Covid19 Will Change How and What We Write

Any Fiction Writing 101 course will tell you that setting—where and when a story takes place—is one of the building blocks of writing. Someday, when the world returns to normal or assumes whatever shape the new normal dictates, we writers will begin to use the Covid19 pandemic in our work. I’ve been thinking a lot about how that might look. My work in progress deals with race and the cult of instant celebrity in America. Of all the books I’ve written, it is the most contemporary, the most “now.” There are certain elements to it that could only take place after 2016. It’s set in Cleveland in a cold February over the space of a few weeks. In my head, the story was playing out in winter 2020. Remember those halcyon days of a few months ago? We knew the Coronavirus was out there, but it was still out there—somewhere else. No one knew what “flattening the curve” meant, and six feet was still the length of a standard dog leash or the depth at which one buries a coffin.

Now, the novel is going to have to be set sometime prior to this point—BP (Before Pandemic) rather than AP (After Pandemic). You might think it doesn’t matter, that the pandemic doesn’t need to figure into the lives of a story set in contemporary times. I beg to differ. It’s too big, too widespread, and is lasting too long to ignore.

There are plenty of stories that revolve around a major historical incident. For instance, take Don Robertson’s lovely little novel The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, which takes place on October 20, 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio. Why is the date significant? Because the book revolves around a major industrial explosion at the East Ohio Gas Company on that date that killed 130 people and leveled a one-square-mile area of the city. The explosion roots the story in time and place, however, it was an isolated incident. You could write plenty of novels that take place in Cleveland in 1944 that don’t mention the East Ohio Gas explosion without losing historical accuracy. In historical terms, the explosion is small and isolated.

Let’s take a slightly larger but still isolated example—Northern Ireland and the Troubles. There were decades of violence between Irish nationalists and the British. So much so that in Anna Burns’s remarkable novel Milkman, she never names characters or places. She doesn’t have to. The conflict in Northern Ireland was geographically isolated but of such a lengthy duration that it, for all intents and purposes, became common knowledge. It’s a cultural reference point.

For a larger cultural reference point closer to home, take David Guterson’s lyrical Snow Falling on Cedars. (It came out 25 years ago. I just read it. Thanks, quarantine.) The book takes place in a fictional island off the coast of Puget Sound that is primarily populated by people of white European descent (lots of fine Norwegian and Swedish names among the characters) and a sizable population of Japanese-Americans. Much of the action takes place in the autumn of 1941 and immediately after. We all know that Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. We all know thousands of Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps as a result. Guterson creates a certain sense of suspense and looming dread as we watch the unsuspecting characters get closer and closer to events that we know will change their lives and change the world around them forever.

Kind of sounds like America in January 2020.

Covid19 is neither small nor isolated. It’s been on the world’s radar since last fall, regardless of when it hit your country, and the end is not in sight. Conventional wisdom has it that there won’t be a vaccine widely available until sometime in 2021. We would have to go back to World War II to find a historical equivalent. Like World War II, Covid19 is all-encompassing in terms of geography, duration, and effect. Let’s go back to The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread for a moment. While the war isn’t the primary focus, it’s referred to. You can’t set a novel in the early 1940s without World War II somehow being part of the setting, part of the background. Think about it another way—you can’t have a contemporary novel (or anything that takes place after 2008) without the presence of smartphones. If you have a character who doesn’t have a smartphone in a contemporary novel, you have to account for the absence of a phone in some way. They’re a quasi-Luddite and it’s a character quirk or the phone falls out of a pocket and gets run over by a truck—something. Phones are so ubiquitous that you simply can’t write a contemporary story without using their presence or addressing their absence.

