple question for our final day: the book tour is an odd yet cool phenomenon of our times (full disclosure: I trained/drove/toured a bunch of miles this week and now, back home again, not sure how efficient/effective such travel is—not sure, really, if efficiency/effectiveness are the right criteria).

What are your favorite stories/experiences from the road? Worst stories/experiences? Things that happened on book tour #1 that you vowed would never happen again? Events you wish you could attend weekly? And, bonus question: what question(s) do you wish we'd tackled this week (it's not too late)?

***

From: Chris
To: Adam, Daniel, Ed, Peter

I love giving readings. It's probably my favorite part of the publication process. I love getting an emotional reaction from an audience.

Obviously I'm most happy when the audience is visibly moved (which doesn't happen very often) or leaps to a standing ovation (which has never happened). But I also like it even when they ask all those expected questions about whether I write longhand or on a computer, or what I'm working on now, because these are people who care about books and, simply by their presence, are validating my vocation as a writer. I write for them, so I have an obligation to honor the time they've taken out of their lives to spend with me. Of course I like it when they ask more challenging questions, or say, "Hey, that was good!" or buy multiple copies of the book.

I love the hotels, even when they're sterile Marriott Courtyards. I love eating dinner alone at the hotel bar and making inconsequential conversation with the people around me. I love walking aimlessly around towns I'd never otherwise visit (Akron; Keene, NH) and imagining who I might have been if I'd grown up there. I love avoiding friends of friends who live in these cities with whom I'm supposed to "grab a drink," because my life is crowded enough, and these tours are a nice opportunity just to be alone.

What I can't bear are event hosts who aren't prepared for the visit, who don't even remember I'm coming, and/or who"Can Everyone Hear Me?": If you ask an author to give a reading, try to get other people there, too. think it's no big deal if no one shows up. I find that very insulting. Not because I deserve the red carpet treatment, but because it devalues my time not to put down any carpet at all. They would never treat their accountant or their lawn guy this way. This doesn't happen often, but when it does I take it personally, and then my dinner at the bar feels very lonely and pathetic, and I can't even call the friend of a friend b/c I'm too embarrassed.

My "rite of passage" reading was at an independent bookstore in Keene. I was on tour for my first book, and had read in NYC the night before. I overslept and drove up from the city at breakneck speed, panicked that I wouldn't arrive in time.

I got to the bookstore at 6:58 for a 7pm reading, ran inside, and found rows and rows of empty chairs. The events person (a sweet young girl who'd taken time off from college to work at the store) was apologetic when no one—not a single person— showed up, and gave me the standard excuse: "there's a lot going on in town tonight."

I read to her for about ten minutes (because she asked), and at the end she even clapped for me, which, by the way, is the saddest sound in the world: two hands clapping in an empty bookstore on a Tuesday night in rural New Hampshire.

When I got to my hotel, just a 5-minute drive, I had a message to call the events girl. She wanted to take me out. Actually, she wanted me to come to her house. She made it quite clear that she lived alone and that we would have "our privacy." I politely declined, mostly because she wasn't my type. (Had she looked more like Tom Brady, I'm not sure I could have declined her offer, given the vulnerable state I was in). I was grateful, though. She knew my ego needed to be soothed. She was giving it the old college try.

At another reading, this one recently at Border's in Boston, the chairs were full when I arrived (again at the last minute). I was thrilled, and a little bit shocked. Then, as soon as the events guy announced that the reading was about to start, *everyone* got up and left. Apparently there was very little seating at this particular Border's. I read anyway, because it was being broadcast to the entire store, and because I have no shame.

***

From: Daniel
To: Adam, Chris, Ed, Peter

My very first Lemony Snicket reading was in Lansing Michigan. It was raining. It was a Borders. The woman taking me around was from HarperCollins and had agreed to do this for the free plane ticket so she could visit her parents.

I had a whole shtick prepared expecting some children an elementary school was supposed to ship over. They backed out due to rain. There were two adults there. I did the shtick anyway to their stony faces, and afterwards they came up to me and said, "We're buyers from the independent down the road. We hate your books and we just had to see what kind of sicko wrote them."
Authors Welcome!: Crappy hotels are part of the book tour gig
We drove to the hotel where I had fantasies of closing the hotel bar on Harper's tab. But there was no bar. It was the sort of hotel you stay at when driving across the country and you're afraid if you don't take this place it'll be another 3 hours before a hotel appears. The check-in guy gave me a key, and then handed a duplicate to the woman I was with, and then, glaring at me, said, "There's a fax from your wife, sir." The fax said "Happy Birthday," which was a joke. It wasn't my birthday. My wife just had a fax machine at work, and this was back in the day when that was inherently hilarious. But the hotel guy thought I was cheating with the secretary on my birthday.

