Tagged: writing

Pieces and fifteen other stories

PiecesI’m dipping a toe into the self-publishing waters with a short story collection, “Pieces and fifteen other stories,” available at Smashwords as an e-book, Lulu as a paperback and e-book, and on Amazon for the Kindle. It’s priced to move on all platforms: $2 for the e-book, and $12.50 in the print-on-demand version.

Twelve of the sixteen stories have been published in small literary journals. Many of them are available online, for free; you can see the list here. I suppose that the free versions undercut my low, low price for the whole collection, but note that the collection has a couple of benefits: it contains several stories not available online, it packages all of the stories together into an easily-consumable and carefully-sequenced format, and the proceeds help to underwrite my literary efforts.

The four new stories aren’t just “bottom-of-the-drawer” filler, either. One of them was accepted for publication at a small journal that went under before it was printed. Another was one of the manuscripts that made the cut in the Speakeasy contest to be sent to the final judge that year, Amy Bloom. The other two have been in heavy circulation to journals, sometimes coming back with helpful editorial comments, so they’re well-polished pieces.

I chose Lulu.com because I’ve used it before for making calendars and picture books for family consumption: it’s an easy process, and a quality product. I chose Smashwords because I’ve seen some good reviews, and they didn’t push a lot of the vanity press “services”: they provide a basic platform for distribution e-books, and that’s all I need. And I chose Amazon, with some trepidation (as previously noted), because of their scale, and because the installed base of Kindle devices seems like a good market of avid readers. (Note that Smashwords makes a Kindle-compatible version available, too; if you’re a Kindle user with some concerns about the Amazon stranglehold, take a look at the Smashwords version). There are many other e-book and POD resources out there; if you have a favorite, please make a case for it, and I’ll take a look at it.

I’ll publish updates on the adventure here; I don’t expect to see the same sort of success that some writers have had in e-book publishing, but there may be a niche market for these stories worth tapping.

A Whaler’s Dictionary

The knife, the lance, the harpoon, the pen’s nib, the sperm whale’s and the shark’s scythe-sharp tooth, do not create the wound they inflict. The wound is created by the space the cutting implement opens.

Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

If Moby-Dick is the Torah of the white whale (and perhaps of the American novel), then A Whaler’s Dictionary is its Talmud, or at least an interesting and playful chapter in the rich commentary around the seminal (pun on the sperm whale acknowledged and intended) work in the modern American canon.

Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, and approaches his discussion of Moby-Dick with the slipperiness and contingency of poetry. He sees within Ishmael’s story “an unfinished dictionary, specific to the science and art of whaling,” and in A Whaler’s Dictionary he teases out much science and even more art. This isn’t, though, a simple concordance on Moby-Dick with reference to Melville’s sources and more recent knowledge of whales; it “does not finish Ishmael’s failed cetological endeavor–it simply repeats the failure in a different guise.”

The book, which at over 300 pages is not much lighter than Moby-Dick, is organized into topics both philosophical and practical: “Doubloon,” “Experience,” “You/Thou,” “Omen,” “Jawbone.” Each topic is accompanied by a short essay related to Moby-Dick, and to whales in general, and to the practice of writing. And each section ends with a list of related topics; “Savage,” for example, points the reader to the headings “Accuracy,” “Justice,” “Tattoo,” and “Writing,” among others. Beachy-Quick recommends not reading the book straight through, which means that more than is normally the case, it is unlikely ever to be read the same way twice.

Literary critics might take issue with some of Beachy-Quick’s readings; he is given to Old Testament echoes and a touch of postmodernism. But the readings are rich and expansive, and taken together both illuminate and befuddle anyone who has tried to understand Moby-Dick. It’s best seen as one reader’s careful, contentious grappling with a great book, a collection of smart and challenging interpretations against which to push, and a rare piece of literature that revels in its ultimate failure to come to tidy conclusions.

The Passionate, Accurate Story

America has a good deal of ugly fiction about. Some of the violence in it is salacious: that is, the author gets a kick out of thinking about it and knows the reader will, too. But some is a mistake in calculation: the author thinks that exposing the reader to this or that specific grunge or evil will teach the reader not to participate in that grunge or evil. In fact, people imitate what they see most sensually put before them–rather than learning from the moral brought out at the end of anything.