No one knows what the world is going to look like when this pandemic is over. What we do know is that every aspect of our daily lives has already been changed, and it will be changed for a long time. Probably forever. The Pandemic will be one of those literary signifiers, the ticking time bomb. Five or ten years from now, we’ll have stories that reference relatives who died during the Pandemic of 2020, or stories that explore family dynamics during lockdown or isolation. We’ll have stories set in the winter of 2019-2020 and we, as readers, will know what’s coming. We’ll know that these characters will soon be isolated, some will get sick, people will die. Known history will offer foreshadowing for the reader and a useful literary device for writers. I hope we’ll all be around to write it (and read it).

The Heebie-Jeebie Girl will be (slightly) delayed

When you’re dealing with a worldwide pandemic, the release of one little novel seems kind of insignificant. At the same, losing yourself in a book is a wonderful way to pass the time while you’re hunkered down at home (you are practicing good social distancing and washing your hands, right?).

The bad news: Covid-19 has thrown printing and shipping schedules out of whack and delayed the release of The Heebie-Jeebie Girl in hardcover to June 9. The book is still available for pre-order from your favorite local independent bookstore–check out indiebound.org to find one near you.

The good news: The e-book version of The Heebie-Jeebie Girl will still be released as scheduled. Watch this website or follow me on Facebook or Twitter for details about the virtual launch party at 7:00 pm EST on April 23. (And mark your calendar for Wednesday, June 10, when we hope to have an in-person book launch at Loganberry Books in Cleveland, Ohio.)

I was fortunate to be part of a great Cleveland.com piece on how several local authors releasing books during the shelter-in-place orders are coping. And if you’re looking for other good reads, local writers and literary types have some suggestions.

No matter how you choose to read, I hope you’ll take a trip to Youngstown, Ohio, via The Heebie-Jeebie Girl. That city has a lot to say, literally–Youngstown is one of the narrative voices that tells the story of a little girl and her great-uncle who set out in 1997 Youngstown to find the guys who robbed her grandmother. As always, your reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, and any other online book discovery sites are a huge help.

I’ve never done a staggered book release like this, so I don’t know what to expect. These are strange times–none of us know how this will play out. Stay healthy and keep reading.

Life Imitating Art (and Vice Versa)

In Throw Like a Woman, which came out in 2015, the protagonist, Brenda, gets discovered as a pitcher when someone takes a video of her throwing smoke at a test-your-speed pitching game at a Cleveland Indians game. It seemed like a plausible if slightly improbable scenario. Lo and behind, I saw a list of the Best MLB Stories of 2019 and there was the story of a guy named Nathan Patterson, who threw 96 mph in a speed pitch challenge and ended up signing a contract with the Oakland A’s. Go figure.

So there’s your life imitating art moment. And sometimes art imitates life. Or we turn life into art, which is the case with the upcoming The Heebie-Jeebie Girl, which is based on some real family history. The story is set in 1977 Youngstown and revolves around a little girl with a talent for picking the daily lottery number. When her grandmother is robbed of her lottery winnings by two men who come to her house pretending to be from the water department, the little girl and her great uncle decide to try and find the perps on their own. Most of that synopsis is true. Years and years ago, one of my cousins really did go through a several-month period where she picked a lot of winning lottery numbers. And two guys pretending to be from the water department really did come to my grandmother’s house and rob her. Those events were the little seed that grew into a novel that I’ve described as ‘Crime and Punishment set in 1977 Youngstown, only with jokes and magic.’

If you come to a book talk for The Heebie-Jeebie Girl, you can hear more about the process of deciding how to turn these real life events into fiction. Or you can read it and try to guess what’s real and what is imagined. Hope to see you at an upcoming event!

Don’t forget to pre-order The Heebie-Jeebie Girl
or add it to your “to-read” list!

