TriQuarterly Blog

Literarily: Print and Digital Lit Mags

I assume you’re up to speed on Occupy Wall Street, but have you heard about Occupy Writers? It’s a website with a fast-growing list of over 1,200 writers (Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Cunningham and Northwestern faculty Gina Frangello and Stuart Dybek) who have publicly declared support for the Occupy movement.

Created by author Jeff Sharlet and journalist Kiera Feldman, the site now hosts “occupy writings.” Lemony Snicket’s piece, “Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance” has been tweeted wildly; my favorite parts are numbers ten and eleven:

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.
11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

Alice Walker’s piece praises Princeton professor and activist Cornell West—one of OWS’s most vocal supporters—who was arrested last Sunday:

what a joy it is

to hear this news of you.

that you have not forgotten

what our best people taught us

as they rose to meet their day:

not to be silent

To anyone who believes that writers should also be public intellectuals, this site is bound to feel important. As Francine Prose said in a recent Guardian story: "Since this movement started, I've been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I've woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we're all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it."

I find the list is refreshingly diverse. New York Magazine might have sniffed that it “tends toward the small-press published, lefty magazine editors, and generally highbrow types,” but at least it admits that “It's not without big, big names (Elizabeth Wurtzel, Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, Ann Patchett, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan).

Personally, whenever I see the names Dorothy Allison, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rick Moody, Elissa Schappell, Jonathan Lethem, Barbara Kingsolver, Gloria Steinem, Ayelet Waldman, and Chicagoans Dan Sinker, Zoe Zolbrod, and Sara Paretsky on a list, it’s one I want to be part of. In fact, I may start looking askance at favorite writers not on the list. (I’m looking at you, Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Pam Houston.)

If you support OWS and have published a book or are a magazine editor, you can add your name. There’s a backlog (because they verify identities), but new names are constantly being added. Follow news at @occupywriters on Twitter.

With a Small p: Poetry and its Purposes

The debate over the recent fracas at the Poetry Foundation is blowin’ up on the blogosphere, primarily centered here, and yes, there’s still time to weigh in. 

It all sounds fairly ridiculous, but I have to lend a wee bit of sympathy to the poets and their spontaneous protest, though, to be sure, I’m not of the mind that PDA and stripping are brilliant, original, or even interesting manners of protesting the obscene amount of cash the Poetry Foundation received and spent on the slick new Apple Store—I mean, Poetry Center. 

To me, the Poetry Foundation calling the cops and pressing charges makes me leery of visiting the place. I was supposed to go to the Zurita reading, and I'm thinking of going to another next week, though now I am not sure I want to (what if I accidentally disrupt the reading Will I get manhandled by goons?). It’s not that I totally sympathize with the protesters, but I do think their actions were harmless enough to be ignored. Pressing charges seems a bit draconian. Let it go, Poetry Foundation, while you still have a shred of credibility. 

Hours of the Universe: The Bookstore CosmonaurThe perfect bookstore is not perfect because it meets every expectation of what a bookstore should be, as if it conformed to some platonic notion of completeness. Nor is it perfect for exceeding any and all reasonable expectations thrust upon it. Rather, perfection derives from the expectations a bookstore places upon itself, expectations that supplant any preconceptions of what a bookstore ought to be. All that the book lover sees, in this case, is the store in front of him, and he’s so overwhelmed by what it has to offer that he can’t quite remember what it was he expected to begin with. 

I feel this way every time I visit the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on the University of Chicago’s campus.[1] The Co-Op’s selection is wide, deep, and, most significantly, 100 percent garbage-free.  It’s in a basement, and color-coded paths taped to the stone floor map its sections. The enthralled browser is sure to bump his head on one of the many exposed pipes. It is what one might expect from a bookstore found inside the business end of a wardrobe: ultimately indescribable in any way other than magical.

I recently read Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, a novel whose plot and cast of characters call to mind a most complimentary adjective: Dickensian. With Dickens on my mind, and influenced by the wonder of the Seminary Co-Op, I picked up a copy of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, supposedly an account of Dickens’s early career that ignores the inherited wisdom of Dickens lore. As an aspiring novelist, I’ll  take any stitch of Dickens I can get my hands on; it is likely enough to teach by osmosis to be well worth the price.

I would like to say that I had been yearning for more Russian literature in my wanderings, but that would be the sort of lie worth telling only as a punch line. Instead, meandering through the stacks at Seminary Co-Op, I stumbled upon a copy of Turgenev’s Virgin Soil. I was fond of Fathers and Sons as an undergraduate and am still waiting to be convinced that Russian novelists don’t hold the key to the universe.