Carol Bly, The Passionate, Accurate Story: Making Your Heart’s Truth into Literature

There are lots of writing guides out there; some are useful for points of craft (Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular), others focus on the “spiritual journey” of writing (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within), and others are quirky and fascinating reads in their own right, even if not entirely useful in a utilitarian sense (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life). But none that I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) are quite like Carol Bly’s “The Passionate, Accurate Story.”

What Bly brings to the writing-book shelf is a fierce sense of morality. Writing for Bly is not merely about expressing oneself, or even about creating literary art (though she has deep respect for art as a thing larger than ourselves); for Bly, writing is a moral act, and fiction must be built on strong ethical ground.

Before even beginning to write a story, Bly urges us to compose a “Values Listing,” a written record of the things that are most important to us. And throughout the writing process–in the sketchy, secret first draft, through the crafting of structure and plot, in the imagining of character and setting–we are to return to this list and ensure that our work remains grounded in it. If we stray from our Values Listing, and start to let our stories lose their moral center, then all the fine craft and careful words will not give them life.

Bly is especially insistent that the characters writers create be approached ethically. Even if we disagree with a character, find them distasteful or even repugnant, we need to know them and respect them. Bly hates disdain: “people feel more disdain than they suppose they feel. We don’t notice it in everyday life, but it immediately shows up in our fiction unless we recognize it and confront it.” She proposes that the writer should know all the facts of even the minor characters in a story, their secret desires and hidden strengths and frailties, even if those things never find their way into the story.

Throughout “The Passionate, Accurate Story,” Bly builds a story of her own–about a man who quits his job at a chemical weapons factory before going fishing with his wife on their wedding anniversary–around the principles she extols. She shows how to avoid the easy traps of snark and interiority, and how to move the plot (and for Bly, plot is everything) forward. Readers of Bly’s last novel, Shelter Half, will recognize many of the characters, settings, and themes presented in these snippets of story: it seems that almost twenty years before “Shelter Half” was published, she was working through not only the mechanics of the novel but also its moral universe.

Bly is a solid writer, but not a sparkling one. There’s little flash in her writing; it’s straightforward and workmanlike, careful but never precious. Her tone is sometimes a bit gadflyish, and her politics are unabashedly left of center: readers of Letters From the Country will recognize her concerns, and her occasional crankiness.

I’m not sure that I’m 100% on board with Bly’s project; in less capable hands, her prescriptions would produce preachy, pedantic work that sounds more like an earnest pamphlet than a piece of literature. At the same time, though, it’s clear that these are the prescriptions that Bly followed in her own fiction: in her stories, she is never condescending, always decent, and filled with a love for humanity that is so specific in its passions that it can’t be mistaken for a mere facade. And it’s hard to argue in these times with someone who demands an increase in the general decency of our culture.

Fall 2008 Black River Chapbook Contest Finalists

The list of finalists in the Fall 2008 Chapbook Contest is up, and my collection, “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny,” is on it. I’m not hugely hopeful, since my track record with contests isn’t very good; I’ve made the Million Writers long list a couple times, and once had a story for the Speakeasy contest make the cut to be considered by Amy Bloom (that it may have been read by Amy Bloom is actually just as good as winning, in my mind).

The collection has three fables that consider the fuzzy lines between human and animal natures. You can read two of them on line. Among the Moabites, in which Wilson finds himself to be a vengeful god, was published in “Cherry Bleeds”; you can also hear it at Pseudopod. Ichthyology, a story about a girl with gills (and other issues), appeared on “JMWW” (the Spring 2009 issue is out!), and in the first “JMWW” print anthology. The Baltimore City Paper called it “a brilliant carnage of a story,” which I take to be a compliment.

The third story, “The Oologist’s Cabinet,” was published in issue #20 of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the “zine” from “Small Beer Press.” It’s about eggs. You can order it from Small Beer, and maybe even turn up a copy at your local odd book specialty shop (I saw it on the stands at DreamHaven in Minneapolis, and at City Lights in San Francisco).

I wish the other writers on the finalists list the best of luck; mine’s an odd little collection, unlikely to rise to the top, but I hope you enjoy these strange tales should you track them down.

Blog Widget by LinkWithin