It gradually got better.

***

From: Ed
To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter

One book tour credo: there's safety in numbers. Many of my best events have been readings with other writers. And many of the best of those have been in bars, which could lead to another credo you can coin yourselves. The First Fiction Tour was an incredible idea whose time has come and, alas, apparently, gone (but hopefully will return): great independent bookstores and local bars working together, producing fun, well-organized, vibrant events. Closest I'll ever get to what it must feel like to be in a band.

My most depressing event was also strangely joyous by the end. On the First Fiction Tour, we stopped in Iowa City to read at an event sponsored by Prairie Lights, one of those fabled stores I'd always wanted to visit, in a fabled town with a fabled writing program directed, then, by Frank Conroy. I was looking forward to being a part of that storied scene, if only for a night, and I was particularly looking forward to meeting Frank Conroy, about whom I heard so much, and whose memoir, Stop-Time, I'd read, and loved, during my conversion from pre-med to creative writing in college.

When we arrived in town, we learned that Frank Conroy had died earlier that day. We wound up in the appointed bar, drinking and mourning, which may be a common Iowa City pastime. No one came to the reading. Until just before we started (we were going to read no matter what, the organizer told us, because that's the way Frank would have wanted it) when a gangly kid I recognized walked in hand-in-hand with a young lady. Turned out he was an ex-student of mine who'd driven in with his sweetheart all the way from Minneapolis. Crazy. Exactly the kind of craziness and chance that, in one way or another, tends to salvage even the gloomiest readings.

***

From: Peter
To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Ed

This continues to feel very strange, is this what it is to be a blogger? I can see why people do this. Can tell an unlistening world anything you feel like.

I've been trying to fast for Yom Kippur and so far this morning I've had cream in my coffee and a half a cookie. It's only 10 Chicago time and I got up at 9:15. I'm not on a book tour—I'm in my home town researching my childhood, which is an odd thing to do, I can't quite find it.

In Seattle I once read to a single person. He was a former postman who'd lost his job, his wife, and his house, he said. He said he came to the back of the bookstore to get a little peace and quiet, but go ahead, why not read a little? Couldn't hurt, he said.

And so I did. I read to him. His name was Harry. After, he said he enjoyed it. I stole a copy of my own book and gave it to him. He shoved it in his coats and wandered out into the rain.

***

* Enjoyed this Klatch? Check out our first Book Klatch, moderated by Jewcy heroine Elisa Albert.

 

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Jewcy giddily presents the second in our series of Book Klatches, wherein five authors spend five days dishing over e-mail about the writing life. On Day 4, below, moderator Ed Schwarzschild asks the group whether literature ought to be political.

From: Ed
To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter

William Kennedy, Pulitzer-Prize winner and one of our finest writers, end of sentence, but also one of our finest writers about politicians, corruption, and the trappings of power, recently cited Camus when asked how writers should engage with/in politics. The Camus quote he referenced:

"It would appear that to write a poem about spring, would nowadays be serving capitalism. I am not a poet, but I should have no second thoughts about being delighted by such a poem if it were beautiful. One either serves the whole of man, or one does not serve him at all. I like men who take sides more than literatures that do."

The Revolution Will Be Ambivalent: ActBlue brings the literary class into the political process
I've been thrilled by the appearance of LitPAC and look forward to doing what I can to help that writers-based PAC grow and prosper. I'm curious, though, about where/how you draw the line between giving political support when you see fit and bringing/letting politics into your writing lives?

Another way to think about this goes back to Peter's point about the actual decrease in the space fiction writers are given these days in traditional magazines/newspapers/etc—I mean, it's a relatively clear indication that fiction is, on some level, seen as less relevant, less important, less of-the-moment than all the other work for which those magazines/newspapers/etc reserve plenty of pages. Or, to alter slightly that Camus quote: What do we do in a culture that likes men who takes sides more than it likes literature?

And, hey, you've heard, of course, that Pres. Bush has been reading Camus, too, right?

P.S. I hope everyone is in good health this morning, with the buckets cleaned out and back under the sink....

***

From: Daniel
To: Adam, Chris, Ed, Peter

"Political" is like "experimental," "realistic" or thousands of other adjectives applied to fiction—I'm more convinced by an individual example. Mr. Orner's last novel was so swell it made me think every novelist should be engaged specifically and directly with culture.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union made me think, scratch that, the fantastical is the best way to get at large cultural ideas. Whenever I read David Markson I think, never mind, the novel's over, this is the direction writing is going in. A great novel makes you think all novels should be like that, in the way that if I'm driving around with the windows down listening to Revolver or Purple Rain or Velvet Underground With Nico I can't believe I ever listen to anything else. Until I go the opera and then I think pop music is ridiculous.