What does King Kong have to do with Thanksgiving?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I was a little kid. When I was growing up, the local UHF station, WUAB, used to show the original King Kong every year on Thanksgiving. If you grew up in northeast Ohio, you probably saw it at least once. Both of my parents grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, which is also the setting for my upcoming novel, The Heebie-Jeebie Girl. I remember every Thanksgiving my parents would pack all six of us kids into the station wagon and drive the 65 miles from Cleveland to Youngstown to see my grandparents. And my other grandmother. And maybe an aunt or an uncle or two. And some cousins. I remember happy food comas and poring over the J.C. Penny Wish Book (google it), and, yes, trying to watch a little bit of King Kong. In a small nod to my childhood and my family, there is a scene in The Heebie-Jeebie Girl in which the young protagonist, Hope, and her great uncle Joe watch King Kong on Thanksgiving 1977.

It’s an odd film to associate with Thanksgiving and gratitude–I’m not even going to try and make a logical connection. I don’t think there is one. Maybe there doesn’t need to be. Maybe the UHF station didn’t show it every year, but in the Thanksgiving of my memory, it did. It’s a fond if incongruous memory.

I haven’t watched King Kong in years, and I haven’t had occasion to spend Thanksgiving in Youngstown for a long time either. I still love that city, so much so that I wrote a novel about it. The Heebie-Jeebie Girl comes out April 21. You can read more about it on Goodreads (maybe add it to your bookshelf) or pre-order from your favorite brick and mortar or online bookseller. No matter how you celebrate it, I hope you and yours have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

When Our Mothers Die

I wrote this during a memorial service for a friend’s mother, who died this spring. I just came home from a funeral for the mother of another dear friend. We are all adults and losing our mothers and it kind of stinks.

When Our Mothers Die We Come Unmoored

When our mothers die we come unmoored.
There is no one to call on a Wednesday night to ask how you can tell if frozen food is still good; how you know if you’re really sick or just have a normal cold; or the best way to get a stain out of your favorite shirt.

There is just you.

If you’re lucky, you have someone–a husband, a wife, a roommate, a best friend–to puzzle over these things with you. But still,
it’s just you and your little brain
in your car, alone, at 8:15 on a Monday morning looking for someone to tell you that everything will be fine in a way that makes you actually believe it.

When your mother dies, there is no one to tell you that you’re doing things right, or
more crucially,
about to make a faulty major life decision.

If you’re lucky, you and your little brain will someday be called “Mom.”
If you’re lucky,
if you want it,
you will become the center of another human being’s universe,
a human who will ask you the best way to lace your shoes
or make chocolate chip cookies.
Your method of making scrambled eggs will live on it another person’s little brain
as the best and only way to make them.

You will teach and instruct and advise and
someday,
somehow
you will come to know the answers to all the questions this young human being may pose.
If you don’t know, you will make them up,
but you will never lie.
Just as you suddenly knew all the words to every song in the top 40
when you hit 8th grade,
you will just know.
And you will trust your gut and will be able to answer all the questions
except the one about why one day
you will unmoor your child.

How I Met Kurt Vonnegut and Lived to Be a Better Person

vonnegut letterNote: Kurt Vonnegut, one of my two all-time favorite writers, died ten years ago today. At the time, I was the somewhat-newly adoptive parent of a 15-month-old. While she took her afternoon nap, I wrote this essay. I’ve put it on an Internet forum or two, but never on a blog. On the 10th anniversary of Vonnegut’s death, it seemed like a good time to resurrect it.

Back in 1991 during the war (before we knew there’d be a sequel) I was a young writer, fresh out of college, working in an indie bookstore. The war pissed me off, as all wars do, and shortly after my first mass protest, I started writing a novel about a bunch of young anarchists who try to take over the U.S. government. It was kind of a comic novel. The writing was going well during the summer of 1991, and since I wasn’t sure what to do with it or how to approach an agent, I took a chance on sending a few chapters to my favorite author on the planet, Kurt Vonnegut. I figured he’d know what to do.

Did I tell you I believe in longshots?