To round out my purchases, I picked up a copy of Stuart Dybek’s Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. I long ago loaned a copy of Childhood to a friend, and only slightly less long ago gave up on the hope of seeing it returned. Besides, one needs no excuse to walk out of a Chicago bookstore with a Dybek collection in hand.

Like so many other bookstores, the Seminary Co-Op lines its checkout counter with potential impulse buys.  The cynic would expect to find here the flavor of the week memoirist or a variety of recycled self-help information.  Not so at Seminary. The book that caught my eye and stimulated my impulse was Irish Writers on Writing edited by Eavan Boland. Walking out of the Seminary Co-Op, I was convinced once again of the bookstore’s perfection.  With an armful of only four books, I held strong to the conviction that only a perfect bookstore can leave you feeling simultaneously satisfied and invigorated, eager to consume monuments of unageing intellect.

[1] N.B. The Seminary Co-Op will be moving a block east of its current location in the very near future.  It is this author’s opinion that, if you are at all able, you should make a pilgrimage to the current location before that move happens.  However, it is also this writer’s opinion that cultural eulogies are as obnoxious as they are useless.  Consider this a love letter to the only version of the Co-Op any of us has ever known.  The writer of this love letter understands that, as is true of any love worth expressing, adoration of The Way Things Were without an eager eye on the way they will be is no love at all.

Writing Off the Page: Fiction and the InternetWhat is fiction? A book? A story? A craft? A solitary artistic endeavor? A meeting of minds? I don’t know. What I know is that the digital revolution affects our assumptions about what forms fiction can take.

At the least, we know literary fiction is a book. No question. And, my, what would happen to all its high-brow respectability if there were no lovely end leafs or perfectly cut pages?

Before we get going on this exploration of pomp and circumstance I’ll give you my background as a writer so you have some sense of whatever bias to which I’m blind. I decided to write one day while reading The Great Gatsbyor Tender is the Night—one of those prodigious Fitzgerald novels—at my grandmother’s summer cottage on Long Island. My parents, my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, perhaps a cousin, and my sister were all laid out on their backs with books on a hot summer afternoon. The sounds of pages turning, cowbirds singing in the grapevine, and large screens shifting on light breezes in syncopation with waves were all I heard for an hour after lunch. I was the youngest.  While I was very much enjoying whichever novel determined the entire trajectory of my life that day before fifth grade, mainly I was bored and wanted to go down to the beach. I was not allowed to swim alone so I said, “Mom?” She said, “Read.” 

I lay back on a green, sun-warmed, jungle flora print 70s, bedspread, oppressed by maternal directive, and thought, “This is so boring. No one’s talking. Everyone I care about is here but there’s no interaction. They’re all just reading.” Then my eureka moment came. If you want to have any kind of interaction with a chemist, an English scholar, a teacher, a social worker, a nurse, two biologists, and a pianist, well, then you’ll likely have to write a book. They’re all introverted readers and have absolutely no interest in communicating with anyone directly. I very much wanted to communicate with the people I held most dear. So it was decided: I’d write.

I’d already been writing for at least three years but not with any formal ambition. Having galvanized my conviction and admitted my dreams to an interested third party I was rather surprised to be told again, “Read.” Why? What on earth would reading have to do with writing? But whether or not there happened to be any logic in it at all dominant forces prevailed and I read. I won’t say I read everything because I spent a great deal of energy and effort avoiding all the books that constitute what anyone means when they say they’ve read everything. But. I read all the other stuff and loved it.

Okay. By high school I was taking myself and everything else rather seriously and allowed myself to be influenced by the following books on the writer’s life. I recommend all of them. But. When reminiscing about that era I might also be apt to recommend the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack so take this list for what it is: Aspects of the Novelby E.M. Forster, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, and—during what may or may not have been a drug-addled, new-agey period of my life if I were not currently in rather covetous defense of a license to practice pharmacy— The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. During my more recent MFA work I was introduced to Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read A Room of One’s Ownand you’re trying to become a writer I don’t know what you’re doing and I can’t help you.  

It’s funny. When I was in high school diligently reading all these books and more I only ever imagined I was going to be writing books. To me, at that time, books were stacks of nice paper bound with perfectly respectable covers. I mean, what else could they be? But even as I was oh so diligently indoctrinating myself to the concrete aspects of a writer’s reality things were changing, quickly.

I do not think that any of the books I read that discuss writing ever really said you had to assemble a bunch of sheets of paper and put a cover on them to post a bit of work for sale and sharing. So. Without being able to ask explicit permission of Forster, Woolf, Brande, Cameron, or Le Guin (who I know would say it’s perfectly fine to plunge headfirst into the production of reflowable content), I think we’ll just go ahead and assume here at the outset that fiction can be liberated from our assumptions of physicality.