I'm happy to be politically active and to put my money where my mouth is. In terms of my work I can't picture writing a novel that's overtly political. But then again, my literary agent says all literature is political—it either supports the status quo or doesn't, and the good stuff doesn't, and she sees representing the Snicket books as part of the political literature she's represented over the years. So here we are again with the slippery adjectives.
Lemony Hearts Peter Orner: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo makes other authors dream big
***

From: Peter Orner
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild

I'm of two minds on this, on the one hand, there's a war on, and on the other, when isn't there a war on?

The Clinton years were like a strange dream. The fate of the republic hinged on a stain in a dress. I long for the days. What this has to do with writers, any more than accountants though I'm not sure?

I've also had a few beers tonight so maybe I'm not in position to say anything relevant, but I will say we have a responsibility to be engaged citizens no matter who we are. But I think this should only leak into our stories so far as it doesn't make them boring. If Daniel's books are political because they question authority and more—they make a complete mockery of authority—then all books should be so political. And I think that's the upshot. I'm with Kennedy—who also understands that politics is about people and if your people are real and if your people make trouble, your politics will never be boring. Long live Roscoe.

***

From: Chris
To: Adam, Daniel, Ed, Peter

Writers are truth-tellers, and telling the truth is an inherently political act. In writing nuanced dramatizations of the lives of people in your (fictional or nonfictional) town, family, or country, you create empathy among readers. You create documents of a particular time and place, and those documents become a sort of history. I love that oft-quoted line about history being written by the winners and literature by the losers; we need both perspectives. In fact, we need lots of losers and lots of winners giving us their various perspectives on any event.

I do think writers have an obligation to be politically engaged, but mostly because writers should have an insatiable curiosity about what makes the world tick.

***

From: Ed
To: Adam, Chris, Daniel, Peter

Yes and yes and yes to being swept up and engaged and insatiably curious, and a big No in thunder to being boring about politics or anything else—nothing worse than that. Sometimes seems to me we need a politics of reading, or a politics that includes much more reading.

The recent stat that had 1 in 4 Americans stating they hadn't read a single book during the last year (zero, zilch—no Dan Brown, no Harry Potter, no nothing) is a bad, bad thing for this land. Tricky, I know, to say that writers are/should be role models, but this need for writers to be engaged and insatiably curious and absorbed by what James Agee called "the certain normal predicaments of human divinity" is really, I like to think, a crucial political statement, a political demonstration of how to study and make sense of the world around us.

Maybe it's naive of me to say, but here it is anyhow: people who read Orner, Castellani, Handler, Johnson, and their literary ancestors will be, I guarantee it, better political—and human—beings.

***

* Next: Book Tour Horror Stories

 

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Jewcy giddily presents the second in our series of Book Klatches, wherein five authors spend five days dishing over e-mail about the writing life.

BOOK KLATCHERS

Adam Johnson, author of Emporium and Parasites Like Us

Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs and the Lemony Snicket books

Chris Castellani, author of A Kiss From Maddalena and The Saint of Lost Things

Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Moderated by Ed Schwarzschild, author of Responsible Men and The Family Diamond

*****

Jewcy Loves Ed Schwarzschild: Have this book? If not, show some self-respect and click the above imageFrom: Ed Schwarzschild
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Peter Orner

Good morning, kind klatchers!

The basic idea here is simple: Imagine we're hanging out, kicking back, talking about the writing lives we're living and contemplating. We're a mid-career, all-male klatch by design, which I hope gives us an opportunity to get some interesting takes on specific issues both old and new.

Here we go:

How does it feel to be a mid-career writer? What new pressures/pleasures surprised you? How have the processes of writing and publishing the 2nd, 3rd, etc books felt different from that first book? And how did you push on to become a mid-career writer? Were you ever tempted to stop and switch careers? If so, what kept you from doing that?

Can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Klatch on!

Ed

*****

From: Daniel Handler
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

I pack my kid off to school, pour myself the second cup of coffee, check my e-mail and learn I'm mid-career already? I should have stayed in bed. Mid-career? Let's hope, as with the author himself, it's a pretty big middle.