I went to the public library and found an address for Mr. Vonnegut in a celebrity phonebook (this was in the dark days before the Internet when you actually had to leave the house in order to do research). I sent off the first three chapters along with a letter asking for his advice about agents. Two weeks later, an envelope arrived for me, my address written in blue magic marker in a swirling hand that looked vaguely familiar and a Long Island postmark. I opened it to find the following letter, typed on onion skin paper and copied here verbatim:

July 17, 1991

Dear Susan Petrone –

You are right to suspect that you have written well. I also like your politics.

The only way a literary agent can treat an unpublished writer badly is to charge stiff fees for reading material which he or she knows can’t be sold. Their business is reading, not selling.

Two good agents, both friends of mine, are Knox Burger (address deleted to protect Mr. Burger’s privacy), and Elaine Markson, NYC 10001. But no agent (except a reader for cash) will consider an unfinished work from an unpublished writer, and neither will any publisher. The only acceptable proof that an unknown can indeed finish a book is a finished book. Sorry about that.

Cheers,

Kurt Vonnegut

It was signed in the same blue marker with a signature that now reminds me slightly of the symbol Prince used to use when he wasn’t calling himself “Prince.” “Damn,” I thought, “I should have told him that the novel was finished.” (Indeed, it was.) Nonetheless, I was delighted to have received a letter from God (as I dubbed it when I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall near my desk, where it has followed me these 15+ years) and was even more delighted that God said I had written well.

A few months later (October, to be exact), I saw that a community college in Canton, Ohio, (about an hour’s drive south) was hosting a two-day writing convention and that Kurt Vonnegut was scheduled as the keynote speaker. I borrowed the registration money from my older sister and went. Thus began the most Taoist 24-hour period of my life up to that point.

The conference began with workshops in the afternoon. Vonnegut wasn’t scheduled to speak until later that evening. He was also on the agenda as doing a Q&A session early the next morning. I went to my first workshop session on a topic that I can no longer recall. There were about 60-75 people scrunched into a classroom. For some reason, one young woman about my age caught my eye. I’m straight, but something told me that I had to make friends with her. Thus when the workshop ended, I started chatting with her and successfully completed my first het-girl pickup. It turned out she was with a group of five people who worked at American Greetings and were at the conference on the company tab. They invited me to join them for dinner, during which I told them the story of writing to Vonnegut and The Letter. They were duly impressed and invited me to crash on the floor in their hotel room so I wouldn’t have to drive back to Cleveland that night. I gratefully accepted.

After dinner, they went back to their room to freshen up before heading back to the college for the keynote speech. I hung out in the lobby, fooling around on the baby grand piano sitting there, people watching, and generally feeling that all was well with the world. As I sat there, I heard applause coming from the next room. A set of double-doors leading to a conference room off the lobby opened up, and Kurt Vonnegut strode out and across the lobby.

“I must talk to him!” I thought. Vonnegut looked as though he had other things on his mind, and the same impulse that told me to buddy up to the right people told me to wait. So I did.

We went to the auditorium at the college across the way and got decent seats. We could see Kurt Vonnegut sitting in the second row on the aisle, chatting with people and signing books as the brave faithful made their pilgrimage to his seat. The American Greetings folks kept urging me to go talk to him, but again, I declined. It wasn’t the right time.

The great man gave a wonderfully clever and amusing talk. At the end of it, he walked off stage right and went directly out of the auditorium doors, not to be seen in that room again until the next morning.

The American Greetings folks and I toyed with the idea of going out for a drink, but decided to go back to the hotel first and regroup. We wandered into the hotel bar. For some reason I ordered a hot fudge sundae—I was in a good mood. Before my ice cream had even arrived, Kurt Vonnegut walked in—alone—sat down at the bar and lit a Pall Mall.

Now seemed a good time to approach him.

I used to work in professional theater and have met more than my share of famous people, but none has made my heart pound as much as Kurt Vonnegut did. I walked up to his bar stool and waited until he had finished ordering a drink (a scotch and water I believe, but don’t quote me).

“Excuse me, Mr. Vonnegut?” I said. “My name is Susan Petrone. I wrote to you last summer and send you a few chapters of my novel.”