I'm trying to cling to my innocence as far as writing fiction goes. I work best when I don't know quite what I'm doing, and all the writers I admire seem to maintain a certain amount of naiveté throughout their careers. (I used to have a fragment from one of Melville's letters taped up near my desk, in which he admitted to a friend that he had no idea what his new novel was even about. It was Moby-Dick.) I'm trying to finish two short stories in the next few weeks, and I'm at complete existential crisis: not only do I not know how to make these stories better, but I'm beginning to wonder what a short story is, exactly. I hope I always have that kind of vertigo even if it wears out my shoe leather through pacing.

Naturally it's nicer to write a book knowing that in all likelihood it will be published, rather than the fear I had writing my first novel (and then, my first real novel) that it would be found in a box by distant relatives and turned to mulch. That's a substantial difference in temperament now that I'm "mid-career," but it's basically the only one.

Towards the publication of my first novel I found myself wondering what in the world I could do for a living, as being utterly broke and unpublished seemed acceptable but utterly broke and published just seemed pathetic. Writing for children kind of fell into my lap and then, as is so often with young men, my lap took over.

But that's another story.

***

Left New York to Hang With Other Ordinary Folk: Daniel Handler (calls himself "Lemony Snicket") yawps and mugs while playing accordionFrom: Chris Castellani
To: Adam Johnson, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzscihld, Peter Orner

First of all, it's nice to hear that I'm mid-career. Most days I feel either as though my career, such as it is, is in its awkward pimply sweaty adolescence, or that it's been over since my most recent pub date (Oct, 2005). What a relief to hear I still have at least half my life to live.

I wrote and sought publication for my first book for (too) many reasons: as a gift to my parents (whose immigrant stories inspired it), out of vengeance toward a writing professor who said I'd never publish anything, as a fulfillment of a wish/goal I've had since I first started reading for pleasure, because I loved the setting and the characters (of course), and because I had to save face with the dozens of people who'd had to listen to me complain about writing for five years.

My second book I wrote because I'd settled into that identity as a writer, and I felt confident that I had a story to tell. I put no pressure on myself to prove anything to anyone. I thought, "no one expects anything from a second book, anyway," and because of those low expectations I actually *enjoyed* the process, let myself experiment a bit, and didn't carry around so much baggage. Most people say that the writing of their first book is more "pure," but for me it was the opposite. Instead of feeling tainted by the marketplace and the criticism and the touring, I felt as though my experienced with all of them inoculated me.

Because neither book made me a fortune, I've worked as a teacher and a non-profit administrator for the past few years, and I can't imagine NOT having (an)other job(s) to occupy my mind. I've never once considered not writing as an option. My nonprofit Grub Street is in the literary world, so it feeds my desire to write rather than diminishes it. I also get to meet a lot of amazing fellow writers. So I wouldn't change a thing.

I hope this is OK as an initial response, though, as I read it over, it strikes me as quite boring. I'm looking forward to hearing from the rest of you.

***

From: Adam Johnson
To: Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

While getting a degree in writing, I had a professor who liked to hold court over beers after class. One time he delivered a mini-lecture on why the third book was the real test for an author, of whether he had "it." His basic argument was that everybody had a book inside, and writers should certainly have two, so the third book determined whether you were a navel-gazing, auto-bio type, or whether you could really write "fiction." It seemed like pretty useless advice to a table of unpublished students, and looking back, it's really clear that this professor had just published, to his great relief, his third book and thus secured tenure.

And yet, here is where I find myself, working on my third book. Like Daniel, the process of writing seems eerily the same, if a little more difficult and contemplative—right now I'm working on a short story, one I don't completely understand, and I hope I don't fail it. But the "mid-career" label seems to refer to the public side of being a writer. As a guy who is pretty much on the sideline of this business, the mid-career label kinda means: Instead of writing for readers, mostly, you're now writing for other writers. Real readers are hard to find, and it seems like publishers are willing to promote the books of literary stars and books for "new," "discovery" and "debut" writers. After two books, I am neither new nor a star, and my next collection of stories is likely to sell to the few thousand people who tried to write a short story themselves in the previous year.

But if you're writing for yourself, or for your wife, or for your close friends, none of that matters. I was always gung-ho over a new short story by Mark Richard or Lorrie Moore, and I'd talk about them with friends whose shared enthusiasm put us somewhere between sneakerheads and war reenactors. And honestly, I didn't start really reading contemporary fiction until I started trying to write it, so it was probably destiny that I would head toward being a writer who writes for other writers. AKA, Mid-career Johnson.