His Basset Hound-like eyes gave me a once-over. “Did I write you back?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I remember.” My heart was about to pound through my chest. I didn’t expect a writer of his caliber to want to bother with a 23-year-old kid and all I could think was: “Don’t even bother playing polite. If you’re going to tell me to buzz off, just do it fast. I can handle that.” Then he said: “So how goes the life of a radical?”

He actually did remember what I had written. The tension in my chest eased up a bit and I was able to speak. We chatted for a few minutes about my novel. I told him that I had tried the two agents he had suggested in his letter, but both had replied that they didn’t think it was something they could sell. He tried to think of the name of a small press to send it to. I tried not to fall over.

We had only been talking for a few minutes when the American Greetings person I had originally buddied up to came over and said, “Mr. Vonnegut, if you’d care to join us for a drink, we promise not to talk about any matters literary.” I could have smacked her. He declined politely, saying he had to get up early for the Q&A session the next morning at eight. I took that as my cue to leave him alone, although I think I probably could have hung around longer.

My ice cream had melted (and here I had thought that time had stopped while I was talking to God). We told the waitress that we wanted to buy Kurt Vonnegut a drink. She said “Who?” and simultaneously, the original American Greetings girl and I said, “Bless you.”

The concierge apparently didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was either, because he gave me his room number. I actually stood outside the door for a full minute, feeling like a stalker, before running away.

I crashed on the floor of the kind people from American Greetings (none of whom I’ve ever seen or spoken with again) and the next morning, we got seats in the third row, center for the Q&A session. At one point, Vonnegut was talking about people who wrote because they love it and the difficulty of getting published. Then he said, “Last night, I went to the hotel bar to congratulate myself on my marvelous speech, when a woman came up to me, and it turned out that we had corresponded. Is she here?” he asked, looking around the 250 or so upturned faces staring at him.

Shocked, I slowly raised my hand as the American Greetings crew all pointed at me and yelled “She’s right here.”

Vonnegut asked for my first name again. I told him. And he said that Susan had written this great book about how war is bad and government is bad and that he had recommended some agents but they had turned it down. He said that the problem was not the writing, because it was good (!) but the parochial attitudes of editors and agents on both coasts. He went on from there to talk more about writing and to answer more questions, but there it was. I was a Kurt Vonnegut anecdote. I got to be a minor celebrity for the rest of the day. There was, fortunately, a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal sitting in the first row, tape recording the whole thing. He sent me copies, so I have a recording of Kurt Vonnegut saying that I write well, and that is a mood lifter better than Zoloft with a wine chaser, let me tell you.

When I went back to work at the bookstore, my co-workers asked, “So, did you meet Kurt Vonnegut?” When I said, “Better,” when of them actually said (not asked): “You slept with him.” “No,” I replied. “He remembered my writing.”

The following spring, one of our buyers went to a conference where Kurt Vonnegut was the speaker. He brought back a special edition of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater for me, signed by Kurt Vonnegut. It is inscribed: “For dear Susan Petrone” with the same symbolic-looking signature. My colleague said they just put slips of paper into the books with the name to be inscribed and that he didn’t know anyone else for whom Vonnegut had written “dear.” “Maybe he remembered you,” the colleague said.

Maybe he did.

My mother always thought that I’d have one more encounter with our Mr. Vonnegut. I regret to say that she was wrong. She’s no longer among the living—she’s in heaven or somewhere in the great beyond. And now so is Kurt Vonnegut. I hope that she and he have a chance to talk. Although she was Catholic and he a secular humanist, they would agree on most topics. They would agree that war is bad, that human beings need to be kind to each other. I think they would agree that you need to trust your instincts and be patient and go where your heart leads you and that if you can be kind and make people laugh while you do so, you just might meet God.