***

Loitered in Midwestern Restrooms Before it Was Cool: The polyamorous Peter OrnerFrom: Peter Orner
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Ed Schwarzschild

Above a urinal in a bathroom in St. Louis this morning (yeah, I hang out in midwestern bathrooms, you got a problem with that?), I read this:

125 YEAR PLAN: LOVE EVERYBODY

I'm trying to employ this kind dictum even toward Ed Schwarzschild for getting me into this. I'm with Daniel. Midwhat? I have enough trouble with feelings of inadequacy every day facing the page, now I have to feel this way on email?

I've always been bored by gambling. But writing (and so much else) has always seemed to me like a crapshoot. I never know if I am going to write another decent sentence from one hour to the next. If I pull a few off, I'm thankful and surprised. And grateful. This is a strange job. And I have always thought of the writing of the sentences as the job part. Not the other part, the publishing part, which is something different entirely, but at the same time determines whether or not bills get paid. This too is a crapshoot, with even wierder odds. Good books get published. Bad books get published. Good books don't get published. Bad books...you get the idea.

Andre Dubus has a beautiful essay in his collection Broken Vessels about Richard Yates. In it he describes the small Boston apartment where Yates spent his last years. It was modest and book-filled. It wasn't squalor, but it was cramped and book-filled, and it was, fitting for Yates, lonely. In the essay Dubus wishes that the apartment could have been preserved in that state, not as a shrine, but so that aspiring writers might see where one writer wound up.

Again, not to show that this is a miserable thing to do with your life, but to demonstrate that even if you are good, and Yates was very good, you might end up in a place like this. Or you might not. But get used to the possibility.

Now go home and write something honest and don't worry about what it might bring you.

***

From: Daniel Handler
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

I've always loved something Brian Eno supposedly said, that the Velvet Underground didn't sell that many records, but everybody who bought one started a band. That's how I like to think of literary fiction—regardless of whether or not it finds a large audience, it's the readers who really take it to heart that count. One of the things I love about having left New York, the literary capital of the world, is bumping up against people who are reading whatever occurs to them, and forming opinions about the writing that aren't informed by literary gossip or an article in the Observer. It's a reminder to me not to think about the size of the audience but the passion of the few readers who really take it to heart. A few months back I met a guy, not a writer, who mentioned that his all time favorite book was Robert Coover's first novel, The Origin Of The Brunists, offhand a novel I wouldn't think anybody read who wasn't either a writer or a Coover freak or both. And yet this guy just had it in his head—in effect, he started a band with it—and to me that's the best kind of reader.

***

From: Ed Schwarzschild
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Daniel Handler, Peter Orner

Gentlemen!

Fired off question #1 at some ungodly hour last night, then crashed out, awoke early to take the train from NYC to Boston so that, like any glorious lower-mid-career writer, I could then rent a compact, very fuel efficient car to drive 2 hours into Western MA tonight to meet with a book group at a cool indie bookshop. I could have been worrying about whether anyone would show up at all at the event (who knows? who cares?) It's a great bookstore—Odyssey Books, in South Hadley—and the owners and their faithful are folks who love books and I love them. Instead, my worries were focused elsewhere: would the klatch fly? What a treat to arrive here, find that there is occasional wireless in this chilly old house where I'm lodged, and then discover your great responses. Yes! The klatch is aloft and soaring!

I'm not surprised that we're more or less resisting the "mid-career" label. I mean, no one likes to be pigeonholed, categorized, etc. (well, except perhaps in extreme cases, like "Pulitzer-Prize winner" or "Nobel Laureate" or something like that. This will all lead to a future question, so please allow pigeonholing to flutter around your consciousnesses until, say, Wednesday or Thursday). But for now, I'll just say that I share the jitters around the term "mid-career". Sometimes it seems that I live my life in fear of jinxing the future—from baseball games to opening sentences, especially opening sentences—and even the label "writer" can seem awfully presumptuous, reminding me of how Auden (I think he's the one) said that after finishing a poem, he was never certain he'd be a poet again, because (this part isn't Auden) who the hell knows what is going to happen when you sit down with pen/pencil/laptop/graffito tool? In other words, as Peter rightly and eloquently reminds us from the stalls, it's a crapshoot.

But there has to be some way to describe writers who have 2 + books out in the world and are working on the ones after that. They're no longer sexy debut authors, so they must have entered into their sexy mid-career-age. We could get into the whole lower, upper-middle, upper class mid-career vocab, but let's not. In any case, I'm betting there won't be too much resistance when a future question focuses on the fact that we're all male.

But, on a more serious note, I'm really drawn to the question of audience—from Daniel's Coover fan, to Adam's vision of writing for other writers. Maybe it's safe to say that one thing that develops as we move past first books involves a sharper, clearer sense of audience—who we're hoping to write for, whose eyes we long to have on our pages. Which might be another way of saying that our expectations clarify. But more about this to come.