The Space of an Eyelash

My daughter and I went to see the Cleveland Indians play the Yankees tonight.  It was an exciting game, even though the Tribe lost to the Evil Empire in extra innings. As we were walking back to our car, I felt something go into my right eye. I wasn’t sure if it was dust (there was a construction site nearby) or an eyelash or what. It hurt, but I rubbed it gently as we walked. The eye teared a bit, and then felt okay.

We got in the car, turned onto Prospect Avenue, and headed for the Innerbelt on ramp that would take us to the Shoreway and the few miles home. A block before the on ramp, whatever was in my right eye shifted. Suddenly, it hurt so much that I couldn’t keep my eye open. It was late, the kid was tired, I was tired, but rather than try to drive on the freeway with something in my eye, I made a split-second decision to pull into the parking lot of the Cleveland Institute of Dental and Medical Assistants. It just seemed safer. I grabbed a flashlight, pointed it at my eye, and asked my daughter “Is there anything in there?”

“There’s an eyelash,” she said.

With the flashlight and vanity mirror, I managed to get the lash out of my eye.  We were in the parking lot for perhaps two minutes. We pulled back onto Prospect and hopped on the Shoreway. Just before the Eddy Road exit, traffic slowed. Then a police car came speeding by on the left, then one on the right berm.

The accident was just ahead of us. A dark red sedan had half its front ripped off. It had obviously just happened. We missed it by perhaps two minutes.

But for the space of an eyelash, it might have been us.

Good-bye, Big Baby

My daughter is ten and moving into the so-called Tween years, that nebulous period between Kid-dom and Teen-dom. She loves climbing trees, playing in mud, and all sorts of imaginative play. Listening to her and her friends can still sound like a good improv scene, where everything is “Yes, and…” Like “Yeah, we’re all ponies, except S., who’s a goat. And we can all change colors whenever we want.” “Yes, and we all live together on a farm.” “Yes, and we have a bunch of cats…” And so it goes. On the other side, she’s more into pop music than she used to be. She loves to paint her nails. She loves to do hair–hers, mine, her dolls. When she and her friends get together, they spend more time talking than they used to. And on more than one occasion, she’ll take the phone (or the iPad) into her room and close the door while she’s talking/skyping/texting with friends. Oh Lord, it’s starting already.

She still loves to play with dolls, but only her American Girl dolls. Sometimes they’re the students in her classroom as she and a friend play School (my kid wants to be a teacher), and sometimes she just likes giving them elaborate braided hair-do’s. Her first-ever doll, whom she christened Big Baby (to distinguish her from a little Cabbage Patch Kid who was named Little Baby), is a rag doll., the kind with a plastic head, hands, and feet but the rest soft. Perfect for a three-year-old, which is about how old she was when she got the doll. Over the years, Big Baby’s name was changed to Abigail (because she has grown up), but she was played with less and less. She doesn’t have any hair, and because she’s a rag doll, you can’t make her sit or stand on her own. Despite the name change, Abigail is still a little kid’s doll.

big babyWhich brings us to this morning. We’re getting together old clothes, etc. for donation. You know where this is going, don’t you? This is the part where the child thoughtlessly parts with the doll that she once loved, once carried around constantly. The doll that was real enough to  her that she gave me a mortified look when I said Big Baby wasn’t real. (In my defense, she was sharing her real lunch with Big Baby, whose little mouth actually has a tiny little hole. I just didn’t want yogurt going inside a hollow plastic head.) The doll that brought her from toddler to little kid to, damn, big kid. To tween. The doll that brought us to this Sunday morning, where my child is going through her old toys and I, her mother who never even liked dolls when I was a child, am trying not to cry while writing an elegy to a rag doll who will, if the Toy Gods deem it so, find another little girl to love her.

Godspeed, Big Baby.

Why Writing Letters Should Not Fall by the Wayside

My daughter and I just spent an hour with my daughter going through some of my old report cards, yearbooks, and drawings from when I was a kid. She was especially curious about what my old report cards looked like in elementary school.  We also looked through the box of letters, etc. I have from my mom. When I went to college and when I lived overseas, my mom and I wrote to each other a lot. I have all her letters. I just reread what is perhaps the kindest, most loving letter I will ever receive.  My daughter made me read it aloud because she’s still learning to read cursive (but please note she is the only kid I know who has made a point of teaching herself cursive). I made it through the whole thing and only got a little misty near the end. I said, “Isn’t that the nicest letter you could ever get?” With a slight sense of wonder, she replied, “Yeah.”

My mom wrote the letter to me 23 years ago. It’s written in the lovely, even hand that was honed by years of Catholic school in Youngstown, Ohio.  She wrote it on thin, crinkly airmail paper, the light blue kind that I’m not even sure if they sell anymore. Reading it is not only an emotional experience, it’s a visual and tactile one.  It’s an experience you cannot get from texts or emails. All day, I’ve been mulling over Sherry Turkle’s wonderful essay in the New York Times on how texting and constant phone use is killing meaningful conversation, empathy, and appreciation for solitude. It’s killing letter writing and all that goes with it, too.

If my mother had emailed this note to me, reading it now wouldn’t have the same effect. It would be printed in toner, not blue ballpoint ink in her distinctive, unique handwriting. The paper I printed it on wouldn’t have been the paper she held in her hands as she chose and wrote her words. Nor would it have been the same paper that traveled from Cleveland, Ohio, to Alkmaar, Netherlands, arriving two days after my first birthday overseas. In short, it would be a printout of a lovely letter, but the immediacy of emotion, the connection to someone who is now gone, wouldn’t be there.

I write notes to my daughter, and when she grows up and moves away, I will write her letters. Real letters. Hell, instead of just putting in a note in her lunchbox, I’m going to start putting in a damn missive. Listen–we only have so much time here together. The people we love will someday leave us. We will someday leave them. Leave the people you love with something more than the printout of an email or a text conversation that will accidentally be deleted the next time they upgrade their phone. Leave behind something tangible, something meaningful, not just pixels.

How You Can Help New Writers (Even If You Don’t Have Any Money)

The more I look at the publishing world, the more I realize what a closed world it is. The mid-list hardly exists anymore, and unless you’re one of the handful of huge names, you don’t have a publishing contract and have to hope and pray each time you write a book that your agent can sell it (if you even have an agent).

There seems to be this resistance on the part of much of the book-buying public to move beyond the big names published by the major publishing houses. I wonder if part of the problem is that there isn’t really a proving ground for young/new authors like there is for young bands (bars/festivals) or new filmmakers (film festivals). People rarely go to readings, you don’t hear new literature read when you’re waiting in the dentist office (and while they might have Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly, they don’t have Glimmer Train or Tin House other lit journals). There isn’t the public forum for writers to test the waters, try out new material, and polish their craft. And in most cities, there really isn’t a culture of going to readings or of reading new voices in literature unless they’ve been recommended by the NY Times Book Review.

Herewith, a few suggestions you can do to help rectify the situation:

  • Donate a couple copies of your favorite literary journal to your doctor or dentist’s office. Perhaps someone waiting will decide to read a short story rather than a three-month old copy of Newsweek.
  • If you hear about a fiction or poetry reading in your area, go to it. Better yet, organize one. If there’s a college or university in your area that has a literary journal, work with them.
  • Bring a friend to a reading.
  • Support your local independent bookstore by, you know, occasionally buying a book.
  • Buy the work of new writers, especially those who are being published by smaller presses
  • If you can’t afford to buy new literature, get it from your local library. Consider it a way of testing what’s out there. Librarians notice how many holds certain books get, and libraries buy books. Checking out books by new writers does help.
  • Give books or subscriptions to literary journals as gifts. Who needs a new sweater? Give them something good to read.
  • Surround the children in your life with books.
  • Write and post a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, your local library’s website, or wherever you talk about books online.