***

From: Daniel Handler
To: Adam Johnson, Chris Castellani, Ed Schwarzschild, Peter Orner

Charlie Parker said, of the "bop"/"hard bop" debate, "Let just call it music." I say we call authors who are past the second book simply "sexy."

***

On Day 2 of the Klatch: You survived a divorce and a plane crash. Can you survive an MFA?

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THURSDAY

From: Elisa Albert
To: Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: The worst thing ever

What’s the most upsetting thing anyone’s every written or said about your work, and how, if at all, did it affect you the next time you sat down to write (and thereafter)?

From: Aaron Hamburger
To: Elisa Albert, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: "Hi, I've read your book!"

People have said so many upsetting things, even when they’re not trying to be critical.

It all goes back to my first workshop, back in the high school creative writing club when the idea of a workshop seemed so revolutionary and enchanting. Then someone said my work wasn’t genius, and my relationship to the workshop forum has gone sour ever since. In grad school, I got so mad at one group I, I turned in a story called “The Mutual Masturbation Workshop.”

When my book was published, it was just like workshop, but on a bigger stage. All the things people liked and disliked in class were the same things they mentioned in the reviews.

I remember I had one extremely caustic review that found nothing good to say about one of my books. Not one single tidbit of merit. The reviewer singled out lines from my book that had received praise from other quarters as evidence of how awful I was, and how I had somehow conned Random House into publishing me. It was my first really negative review, and I remember I blushed as I read it, as if ha, ha, this guy has caught me! I am an imposter and a fraud, and he knows it and is telling the world. Later, I was talking with a bookstore owner in the area where the review came out and she said, “We just sold out of all your books after that wonderful review!” And then I realized, that it really is true no one reads your reviews as closely as you do and that the only thing that matters is if you get mentioned in the paper, and if you get a lot of inches.

Another upsetting thing people have said to me is, "Hi, I’ve read your book!" and then nothing. Would you go to someone’s house for dinner and say, "Hi, I ate the dinner you cooked!" Either pretend you haven’t read it or lie. Or if you have some interesting criticism to offer, you could do that, I guess, even though it isn’t so useful once the book is done. I really believe that each book comes with its own problems to solve and lessons to learn, lessons that are not transferable to your next project.

So far the really negative comments haven’t affected me greatly because I haven’t agreed with them or found them useful. Also, because I write reviews sometimes, I know that a lot of it is taste-based, trying to come up with objective reasons for a subjective opinion you may have had. For a while, the experience of being reviewed tempered the way I reviewed. “So what?” I said to myself, “This guy wrote a bad book. He didn’t kill anyone.” But then I read some books that really made me burn because I disliked them so much, and then I felt the reason I disliked them was important enough to mention.

So I’ve resigned myself to criticizing when I think it’s warranted, while trying to be as precise as possible. And I always relate my critiques to specific textual examples.

Negative comments have shaken my confidence a good deal as I read them, made me feel bad that they might affect my future fortunes in some way, but by the time I sit down to write, I try to make it a new day. Also, when my second book came out, I tried not to read reviews, and when I did read them, to quickly glance over and then forget.

None of this is easy, but necessary.

From: Elisa Albert
To: Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: Noooooooo Mercy!

I never had that quintessential fuck-all-y’all workshop experience, happily. I was always cool with disagreements about the merits of my work in the MFA setting, no biggie. But holy crap, the reviews have thrown me for a loop. To be fair, it’s only been a couple of bad ones, far outnumbered (so far!) by the good, but freaking OUCH.

The title of the most irritating one was “Without Mercy” and the pull quote (placed next to a sizable picture of me) said “If it’s not hard-wired into us as a species to look askance at characters such as these, it really ought to be.” The best part was that I got the same reaction Aaron mentioned! People were like, hey, pretty good review! Hilarious. For the next few days my boyfriend and I did this bit where I would mock-attack and tackle him and he would cry “Mercy!” and I would go “Noooooooooo! No Mercy!”

I’m sorry to say that I actually have lost sleep over shit reviews. Not because I think my book is perfection—I could talk the ear off any reviewer about what’s wrong with it—but because I was so frustrated and upset about what they’d taken issue with. It was all “This is bad for the Jews” and, like I mentioned before, “These people are bad people” and “No character becomes a better person” and crazy stuff like that. Funnily enough, none of the (very real) weaknesses in narrative or prose were even mentioned.

And also sorry to say that I’ve had a harder time working than usual this summer—I find myself writing defensively, suddenly. It blows. I tried burning some white sage, which the dude at the health store says destroys negative energy. I’m tempted to try a red-string Kabbalah bracelet.

Did any of you guys see the harsh review Owen King got in The New York Times last year? The reviewer was especially obnoxious in making a huge deal out of the fact that Owen is Stephen King’s son, and basically had nothing nice to say at all about Owen’s own work. But Owen had such a great sense of humor about it; he added the following to his blurb list:

“…Owen King…”

—The New York Times

I thought that was pretty awesome of him.

Aaron, I think I may have thrown you a “I read your book!” once, when I first met you. Because I hadn’t yet, and was embarrassed, and am an idiot. But I have since read them both, and hey, they’re wonderful.

From: Stacey Richter
To: Elisa Albert, Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Karen Russell
Subject: "So, don't you have any real stories?"

I’m sort of with Elisa on the getting high/cutting oneself front, though I have a good writer friend who’s published a ton of books who was the most popular girl in her high school. Every time she tells me I explain my need to kill her (which makes her laugh—but I’m not joking.) I still think that there’s some loneliness, isolation, privateness, and rage that drives story making, at least in our generation of ironic, spiritually adrift self-deprecators, but then I remember those guys. You know, those guys. Didn’t they sit around thinking how brilliant they are, laughing and writing books and porking their students? I don’t know—Saul Bellow? Mario Puzo?

I’m totally with Aaron on everything he said. The “I read your book” statement is weirdly common and a bummer. But at least they’ve read it. What I’ve heard a lot is: “I saw your book.”

And I don’t even like reviewing books, period. It’s hard enough to be an artist without having to tell other artists what’s wrong with their work. I want celebration and solidarity.

Also Elisa, I don’t even understand a review saying your characters are unlikable. What? They’re all totally engaging, though still haven’t read the last two or three stories yet. Is that where the serial killers are? I’m just stumped here.

The meanest thing anyone ever said to me came from an unnamed teacher—and I love love love her work. She was doing a short, one week tutorial when I was in grad school, and it was during our one-on-one meeting: “So, don’t you have any real stories?” And after I stuttered for a while she said, “I guess I’m just used to teaching at Iowa, where they screen the students very carefully.”

From: Elisa Albert
To: Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: A plea for "pork."

Please please please can we all make a pact to use “pork” as a verb more often?

From: Angela Pneuman
To: Elisa Albert, Aaron Hamburger, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: "Oh, you dressed up!"

Yes, “pork.” I was just about to weigh in on the vocabulary, which has been making me giggle.

What Aaron said about "I read your book," period—sounds like someone saying "Oh, you dressed up."

My book hasn’t come out yet, so I don’t have the experience with reviews that the rest of you have. And Stacey’s teacher’s comments made me wince. I hope never to say anything so thoughtless to a student.

What I do remember from workshops—early, early on—is that the written comments would be diametrically opposed. One person says her use of commas makes her sentences unreadable, and another person admires her masterful use of the long, clause-filled sentences. I think, as Aaron notes, the negative often has the power to seem more insightful. Like the person who says, “oh, you dressed up!” is the keeper of the dress code or something. But, as Aaron also notes, it’s great, period, that people are paying attention.

Elisa, I am off to pick up your book this afternoon, finally!

From: Aaron Hamburger
To: Elisa Albert, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: Agendas, agendas

Re: Elisa’s “bad for the Jews” review, I think it’s important to remember that people read with agendas in mind, not just reviewers, but also the public. It all goes back to that question of why do we write? Just to please ourselves? Then why publish? For the ideal enlightened reader? But then isn’t that just preaching to the choir? For the general public? Then shouldn’t we measure the quality of art by who sells the most and give Da Vinci Code the Pulitzer? For posterity? In 500 years, if the planet still exists, there’s a good chance our work will not be read, except by academics, maybe.

I have no good answer to this question.

Re: reviewing, I’d like to celebrate and be in solidarity with other writers. For that reason, I’ve declined to review the books I really hated. At the same time, though, I think it’s very important to look seriously and critically and what you don’t like, if you think there’s something important to be said there. I don’t like being on the receiving end of it, but for me starting a dialogue about what a book is doing is a celebration, isn’t it? Very often I’ve been inspired by “bad” reviews to go out and buy a book, and been turned off by “good” reviews to decide not to buy a book. Case in point: James Wood’s dissing of Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days made me run to the store and pick it up. Whereas anything that John Updike praises makes me immediately suspicious…

From: Karen Russell
To: Elisa Albert, Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter
Subject: The klatch hive-mind

YES!!!! (Fists pumping in the air) I swear, the klatch is developing some sort of insect-like hive mind, because I, too, made a mental note to comment on “porking” in my next response (cut to Mario Puzo poolside, winking at us over the back of his student lover). It sounds so sinister to me! Like a mobster homicide technique. Like, instead of smothering someone with a pillow, you’d use a slab of raw tenderloin, slowly porking them to death. Again, an image I readily associate with Mario Puzo….

Well, I’m glad to see I’m pulling my intellectual weight in the klatch. What I’ve been thinking about nonstop are your comments from yesterday—the relationship between creative impulse and the cutting self/getting high impulse. I know that neither exists in a vacuum, but I haven’t figured out exactly what the relationship between them is. I do agree with Elisa that if I had spent my teenage weekends out clubbing on South Beach with Florizio, I doubt I’d be writing stories right now. I saw this lonely girl sitting by the pond in Central Park the other day, feeding geese in fuzzy purple light and looking like YA novel cover art, and I wanted to yell “Hold on, lonely girl! Teach yourself acoustic guitar now! Start with E minor. And don’t feel bad if you spend prom night writing some wise-beyond-your-years haikus! College is coming, I promise!”

My book hasn’t come out yet, either (there’s a low-key book party at Radio Perfecto on Sept 9 at 7:00pm if any of you New Yorksters want to stop by. I sure do wish I could think of a snappy “porking” joke to insert here). But Elisa, I feel you girl, I’ve found myself following early reviews with a sort of unhealthy interest and, in true workshop fashion, retaining only the negative stuff. Even the positive stuff makes me feel this squeamish, abdominal unease—I think it’s that “imposter” terror that Aaron was talking about. I wish I didn’t put as much stock in reviews and workshop critiques as I do. It’s just been very disorienting to me, after sharing my work with my eight trusty MFA buddies, to have strangers weighing in on these stories.

What stuck with me most was this line from the Publisher’s Weekly review that said something like, "If Russell, at 24, hasn’t quite found a theme beyond growing up is hard to do…." This made me feel a dismal sense of failure for some reason, like the collection had only hit this one note. It also made me worried for the novel, because right now a lot of it explores some coming-of-age type stuff (again! do you guys feel obsessively drawn to certain voices and events in your fiction? Adolescence has this gravitational tug for me…). So now I feel like, yikes, I’m not growing as a writer, I don’t want to do a pasty retread of the story collection, I’d better shoehorn some grown-up themes in there stat, like social justice or medical ethics or something.

Owen King is my hero, BTW!

From: Stacey Richter
To: Elisa Albert, Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Karen Russell
Subject: What?

Jesus Karen, are you 24?

From: Aaron Hamburger
To: Elisa Albert, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: Reviewers, get past your personal tastes

The coming-of-age seemed to work just fine for Thomas Mann, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, Marguerite Duras…, shall I go on? I hate these stupid reviews where they say, “Oh, the characters aren’t likeable.” “Oh, the characters aren’t this, that, or the other.” Why can’t they just evaluate the book on its own terms? Maybe you’re a critic who doesn’t like coming-of-age novels. Fine. But then, for the large number of readers out there who do enjoy reading coming-of-age novels, can’t you overlook your own personal taste and let us know how this particular writer handled this theme?

From: Elisa Albert
To: Aaron Hamburger, Angela Pneuman, Stacey Richter, Karen Russell
Subject: Tricky bastard terrorists

They probably give you way more shit for the coming-of-age stuff knowing you’re 24, tricky bastards. If [insert old dude] [(but do not pork him)] had written your collection, they’d praise him for reconnecting with and breathing new life into the oh-so-fascinating coming-of-age motif.

In my more reasonable moments I think: keep doing what you want to do, and eventually it’ll all come out in the wash. The shit people said to/about Roth in 1959 has come to look absurdly limited and unintelligent as he’s just continued to write the books he wants to write. So, fine. At 24 they may take issue with Russell’s writerly obsession with coming-of-age. At 74 there’ll be PhD students clawing each other’s eyes out for new ways to breathlessly describe the coming-of-age themes oft-repeated by Russell.

If you change your novel an iota with some PW reviewer in mind, the terrorists have won, do you hear me?!

Next round: "How does it feel to be worshipped?" 

 

N E X T

Do: "I don't read my reviews" is the biggest lie writers tell one another. As a reader, whose hatchet-jobs are you constantly on the lookout for? Tell us below.
Read: In Slate, Ben Yagoda argued that Michiko Kakutani, far from being the arbiter of taste every scribbler on both coasts has deemed her, is a hack reviewer rather than a literary critic.

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